HAS Courses in Environmental Science
Baylor University
Heidi Marcum
Animal Enrichment Field School
This class is designed to provide hands-on training in the enrichment of captive animals through individual and group work, often without direct supervision. Class objectives include: experience in enriching captive animals; hands-on, practical experience with a current environmental problem; experience with designing enrichment activities, taking data and writing up results; experience presenting results using Powerpoint.
Humane
Society University
Sarah Bexell
Animal
Protection and the Environment
This
course examines the convergence and divergence of animal protection and environmental
movement interests, which have far-reaching strategic and policy implications
for animals. Factory farming, climate change, hunting, and sustainability are
among the topics considered.
University of California, Santa Barbara
Jo-Ann Shelton
Animals in Human Society: Ethical Issues of Animal Use
Identification and exploration of the ethical issues which arise when humans interact with other animals. Analysis of the philosophical debates about the moral status of animals, and examination of the controversies surrounding the extension of human rights concepts to non-human animals. Discussion of conflicting attitudes toward the value of animal life in such specific areas as food production, scientific research, recreational activities, pet ownership, and environmental protection.
University of Oregon
Ted Toadvine
Environmental Aesthetics
Explores aesthetic experience of nature through philosophical perspective; emphasizes nature and art; beauty and the sublime; embodiment, culture, and science; and ethics, conservation, and preservation.
University of Oregon
Environmental Ethics
This course introduces key concepts and methods in environmental ethics and surveys a range of contemporary positions in this field while developing skills of value clarification and ethical reasoning applicable to areas of interdisciplinary environmental study and problem-solving. Topics covered include the interdependence of facts and values in environmental decision-making, the relation of environmental ethics to traditional ethical theory, the conceptual foundations of environmental ethics, attributions of intrinsic value and rights to nature and other species, consumption and sustainability in our conceptions of the good life, and problems of resource distribution and environmental justice. The course concludes with case studies of specific ethical problems confronting environmentalists today (recent examples include restoration of oak savanna and the Klamath River salmon controversy). Emphasizing the skills of critical thinking, value reasoning, and philosophical inquiry within an interdisciplinary context, this course guides students in the application of these skills to real-world examples requiring analysis and interpretation.
University of Vermont
Adrian Avakhiv
Culture of Nature
This course will offer an advanced introduction to current issues and debates at the intersection of environmental thought and cultural studies. The field of cultural studies - which studies the ways in which popular culture, media, the creative arts, and other forms of cultural activity interact with sociopolitical, economic, and technological developments - will be explored in terms of its potentials to address and contribute to the understanding of environmental issues and practices. We will study culture and cultural practices as both the medium through which and the terrain within which different ideas about people and nature, and different social and ecological relations, are articulated and contested.
Through readings, discussion, and media viewing and analysis, we will explore and examine how ideas about nature and environmental issues are framed and represented by various media; how these images and representations are used and contested by different cultural communities; the ways in which environmental ideas circulate between the mass media and popular and alternative cultures in North America (and the world) today; the relationship between culture and environmental identity at local, regional, national, and transnational scales; and possibilities for cultivating a greener environmental culture in our lives and in the world at large.
Williams College
William Lynn
Senior Seminar in Environmental Studies
This class is focused on the ethics and meaning of nature-society relations, for example, 'Conceptions of Nature' and 'Ethics and the Environment'.
