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Is carbon storage in forests and fields enough to spare us from global warming? How does local carbon uptake compare with local emissions?

What is this year's course about?

On both local and global levels, sound environmental science is an essential foundation for sound environmental policy decisions and sustainable choices. This course emphasizes the current scientific methods used to assess environmental damage, rectify impaired systems, and limit future detriment. We demonstrate these methods through hands-on study of several local sites, focusing on specific problems of acid rain and air pollution, alteration of the greenhouse effect and carbon cycle, and heavy metal and organic pollutants. Case studies from other parts of the world illustrate the global analogues of these local problems. We will also compare conventional remediation and treatment options with new approaches from Ecological Design including Living Machines, constructed wetlands, and phytoremediation.

· Heavy metals on the Hoosic Floodplain? How much lead is in the local environment?

What's different in 2003 and 2004?
The spirit of this class has always been one of learning by digging into the local environment and getting your hands dirty (in some cases literally) - where the learning of environmental science comes from going out and investigating environmental issues locally, rather than reading a textbook, listening to lectures, taking tests, or even doing labs where the right answer is already known. Lots of studies have shown that this kind of hands on learning helps students understand science at a deeper level, remember it longer, and readily integrate it in new places.

While keeping the same spirit of the course, beginning in 2003, we have changed the approach significantly. Rather than exhaustively characterize environmental processes at a single local site, we carry out projects at several local sites. Having a more diverse set of local projects allows us to take a problem-centered approach and look at a broader array of environmental issues of local and global importance - including acid rain, human alterations of the carbon cycle, heavy metal contamination, and bioremediation. We explore the importance of biodiversity as an indicator of ecosystem health and essential component in environmental remediation (bioremediation, living systems, carbon uptake). Examples of some of the local problems for 2003 (and their global analogues) are provided. The course reading packet will highlight case studies of these problems and solutions elsewhere in the U.S. and in the world.

This course will provide:

1) Hands-on experience in field and laboratory standard EPA techniques used in environmental assessment of water and soil quality and delineation of ecosystems
2) Hands-on exerience extracting trends from large datasets; evaluating data quality and uncertainties
3) Familiarity with EPA regulations and Environmental Impact Assessments and ability to read primary scientific studies
4) Awareness of basic science behind current global issues and current and emerging technologies in environmental remediation and ecological design

These skills and experience will be useful both for students who continue on in science, as well as for those who continue on in policy fields whose decisions will be based on these types of data.

This course meets the science distribution requirements for the Environmental Studies concentration.

Mimicking natural systems as a new way to treat sewage and other waste. What are the benefits?

Image from Ocean Arcs inventors and designers of this and other ecologically inspired treatment systems.

How will the course be structured?

Each week, we spend several hours together working in a field or analyzing data in the lab, both during scheduled lab time and occasionally during scheduled lecture time. Each week, both individually and collectively, we work to understand the results we obtain and place them in the cotext of global environmental science issues we read about and discuss in class. Collecting new information and trying to understand it is always challenging, both for longtime scientists as well as for introductory students. You can expect moments of frustration. But you can also expect moments of glorious "Aha!," both part of the real way science proceeds.

Each week, you summarize your results and progress on the problem with a written report which will become part of your portfolio for the course. These weekly short reports will occasionally be in the format of a lab report or scientific paper, other times they will be shorter syntheses. Follow the link for details. In the second part of the semester, you complete an independent or team research project of your own choice. Some students apply the approaches we use to study an environmental problem in their hometown or other spring break destination. Others study in greater depth a problem we have worked on as a class.

There will not be any formal exams in this class. You will demonstrate what you are learning through your progressive synthesis of the information you are collecting: interpreting the local data and placing it in the context of global environmental science issues we will read about and discuss in class.