ENST degree program guide

Natural Resources Sustainability

Courses:

Introduction to Renewable Energy
This course provides an overview of the field of renewable energy, including technologies such s passive and active solar thermal, photovoltaics, wind turbines, hydropower, biomass, hydrogen fuel cells, and alternative transportation options. Students learn about energy conservation strategies and energy-efficient design principles, and the basics of how to assess the viability of a renewable energy system for a given site. Additional topics include the politics of energy, the impact of environmental problems, lifestyle choices, and energy related careers. Extensive field trips and cooperative, experiential learning activities and projects are utilized throughout the semester.

Campus Sustainability: Students as Change Agents
This course provides students with a real time exploration of methods, policies, procedures and interaction with stakeholders related to furthering sustainability practices within organizations. Paul Smith's College is used as the primary case study to investigate its institutional practices related to sustainability and the associated roles of members of the campus community. Particular attention is given to empowering students with the knowledge, organizational skills, and confidence to develop their own capacities as change agents for fostering a greater institutional commitment to sustainability.

Renewable By Design: Homesteading in the 21st Century
This course is concerned with the integrative design of ecologically harmonious and agriculturally productive small-scale human habitats. A return-to-the-land ethic as lifestyle choice will be investigated as a personal response in the age of global climate change. Appropriate technology (utilizing renewable sources of energy), natural building methods, and sustainable agricultural traditions and practices are explored as viable means in designing modern, sustainable and functional homesteads. Literary readings, field trips and cooperative, experiential learning activities and projects are utilized throughout the semester.

Ecological Change and Society
This course focuses on global change science and how the non-scientific community might become better informed in the policy-decision-making arena by accessing and interpreting this information. We will examine the natural and anthropogenic changes taking place in the totality of the earth’s environment across spatial and temporal scales. We will deepen our understandings of interrelationships and connections between biogeochemical processes in various parts of the earth system, and discuss change mechanisms, tipping points and possible mitigation and adaptation solutions to the tremendous challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change. We will examine long-term records of global change as well as focusing on near-past human societies that have successfully or unsuccessfully adapted to changing environmental conditions. We will assess global change models for implications regarding vulnerability of human society and non-human ecosystems to potential change and for insight into strategies for future sustainability.