Global Arc

Food fuels us and our diets connect us with nature at many scales. Yet most of us poorly understand how food is produced and how production processes impact our diets, health, livelihoods and the environment. By the course's end, students will better understand the ethical, environmental, economic, social and medical implications of their food choices. Food production methods ranging from hunting, fishing and gathering to small and large scale crop and animal farming will be examined through lenses of ethics, ecology, evolutionary biology, geography, political economy, social dynamics, physiology, climate change and sustainability.

The dynamics of the emergence and spread of disease arise from a complex interplay among disease ecology, economics, and human behavior. Lectures will provide an introduction to complementarities between economic and epidemiological approaches to understanding the emergence, spread, and control of infectious diseases. The course will cover topics such as drug-resistance in bacterial and parasitic infections, individual incentives to vaccinate, the role of information in the transmission of infectious diseases, and the evolution of social norms in healthcare practices. One three-hour lecture, one preceptorial.

Special topics courses related to the broad field of environmental studies.

Special topics courses related to the broad field of environmental studies. Seminar.

Examining the relationship between law and environmental policy, this course focuses on cases that have established policy principles. The first half of the seminar will be conducted using the Socratic method. The second half will allow students to reargue either the plaintiff or defendant position in a key case, which will be decided by the classroom jury.

Climate scientists have long agreed that climate change is real, potentially dangerous, and caused largely by humans. Despite these warnings, however, policymakers have still not taken significant action to limit greenhouse-gas emissions--in part because scientists talk mostly to each other, in technical terms most of us cannot understand. That is where science communicators come in. This class will give students the basic scientific knowledge; the narrative ability; and the technical skills to translate climate science into compelling stories, largely in video, that can help lead to greater public understanding of this crucial issue.

What is environmental racism? What is environmental justice? This course will explore those questions, focusing on the plantation as a key site for understanding the complex relationship between race and the environment in the U.S. and in other global contexts. We will trace the environmental legacies of the plantation through literature, film, and popular media from the eighteenth century to the present day, and will also examine histories of resistance in and against plantation geographies, from the antebellum cotton plantation to the contemporary prison complex.

Addressing global ecological and societal degradation depends on humanity practicing regenerative, or reciprocal, relationships with nature. Evidence suggests that we are collectively capable of producing restorative technological, behavioral, and social solutions, but they must be applied holistically across all human actions at every scale. We explore sustainability challenges in the context of ethics, justice, and behavioral psychology, including visits with experts, and survey-based investigations on campus. Students will be presented with real-time decision-making needs at Princeton, with an opportunity to influence those decisions.

This course considers the global history of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to tease out macro-and micro-histories of the pandemics associated with the pathogen-the Justinianic Plague, Black Death, and Third Pandemic-and to pin down shifts in plague's past-biological, cultural, and ecological-vital for understanding plague's inconstant pandemicity. The course spans the sixth century to the present, Alexandria to Buenos Aires, and draws on diverse sources-from Byzantine hagiography to the New York Times to plague-victim teeth-to unravel plague's complexity and assess its impact.

The class will discuss the physics of ocean surface waves and its impacts on human life. We will cover the principle of ocean waves propagation across the oceans, with analogies to optics and acoustics. Using historical observations and modern modeling tools, we will discuss wave forecasting with practical examples including planning of D-Day during the second world war, or local surf forecasting. The influence of ocean waves on human life will be discussed, from their role on beach morphology, mitigation of storm surge, or tsunamis. Finally, we will discuss the ubiquitous representation of waves in arts/movies.