M.S Environment and Society

The Environment and Society specialization within the Geography major emphasizes the inseparability of social and natural systems. Geographers uniquely draw from integrated human and physical approaches to understand how environmental change, sustainability and social justice all require attention to interactions between humans and their environments. In our courses and in our research we analyze global environmental change, climate change, ecosystem modeling, environmental justice and health, political ecology, globalization and environment, and land-system science, among many other scholarly traditions. We work in forests, wetlands, cities, oceans, glaciers and food systems. And finally, we teach methods of inquiry that can include spatial analysis, remote sensing, field methods and instrumentation, ethnography, Marxism, and science studies. Students can get involved in many research and service learning opportunities outside the classroom.