This course focuses on the management of water resources. More specifically, it addresses the tensions and interactions between hydrological principles, economics, and politics during water management decision making processes. This course challenges students to develop an understanding of the interrelationship between different disciplinary fields of knowledge, including those in the physical and social sciences. Students learn about a wide variety of natural processes that determine the distribution and quality of the world’s freshwater resources.

This course is an applied introduction to the use and limitations of environmental impact analysis to guide decision making. Students engage in a series of lively and accessible policy simulations and legal puzzles that mimic challenges faced by environmental professionals and affected community members in real cases. Most, if not all, environmental professionals across a wide range of expertise areas engage with this decision making approach because it is required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and many similar state and local laws.

This course explores current real world problems of environmental justice -- the struggle of marginalized communities to manage profound environmental problems in ways that are often rendered invisible in the broader political landscape. The focus of the course will vary each time it is offered, depending on current debates and issues of concern in the greater Tacoma area and further afield. Consistently, it will explore the ways in which poverty and racism interact with problems of natural resource use, extraction, and management.

This course provides a basic introduction to environmental policymaking in the U.S. system of government, which includes the processes by which laws, rules and regulations, agency guidelines, court decisions, and international agreements are established. The course explores several major areas of environmental concern.

Most of human learning occurs across the lifespan and takes place outside of school settings. Schools are but one part of a large educational infrastructure that includes informal learning environments such as families and friends, libraries, museums, the outdoors, workplaces, community-based organizations, the media, and the Internet. Informal learning environments are powerful sites for learning because they support rich social interactions and allow people to engage their own learning goals and generate their own highly personalized understandings.

Writing and presenting science clearly means thinking clearly about science. This course addresses the two main challenges of science literacy: (1) the struggle to understand, and (2) the struggle to communicate that understanding. This course provides students the opportunity to engage with the primary, scientific literature on a range of current interdisciplinary topics relevant to environmental science. Each topic is explored via case studies and review articles. In order to understand and discuss topics and readings, students apply environmental science methods and tools.

This course, using a tools-focused approach, provides a foundation in basic environmental sciences. The course emphasizes the following concepts: field skills, environmental sampling, data collection, data analysis, and development of scientific questions. Students gain experience applying these concepts in lab and field-based settings. For example, experiential opportunities may include air quality monitoring, water sampling, ecosystem characterization, biodiversity assessment, and spatial analysis.

This is the required introductory course for the Environmental Policy and Decision Making minor/major, an interdisciplinary program designed to help students integrate their major area of study with an understanding of how individual and collective decisions interact with the environment. The course uses approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to introduce the ways in which human social, political, economic, and cultural systems interact with systems in the non-human environment.

Global climate change is considered by many to be the most significant environmental challenge of the 21st century. Unchecked, the continued accumulation of greenhouse gases over this century is projected to eventually warm the planet by about 6 to 14 °F, with associated impacts on the environment, economy, and society. This course explores the economic characteristics of the climate change problem, assesses national and international policy design and implementation issues, and provides a survey of the economic tools necessary to evaluate climate change policies.

Environmental justice can only occur with rich and complex understandings of the intersections of culture, ecology, politics, history, and community. This course seeks to understand the persistence of environmental racism in an inclusive and historicized landscape, one that considers multiple forms of knowledge and expertise and embodies the idea that imagining a more equitable, sustainable future is not possible without a grounded notion of the past and its present articulations.