Topics of Conversation: Environmental Studies
“At Hamilton, students in environmental studies gain knowledge, skills, and perspectives to understand the causes and consequences of — and potential solutions to — the world's pressing environmental challenges. Addressing these necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, and the environmental studies curriculum fully embraces this.”
Aaron Strong
Associate Director, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies
This year, Hamilton will offer more than 30 courses as part of its Environmental Studies Program (some cross-listed in other academic departments), plus several dozen others throughout the curriculum that address issues ranging from renewable energy to regenerative agriculture to climate change.
Some of the courses are so popular that multiple sections are offered; others are waitlisted. Here’s just a sampling:
Architecture & the Environment
Blue Humanities
Biodiversity: Crisis & Solutions
Explores global patterns of biodiversity and the biological processes driving these patterns and examines how people are threatening biodiversity, causing a new mass extinction event. For each threat to biodiversity, we will also discuss conservation and restoration strategies. In lab, we will quantify biodiversity in campus forests and develop recommendations to guide the College’s conservation and restoration efforts.
Bioprospecting & the Ecologies of Medicine
Carbon Footprints & Sustainability
Changing Arctic Ecosystems
Climate Change
Investigates the scientific, social, economic, and political dimensions of anthropogenic climate change, including our scientific understanding of its causes, its local and planetary human and ecological impacts, and the potential for technological, social, and policy solutions. Examines the roles of public policy and international negotiations in developing equitable mitigation and adaptation strategies to combat the totalizing problem of our times.
Coastal Ecology & Food Systems
Environmental Data Science
Focuses on the application of statistical programming for big data associated with ongoing environmental issues. Students will learn the fundamentals of applying statistical modelling and machine learning for making predictions and inferences for environmental data, as well as considerations of data science unique to environmental data including spatial, temporal, ethical, and justice concerns.
Environmental Economics
Environmental Ethics
Environmental Justice & Soundscape
Environmental injustice almost always involves the loss of the diversity of sounds, acoustics, and music in the soundscapes of Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color, and global south peoples. Students will engage the environment as an acoustic artifact and consider how colonialism is threatening the social, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of soundscapes.
Forever Wild: The Cultural & Natural Histories of the Adirondack Park
Global Wildlife Trade
Putting Down Roots: Environmental Approaches to Classical Antiquity
Renewable Energy Systems
Explores the scientific, technical, and policy dimensions of renewable energy technologies. Utilizes case studies of solar power, wind power, electrification, electric vehicles, and battery technology. Reviews the current state of policy avenues for deployment of these technologies and the social and political challenges involved. The course will connect with area stakeholders engaged in renewable energy deployment around Clinton.
Resilience & Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on People and the Environment
Seed to Gut: An Introduction to Regenerative Agriculture for Food Justice
Regenerative agriculture allows us to change our food system and build food sovereignty through biological diversity in agriculture as a social justice methodology. Students will learn how these tools interconnect to assist in the mitigation of today’s climate crisis and become a catalyst in building solidarity for land and food equity. Class participation includes local community field trips, documentary film reviews, and food tastings.
Focus on Sustainability
Explore Your Passions
Hamilton is committed to meeting or exceeding best practices related to sustainability. As part of the College’s goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, it plans to invest in energy upgrades to campus buildings, manage parts of campus to increase carbon sequestration in its lands, and continue to study and implement additional opportunities for emission reductions.
