ES 100 - Our Goal

While this course provides a survey of important current environment issues, familiarity with today’s issues is not our primary goal. The details of the issues will change in the decades to come. Our primary goal is to foster the habit of critically examining the environmentally related issues you will encounter from several interrelating perspectives, both recognizing complexities and acknowledging ambiguities. This goal is forced by the very essence of environmental issues. That is, issues that result from humans influencing the natural world and, in turn, the natural world influencing humanity. The natural world is extremely complex, and natural systems have a high degree of interconnectedness both within an ecosystem and among ecosystems. In other words, altering one component of an ecosystem will likely influence other components of the ecosystem chemically, geologically, and biologically. Also, altering the functioning of one ecosystem might have far reaching implications for other, perhaps geographically distant, ecosystems. Humans, of course, influence natural systems in various ways and these interactions are controlled by various economic, social, and political objectives. Hence, the study of the environment must be interdisciplinary because environmental problems, like many other issues we face, do not fall neatly into the traditional academic disciplinary categories. Academic disciplines are largely artificial constructs of the scholarly world. The scientific and technical components of human interaction with the natural world must be understood in social, political, and economic contexts. In addition, we must consider the interactions among all such perspectives.

Learning Objectives

Basic Concepts
The students should be able to:

• understand ways that the social world and the natural world function, as well as how they influence and are influenced by environmental issues.
• understand the utility of an interdisciplinary perspective for studying interrelationships between humans and their environment and the issues that result from these interrelationships.
• appreciate the complexity and importance of environmental issues across time and space. Specifically, students should be able to appreciate contemporary, historical and future environmental issues as well as the interrelationships of local, regional, national, international and global environmental issues.
• understand various intended and unintended consequences of human responses to environmental issues.
• appreciate environmental issues and personal responsibilities as a member of a community, which includes the Skidmore campus community and beyond.
• understand the importance of the rate of human activities on the natural environment.

Skills and application
The students should be able to:

• work in collaborative and interdisciplinary contexts to address environmental concerns.
• understand major methodologies for addressing particular environmental issues.
• demonstrate basic problem solving and technical skills related to environmental issues (asking questions, analyzing empirical evidence, applying methodologies to answer questions, and reporting results).
• communicate effectively (both orally and in writing) regarding environmental issues.
• examine personal and community values and ethical dimensions of environmental problems.
• apply knowledge and skills to develop informed actions regarding environmental issues.