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.

This studio will explore the histories and future possibilities for the forests of Geneva, Switzerland. Building on the findings of last spring’s research seminar “Cultivating Shade: Policy, Planning, Design, and Activism for Geneva’s Urban Forest,” the studio will explore Geneva's forests at the urban, cantonal, and regional scales.

Outfitting Architecture imagines building assemblies like clothing—something you can layer, unzip, or throw on depending on the weather, your mood, or how many people are coming for dinner.This option studio challenges dominant understandings of comfort in architecture, proposing a layered, climate-responsive design methodology that bridges social, thermal, and material entanglements within the apartment buildings and arcades of Athens. The studio investigates how architecture—like clothing—can be rethought as an adaptable, soft system able to evolve for shifting climates and forms of inhabitation.

Aqua Incognita aims to decipher an array of design-visions capable of advancing extreme climate resilience in the water-stressed region of Valencia, SP. Spain’s original breadbasket, but growing unsustainably, this metropolis of 1.57 million is threatened by critically unbalanced water regimes.

This studio explores how ancestral and spiritual practices might inform new architectural imaginaries. In an age of ecological collapse and cultural erasure, how might we reclaim rituals of rooting, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization as meaningful design tools? What can we learn from practices that imbue ordinary materials with emotional and cosmological value—practices that sustain relationships between the living and the dead, the domestic and the divine, the ground and what lies beneath?

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.

The fossil record offers a unique perspective on the history of Life on Earth. Although palaeontology might remind us of grotesque bones, dusty museum cabinets, and quirky scientists who relish both of those things—or God forbid, Ross Geller from Friends¬—the knowledge derived from the fossil record affects our daily lives in ways that are not immediately apparent. From its natural history origins during the 19th century, paleontology has become a cornerstone of neo-Darwinian evolutionary thought, produced a detailed log of climate change, and sits at the center of a multi-billion-dollar business consumed by millions of people around the world, most likely yourself included.

You are part of the so-called “pivotal generation” for preventing the worst effects of climate change. While global carbon emissions continue to rise yearly, there remains a small window of time for action. What options are available to you for responding to climate change and the unequal burdens it creates?

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.

The studio will explore housing as an ecology of care, a framework that understands architecture not as an isolated product but as a relational practice embedded in networks of interdependence among people, species, systems, and time. In this view, a multi-story residential building is not only a place to live, but a place to heal, connect, and coexist for both human and nonhuman life.

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.