Courses

GEOG 157, Decolonizing Nature: Race, Empire and the Environment

Catalog Description: This course seeks to trace the rise of the anthropogenic epoch as a political epistemology, changing material milieu, and amorphous and contested political signifier. The notion of the Anthropocene challenges the very boundaries of nature and culture that have plagued and defined modernity. Natural forces and inanimate objects from storms and bodies, ocean flows and river currents, soil layers and chemical reactions are more and more commonly understood as always already natural/cultural. What are the differential ways that the...

GEOG C136, Terrestrial Hydrology

Catalog Description: A quantitative introduction to the hydrology of the terrestrial environment including lower atmosphere, watersheds, lakes, and streams. All aspects of the hydrologic cycle, including precipitation, infiltration, evapotranspiration, overland flow, streamflow, and groundwater flow. Chemistry and dating of groundwater and surface water. Development of quantitative insights through problem solving and use of simple models. This course requires one field experiment and several group computer lab assignments.

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GEOG 137, Top Ten Global Environmental Problems

Catalog Description: Conceptualizing global environmental problems is difficult because of the complexity of the issues, the magnitude of the problems, and the different time scales of action versus reaction. These issues apply both to the natural earth system as well as human societies. This course will examine the scientific basis underlying the largest environmental threats, and then reframe the issues to explore the societal basis of those problems. Class is not open to freshmen.

Units: 4.0

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GEOG N130, Food and the Environment

Catalog Description: How do human populations organize and alter natural resources and ecosystems to produce food? The role of agriculture in the world economy, national development, and environmental degradation in the Global North and the Global South. The origins of scarcity and abundance, population growth, hunger and obesity, and poverty.

Units: 3.0

Prerequisites: None

Formats:

Summer: 6 weeks - 7.5 hours of lecture per week...

GEOG C135, Water Resources and the Environment

Catalog Description: Distribution, dynamics, and use of water resources in the global environment. Water scarcity, water rights, and water wars. The terrestrial hydrologic cycle. Contemporary environmental issues in water resource management, including droughts, floods, saltwater intrusion, water contamination and remediation, river restoration, hydraulic fracturing, dams, and engineering of waterways. The role of water in ecosystem processes and geomorphology. How water resources are measured and monitored. Basic water resource calculations....

GEOG 130, Food and the Environment

Catalog Description: How do human populations organize and alter natural resources and ecosystems to produce food? The role of agriculture in the world economy, national development, and environmental degradation in the Global North and the Global South. The origins of scarcity and abundance, population growth, hunger and obesity, and poverty.

Units: 4.0

Prerequisites: None

Formats:

Fall and/or Spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture...

GEOG 129, Ocean Worlds

Catalog Description: This course explores oceanic connections, movements, livelihoods, developments and imaginations in the modern world. We read the oceanic novel Moby Dick and think across themes including the geography of the Mediterranean, the riotous Atlantic, the imperial Pacific, the anticolonial Caribbean and the Muslim Indian Ocean; and we look at ports, containers, oceanic infrastructure and precarious marine livelihoods today. We read thinkers from our oceanic planet to imagine an oceanic way of thinking.

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GEOG 124, Urban Sites and City Life

Catalog Description: This course explores historical, cultural, and socio-economic geographies of cities, city life, and the organization of metropolitan political power. It is primarily focused on the U.S., but will draw on select examples from abroad. We will investigate urbanization as a general process and the resulting physical, social, cultural, and political economic forms of cities and examine the ways that cities have addressed tensions emerging from segregation and urban renewal. We will also look at both the ways in which social inequality is...

GEOG 125, The American City

Catalog Description: The American city, palimpsest of a nation. It all comes together in the modern metropolis: economy, society, politics, culture, and geography. Cities as the economic engines of capitalism, centers of industry, finance, business, consumption, and innovation. Cities as political powers and political pawns, and the government of cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas. Cities as magnificent constructs, built of concrete, credit and land rents, from skyscrapers to housing tracts, freeways to shopping malls, airports to open spaces....

GEOG 114, Thinking Globally, Acting Regionally: Geographies of Climate Change

Catalog Description: This writing-intensive course engages all fields of inquiry and forms of evidence in the geographies of climate change. Course topics include impacts on human and biophysical systems; mitigation and adaptation; global, regional and local policy efforts; gender and climate; and environmental justice and human rights. Regional and historical approaches underlie all topics.
Students will use common rhetorical strategies in writing; trans-disciplinary forms of evidence for characterizing, analyzing, narrating and explaining;...