Water, Design, and Environmental Futures

Buildings account for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. Sixty percent of Maine homes are heated with heating oil, the highest percentage of any state, and Mainers spend more than a billion dollars on heating oil each year. Improving the efficiency of our homes and buildings is essential for transitioning away from fossil fuels and reducing carbon emissions.

In this course, students will learn how to safely transition buildings away from fossil fuels. This includes understanding the science of energy and moisture movement through a building, how to monitor carbon monoxide and other harmful combustion gases, and methods to reduce energy loss, while maintaining comfortable levels of humidity and fresh air. Students will gain proficiency measuring air leakage with a blower door, using an infrared camera to assess insulation levels, calculating heat loss, and identifying solutions and best practices to develop a plan of action for homeowners.

They will also learn about high efficiency mechanical systems like air source heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, and how to assess lighting and appliance electrical usage. Students will learn how to carry out cost calculations for energy savings and research and share information on rebates and incentives available for homeowners. This will be a very hands-on course, with weekly labs to teach energy auditing field skills. This course will include presentations from local energy contractors, and students will participate in energy audits of residential buildings on or off campus. Through these experiences, students will meet and interact with home performance businesses and non-profit organizations in the local community. As time and weather conditions permit, students will gain experience implementing efficiency solutions such as insulation and air sealing.

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to conduct energy audits for homes, identify cost-effective improvements, and prioritize energy improvements to maximize energy savings. This course will provide students with the tools and experience to reduce building energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in a holistic, whole-building approach.

Evaluation will be based on completion of assignments, participation in class discussions, and mastery of field skills.

This class will explore general weather and climate patterns on global, regional, and local scales. We will discuss the major forcings driving global climate fluctuations - on both long (millions of years) and short (days) timescales, including natural and anthropogenic processes. We will also learn about basic meteorology and the processes producing some common spectacular optical weather phenomena (rainbows, coronas, cloud-types, etc). Students will complete a term project comprising a photo-documentary journal of the different weather phenomena they observe during the 10-week term. The field component of this course will be self-guided through the observation and documentation of weather phenomena. Who should take this course: No prior geology/science experience is needed - but expect to do a bit of basic math in this course! The course level is intermediate because it will not cover foundational principles of geology (or other sciences) but instead the course will be integrative and require students to practice both their quantitative and qualitative skills. Take this course if you are passionate or curious about climate change, but do not know much about the science of climate and weather!

Climate change is one of the biggest and most difficult challenges faced by contemporary societies. The challenge has multiple facets: environmental, social, political, economic – each with its own complexities. This course focuses primarily on the social, political and economic components of the climate problem, framed by the concept of climate justice. In the course students are introduced to basic conceptions of justice, the latest findings of climate science and possible impacts on regional scales, and the global politics of climate change, principally in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Climate justice and its operationalization is the principal organizing theme for work over the term, addressing questions such as: how the costs of climate change impacts and efforts to address climate change could or should be distributed between rich and poor, global north and global south; and what are the possible means whereby those costs might be addressed through collective action at various levels: local, national, and global. Students will be evaluated based on regular quizzes, several short papers, class participation, and a final synthetic paper or project.

We typically think of cities as centers of political and economic power, social vibrancy (and tension), and cultural richness, diversity and production. This course explores ecological “readings” of cities, landscapes transformed irrevocably due to human activities and the introduction of unprecedented concentrations of “unnatural” substances and significant loss of biological and hydrological integrity. The course also examines processes by which cities have transformed surrounding regional landscapes as both “wells” of resources and “sinks” for waste and the planetary scale environmental impacts of urban growth in the contemporary global economy. Following a succinct historical survey in the first part of the class (with focus on the interrelated forces of industrialization, colonization and explosive urban growth in the nineteenth century), we will look to recent efforts to reimagine cities such that they are more “ecological.” These efforts come in a variety of forms from “city as refugia” (establishing habitat for nonhumans) to “novel ecosystems” (working with new concentrations of contaminants and colonization of non-native biological communities) to cities as settings in which closed-loop, ecologically inspired systems drive processes of development. Of concern related to all of these ecological urbanisms is that conversion of city landscapes from grey to green and blue can lead to ever greater levels of inequality. In the final section of the course, we will speculate as to ways to intervene in cities-as-ecosystems that build on commitments to both social justice and ecological replenishment, bringing into relation the flourishing of humans and nonhumans in urbanized environments. Evaluations will be based on class participation and sustained engagement with the core themes: attendance, demonstration of close readings of texts, contributions to group discussions (including listening), honing of collaborative capabilities, and commitment to an iterative process with the three course projects (the last of which will be worked on in teams) that involve succinct compositions of written narratives and diagrams and other visual representations (multiple graphics workshops will be structured into the class).

How has human history shaped and been shaped by "the environment"? Environmental history is one of the most exciting new fields in history. In this course we examine world history from Mesopotamia to the present to see the role such things as resource scarcity, mythology, philosophy, imperialism, land policy, theology, plagues, scientific revolutions, the discovery of the new world, the industrial revolution, etc. on the natural, social, and built environments.

Environmental harms and benefits fall in predictable patterns across our bodies and landscapes, tracing lines of inequality that are embedded deep within our colonial history and modern societal structures. Environmental justice as a field of study represents an attempt to uncover and understand those patterns by drawing connections between harm and broader practices, laws, and procedures by state and private actors. It is also a study of resistance to harm, often led by those in marginalized communities, but increasingly led by more reluctant activists who find themselves on the losing side of capitalism’s growing list of externalities, from pollution, pipelines, and extraction to land degradation and climate collapse.

In this foundational course, we will navigate frustration and accomplishment, despair and hope, and the boundaries around what’s broken, and what may still be fixed, in our movement toward a more desirable future for life on earth. The course will draw on philosophy (e.g., John Rawl’s Theory of Justice), history and contemporary politics (e.g., Nina Lakahni’s Who Killed Berta Cáceres), and sociological theory (e.g., Naomi Klien’s Shock Doctrine) to ground specific case studies and bring context to their development so that students may begin to see what drives environmental injustice and response.

This course will be of value to students at all levels interested in bridging social theory with contemporary problems so that they may develop deeper analysis of and more sustainable solutions to ongoing environmental and social problems. Over the course of the term, we will pair readings and in-class discussion with the development of a “braided narrative” that brings together lived experiences and deep research. Students will be evaluated through a combination of self-assessment, written assignments, and in-person engagement.