Overall Course Content

In this course, students explore the value and limitations of science in understanding environmental issues; become more familiar with scientific concepts underlying selected environmental issues and quantitative techniques that scientists use to evaluate these issues; develop an understanding of how science is used to manage natural resources to promote a sustainable economy; practice thinking creatively, analytically, and without bias (i.e. thinking critically); explore how environmental science issues pervade our lives; and gain confidence making decisions about these issues based on their knowledge and values. Four basic environmental issues are examined in some depth: human population growth, loss of natural resources, climate change, and energy use. Quantitatively, we will be making use of some statistics and statistical inference in studying these areas.

Part of this course will entail working with real life data to see how data helps to shape public policy and/or how public policy is often made in a data vacuum. In other words, part of this course is about how you shape environmental debate/policy around real data and how ultimately, policy is limited by the reliability and availability of relevant data. THIS part of the course the involves data and statistics will be your least favorite part of the class. However, it will also turn out to be the most useful information that you will learn. In a nutshell, the reason that we are very poor at solving either environmental problems or infrastructure problems (e.g. energy generation) is that we are SCARED to be quantitative and therefore usually WISH for solutions, rather than using data to inform us of solution space.

We will follow this approach in the contexts of global warming, energy generation, salmon restoration, pollution and other real world environmental problems. The necessary tools will be provided to you via simple programs that can be executed within a Web browser. For purposes of this course, it is not necessary to understand very much of the theory behind measurements but rather to know what can be extracted from a date-set that is meaningful. In addition, this course will emphasize graphical literacy (since new and robust graphing tools are now available). Graphical representation of data/problems is a very good skill to acquire. Finally, we will be using quantitative methods to establish the scale of some environmental issue because that is often lost in the debate. A sense of scale is required if one is to properly understand the problem.