This course tries to understand why this is so by examining the role that nationalism plays in peoples’ identities and the effects of globalization on nations and nation-states.

The built environment has profound effects on both our daily lives as well as the human condition at large. It determines where and how we live, work, play, and dream. The built environment embodies concrete stances on a wide variety of material, spatial, cultural, and generational issues within a society. The quality and availability of affordable housing, for instance, is not merely an economic concern, but also a value judgment about the obligations of a society to its citizens.

This course examines the nature of climate responsibility from ethical, historical, scientific and policy perspectives and the efficacy of approaches to accelerate responsible climate action by both state and non-state actors.

The seminar will consist of three weekend field trips (Friday evening through Sunday afternoon) to Harvard Forest and a final mini symposium (Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon) at the Harvard Forest. The seminar will acquaint students with our current knowledge about global change, drawing upon state-of-the-art research, tools, and measurements used in evaluating and predicting climate change through ongoing studies at the Harvard Forest’s 4,000-acre outdoor classroom and laboratory in Petersham, Massachusetts. Students will spend the weekends at the Harvard Forest (HF) in comfortable accommodations with round-trip travel and meals provided. Through readings, informal discussions, and field excursions, students will become versed in the ecological concepts related to global change, and the science behind current predictions for future climate scenarios. 

This seminar examines U.S. climate and energy policy from both economic and technological perspectives. The seminar stArts with a review of the U.S. energy sector, climate science, and climate economics and policy tools. The seminar then dives into current policy issues, including power sector decarbonization policies, expediting the transition to electric vehicles, the movement by businesses to set net zero targets, the impact of climate change and the energy transition on marginalized communities, the politics of the energy transition, and the role of personal actions. The target audience is students who are committed to making a difference in how the US and the world tackles the challenge of climate change: through policy, through effecting social and political change around climate change, or through inventing or bringing to market the technological breakthroughs that will facilitate the necessary green energy transition.

This course examines the social and political determinants of health, focusing on historic and ongoing systems of structural discrimination and exclusion which harm health and threaten health equity. It is intended to be an introductory course and will use examples from both the United States and a number of other countries/regions to explore how power and politics shape health and health equity.

What good is art history in the face of environmental destruction and climate change? How can the close investigation of works of art, produced in times and places far removed from our own, address the vast “failure of collective imagination” that novelist Amitav Ghosh has identified as the core obstacle to our ability to respond ethically and effectively to our non-human co-habitants on earth? This intra-disciplinary seminar intentionally entangles scientific and art historical approaches to real objects in both the art collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum. We will focus on how one special class of especially long-lived earthly beings— namely trees—provide living links to distant pasts and futures that no single human can experience, what their persistence can reveal about relationships between other humans and other environments, and what individual case studies can show us about our role as members of a vast embodied network of living beings. During the semester students will have the opportunity to meet with a number of faculty and professionals, including museum curators, conservators, and exhibition designers, as well as the Director of the Arnold Arboretum, its Keeper of Living Collections, and the editor of Arnoldia, the Arboretum’s journal.

Through a series of lectures and conversations with practitioners, the course will address how health care professionals and public health researchers can engage with policy makers to better communicate urgency and provide solutions that advance health equity.  It will also offer some strategies and tools for effective community organizing and clear science communication on environmental justice and climate action.

Dealing with the impacts of climate change is just one example of a challenging public policy problem HKS students may face in their careers. Policy Design and Delivery (PDD) will teach you the skills necessary to address a wide range of issues and to craft options for change.

The Domain of ECOLOGIES engages the relationships between the living and mineral world, between science and technology, between infrastructural and ecological networks, and between human society and the non-human world that sustains us.The role of the proseminar is to introduce students to the range of individual and group research presently being pursued by GSD faculty, across Harvard schools, the Loeb Fellows, and researchers and practitioners from many disciplines.

This proseminar seeks to define what constitutes the Public, both spatially and socially – how it becomes legible and desirable, who gets the right to create it and for whom.

This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.