Course description
The Environmental Studies & Sustainability Program (ESSP) brings together a rich grouping of courses, ongoing projects, campus programs, and speaker series that allows students to develop their own ways of combining the sciences, social sciences, and humanities to study and work on environmental and sustainability topics.
Research and study take place everywhere from the classroom and laboratory to forests and wetlands. Through ESSP, Hampshire students develop a truly interdisciplinary, project-based course of studies that allows them to tackle, with the help of faculty and other students, complex, real-world issues.
Sample First-Year Course
Sustainable Living
In this course our conversation will take the form of critical inquiry into current popular notions of sustainable fuel, fiber, food, and shelter. Can biomass fuel replace fossil fuel and with what consequences? Will local farms supplant mega-foodmarts? Can we find ways to locally integrate our life support systems, balancing human needs and the services provided by the ecosystems we occupy? Through lectures, readings, class discussions, debates, and projects we will critically examine innovative “green” technologies, using our own locale as a classroom, and gaining observational and analytical skills in the process.
Sample Courses at Hampshire
Agriculture, Ecology & Society
Agriculture, Food & Human Health
Beyond Sprawl & Crawl: Developing
Policies to Tame Car Dependence
Biomass Energy
Culture, Religion & Environmentalism
Earth Resources
Ecology
Ecology of New England Old-Growth Forests
Elements of Sustainability
Environmental Chemistry
Environmental Ethics
Environmental Policy in a Time of Globalization
Pollution & Our Environment
Stream Ecology
Sustainable Agriculture Seminar
Sustainable Living
Sustainable Technology
Sustainable Water Resources
This Land is Your Land: Land & Property in America
The Unknown Microbial Majority
Through the Consortium
Environmental Science (MHC)
Field Methods in Ecology (UMass)
Fundamentals of the Environment (UMass)
Intro to Environmental Biology (UMass)
Soil Chemistry (UMass)
Facilities and Resources
Resources available for Hampshire Environmental Studies and Sustainability Program students include our state-of-the-art labs and electronic classrooms, and extend beyond the boundaries of the college. Hampshire owns 800 acres of land that includes woodland, pastures, fields, and streams. This serves as a living laboratory where students can study and experiment.
Through the Five College Coastal and Marine Sciences program, students can use the Hampshire bioshelter for research in aquaculture and marine ecology. In addition, the program sponsors student seminars and internships at or with the support of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Recently, the program has also sponsored training trips on oceanographic vessels, and field courses in the Caribbean and Central America.
Hampshire College Associate Professor of Ecology and Entomology Brian Schultz constructed a canopy walkway in the woods surrounding campus. Students can climb to tree-top level to better observe and study the plants and wildlife native to the region.
Students interested in agriculture work on, and study, many aspects of organic farming at the several-hundred-acre Hampshire College Farm Center and through the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) project based at the Farm Center.
The School of Natural Science maintains a complete GIS (Geographic Information Systems) computer lab with the latest software from ESRI installed on high performance computers. Using state-of-the-art GPS units and an extensive library of recent and historical aerial photos and maps, students are building a growing digital database of Hampshire’s natural resources, including maps of trails, soils, wetlands, and wildlife sightings.
