Global Arc

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.

We know that we must cease using fossil fuels with all due haste if the planet is to avert a climate catastrophe, and yet the odds of making this transition seem long. This is due not only to the political clout of Big Oil, but also to the ways in which oil saturates every aspect of life, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. Yet neither the dazzling benefits nor the dramatic damages of this ubiquitous petroculture are evenly distributed. Surveying literature, film, music and the visual arts, this course renders the material and social circuits of petroculture visible that they might be better challenged and transformed.

This course explores religions within the horizon of interdependent life and the cosmos. It investigates the symbolic and lived expressions of this interconnection in religious texts and practices. The course draws on science for understanding the dynamic processes of the universe, Earth, life, and ecosystems. In part I, we explore ecological perspectives from Indigenous traditions, Christianity, and Confucianism. In part II we survey environmental ethics. Finally, we examine the scientific story of the unfolding universe as a cosmological narrative orienting human-Earth relations.

Field Seminar in Regional Environmental Politics will provide students the opportunity for experiential learning and regional engagement with a range of important environmental topics by pairing intensive topical readings from the environmental social sciences, humanities, and sciences with field-based pedagogy. ENV 347 will proceed in three thematic modules, each of which will be anchored by a field trip to a relevant site in the region (Eg. New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York City). The intensive seminar enhances ENV's goals of broad-based, interdisciplinary approach to environmental topics through locally engaged research and practice.

This course explores the history of the environmental imagination from the Age of Exploration of early modern Europe to the global environmental politics of today. We will trace the ways in which people have imagined themselves and nature have shifted over time, and how these changes have helped shape science and politics in the modern world. The course also examines more recent efforts in the arts and sciences to re-imagine humans and nature in order to grapple with the rapidly changing world of contemporary global environmental politics, with a particular focus on the challenges of urbanization, biodiversity loss, and climate change.