Worldmaking After Empire

This course is designed to provide an overview of the use of international law in solving transnational environmental problems and shaping international behavior. We examine, as background, the nature and limitations of international law as a force for change. The course will then explore customary law, the relationship between soft and hard law, enforcement of international law, implementation mechanisms, and the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements. Special attention is given to existing international environmental law frameworks addressing climate change, Arctic and Antarctic development, ozone depletion, biological diversity, forest loss, export of toxic chemicals, and the host of issues raised by the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development and subsequent environmental fora. Students will also consider the interface between international environmental law and other important international forces such as the Bretton Woods institutions, human rights frameworks, and international development entities. Students will be evaluated on the quality of their classroom comments and several analytical problem sets given during the term. Students will also be asked to complete a major research project examining the effectiveness of a treaty or a proposed international environmental legal arrangement.

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.

Climate change and biological diversity are prominent issues on the global political and environmental governance agendas and in public environmental consciousness. Each issue will be the focus of a major United Nations summit in 2026. At these meetings, Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) and to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will carry on with implementation of these major international environmental treaties. Meanwhile, public narratives of the escalating and intersecting dual “crises” of climate change and biodiversity loss provide a broader context for questioning the role and effectiveness of intergovernmental treaty regimes in addressing these crises.

This course will take a comparative and critical look at these two multilateral treaty regimes on biological diversity and climate change. Students will study legal characteristics of each of the treaties, how problems are defined and addressed within each, mechanisms used for implementation, and the governmental and non-governmental actors involved in the work of treaty implementation. We will also look at how these two treaty bodies work together to address issues at the intersection of climate change and biological diversity. Finally, we will spend some time in the course reading a range of theoretical perspectives and pondering larger political and philosophical questions: Are our current intergovernmental institutions up to the challenge of addressing these immense planetary challenges? What are the potentials of and limits to intergovernmental spaces and collective action that might we discern? What role might there be for non-governmental actors and social movements to contest and construct more effective regimes? How does a study of these regimes help us imagine what a global politics of the terrestrial might look like?

Students will be evaluated based on their participation in class discussions, dedication to preparation for and participation at one of the meetings, and a final project related to one of the treaty regimes.

This class will be an intensive, immersive exploration of Congressional elections in the United States. It runs only in the Fall of midterm Congressional election years, using the current campaign as a lens through which to explore a wide array of issues related to Congressional elections specifically, as well as elections in the US generally. It is structured as a working lab that is supplemented with a series of discussion and lecture sessions. Regular discussion and lecture sessions will provide students with a crash course in interdisciplinary approaches to a range of issues related to the conduct of US Congressional elections. This may include examinations of the history of campaigns, campaign advertising and messaging, the structure of elections, the conduct of voting and voter access, campaign finance reform, empirical research on campaign effects and outcomes, polling and poll methodology, campaign organization and administrative structure, best practices for GOTV and targeted mobilization, etc. Students will combine into teams to conduct term long tracking projects focused on the upcoming US Congressional election. This may include battleground state profiling, campaign finance monitoring, litigation tracking, advertising and media placement, debate watches, candidate travel schedules, etc. A great deal of what will be covered will depend on the nature of the current campaign in that particular year and which issues are most salient. The remaining class sessions after the election will focus on debriefing the results as well as addressing any outstanding issues that linger beyond election day (e.g. disputes over election counts and the certification of results). Students will be evaluated on the basis of their engagement with class sessions and other class related activities, their work for their tracking projects, short-form response papers related to discussion topics, their debrief reports, and check-in meetings with the instructor. This class is open to a wide range of students with varied interests. Given the working lab nature of the class, it is flexible enough to accommodate both students who have had extensive experience with politics and campaigning in the US context, as well as students for whom this will be their first exposure to anything campaign related, and everyone else in between. However, all students, regardless of their background, should be prepared to adapt to a fluid and changing electoral landscape, especially in the days leading up to the election. This may necessitate scheduling evening sessions outside of normal class time, responding to unfolding events, and pivoting topics on short notice.