Climate change is an urgent and multifaceted challenge facing all of society.
Harvard faculty teach an expanding array of courses examining the many dimensions of this shared challenge. Explore courses in climate and sustainability ranging from economics and English to public health and climate science.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
THE SALATA INSTITUTE FOR CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABILITY
In his famous treatise, The Spirit of the Laws (1748) the French philosophe, Montesquieu, stated that ‘the empire of the climate is the first, the most powerful of all empires.’ The impact of climate on the human condition, past, present, and future, is one of the great issues of our time.
Can law save the planet? This course, offered jointly at HLS and FAS/GSAS, investigates a legal movement known as the Rights of Nature. Beginning from the premise that existing environmental law is inadequate to the problems of climate change, mass extinction, and habitat loss, this movement proposes strategies that include granting rights to nature through legal personhood and assigning property rights to wildlife.
This course will examine major issues of solid waste (i.e. production, management, storage, treatment, disposal, infrastructure costs and financing, policy) in the developing world at various geographic locations and scales across municipal, industrial, electronic, biological/medical, and radioactive waste.
From childhood lead exposure, to the pathways and practices of our ancestors millions of years ago, teeth retain incredible records of our collective pasts. This course examines teeth from two main perspectives. The first is medical and dental, examining the developmental biology and mineralogy of how teeth form, and how formation can fail in the context of health crises. The second is historical: the class will learn how teeth are records of past history and climate, even into deep time, millions of years into the past. Every week, we will read contemporary scientific literature on teeth from multiple perspectives. In the second half of the course, students will work collectively on a research project.
This course revisits structures, refines speaking and writing skills, and advances critical linguistic exchanges through the discussion of environmental, cultural, economic, and social issues of sustainability.
GenEd 1178 focuses on the archaeology and history of the first 10,000 years of Mexican cuisine as our case study to explore these questions. We will examine Mexico’s diversity of food, drink, and cultures across time and space with evidence from archaeology, anthropology, climatology, botany, genetics, history, and more, to investigate how and why various changes in Mexican cuisine took place.
Human caused climate change has already irreparably altered the earth’s natural environment, and in the coming years these changes are certain to accelerate into routine and unrelenting catastrophe. In noting that religion often attends to the dying through practices of mourning and grief, this course will seek to consider how categories of apocalypse, pastoral care, lament, loss, and the creative arts might be crucial to our common future. Readings and film screenings will focus upon depictions of apocalypse from the ancient to the contemporary, as well ethical and theoretical considerations of the end of the world in critical and theological writings.
The course surveys histories of economies built by Indigenous Americans on their own lands. It also examines economies—local and global—that settler colonists built from stolen lands and natural resources of Indigenous Americans. Spanning centuries, and extending to the present, this course is organized conceptually into three principal sections on Land, Energy, and Gaming.
In this course we will inquire, specifically, into linkages among climate change, extreme weather events, agricultural production, and food insecurity, and also consider the broader context of how conflict, socioeconomic, and health conditions may be susceptible to extreme weather and influence the ability to mitigate and adapt to changes in extreme weather.
