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Majors in Sustainability

The following majors directly relate to sustainability (please contact Mark Lawrence with updates):

    • Applied Economics and Management (AEM): Today more than ever, many aspects of the business world are interrelated with sustainability and the environment. AEM specializations include:
    • Agricultural Sciences: is intertwined with the topic of sustainability, including subjects such as organic farming and sustainable agriculture
    • Architecture: embraces sustainable building, a core topic of sustainability
    • Biological and Environmental Engineering: largely focused on sustainability, covering topics such as preservation and enhancement of natural resources and the environment and the contribution to solutions of societal problems involving environmental systems
    • Biology and Society: combines courses in the physical and social sciences to help students understand and analytically approach some of the most complex issues of our time-genetic engineering, medical care delivery, and the interaction of biology, ethics, and public policy
    • Civil and Environmental Engineering: encompasses the intellectual core areas of chemistry, biology, fluid mechanics, hydrology, and environmental engineering
      • Civil Engineering: Civil engineers design and build bridges, buildings, and dams, and devise complex systems such as transportation and water supply networks
      • Environmental Engineering: Environmental engineers are called upon to understand, arrange, and manipulate the biological, chemical, ecological, economic, hydrological, physical, and social processes that take place in our environment in an effort to balance our material needs with the desire for sustainable environmental quality
    • Chemical Engineering: Students interested in promoting global sustainable economic development through responsible management of energy and the environment will find that this major provides the springboard for a lifelong commitment to stewardship of the world in which we live.
    • Communication: many of these courses have an emphasis on sustainability and the environment. In this day's media-focused world, it is important to understand mass media's impact on public perceptions of the environment, how the media portray the environment, and the implications of public consumption of environmental content.
    • City and Regional Planning: students can obtain a B.S. in Urban and Regional Studies, which requires students to take courses in areas such as “Land Use and the Environment” and “Regional Development and Globalization”
    • Design and Environmental Analysis: faculty are committed to using a broad-based and diverse set of social science and design methodologies to understand how the planning, design and management of the built environment affects individuals, groups, organizations and communities, and how this knowledge can feed the imagination to generate innovative design solutions to pressing social and cultural issues. Through work on sustainable design and development the department is committed to examining and developing designs that contribute to the health of the environment as well as those inhabiting it.
    • Development Sociology: prepares leaders to secure human well-being and environmental sustainability.  It seeks solutions for problems related to social and economic change and engages organizations and people at all levels, who are working to build community and local/global problem solving capacity. Students are encouraged to focus their major on themes such as the social processes linking the environment, population and development.
    • Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: to gain a better understanding of how the natural earth systems function, and to work with others to apply this knowledge to develop sustainable relationships between humankind and our home planet
      • Science of Earth Systems: from geology to oceanography to meteorology, and from geophysics to geochemistry to geobiology
      • Atmospheric Sciences: scientific study of the behavior of weather and climate, and applications to the important practical problems of weather forecasting and climate prediction
    • Ecology and Evolutionary Biology: one of the thirteen possible Programs of Study within the Biological Sciences major; it includes (1) biogeochemistry and ecosystem science, (2) community ecology, (3) population biology, (4) organismal biology, (5) evolutionary genetics, and (6) macroevolution and systematics
    • Entomology: The entomology curriculum provides students with a basic background in biological and natural sciences with a special emphasis on the study of insects.