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
War is an environmental event. This course draws on historical archives and rich troves of narrative, memoir, reportage, and even analysis of physical objects and landscapes to help you re-think the meanings of warfare.
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 class contains a mix of theoretical and empirical approaches. We will begin with some theoretical approaches that interrogate the concept of crisis, apocalypse, and extinction, and go on to focus on specific types of crisis—sometimes “ripped from the headlines”—analyzing such diverse phenomena as climate change, populism, economic bubbles, and misinformation.
In this seminar we discuss justice and beneficence near and far, as formulated in views of how benefits and burdens should be distributed within the borders of a just society, and as further brought to bear concerning sharing and stewardship to benefit and prevent harm to peoples and generations distant from us in space and time.
Working with the William Monroe Trotter Collaborative for Social Justice, municipal governments, as well as national/state advocacy organizations, a select cohort of students will work to address current injustices in real time—with a focus on what is demonstrably effective.
This course addresses these and other questions by (1) engaging sociological theories about how humans relate to our natural environment, (2) reviewing some of the qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method approaches, and (3) developing ideas about what roles social scientists can play in creating climate solutions.
What are individuals, scientists, businesses, and governments morally required to do to prevent catastrophic climate change? How should governments respond to the problem of climate change? What should happen to the level of greenhouse gas emissions and how quickly? How much can the present generation be expected to sacrifice to improve conditions for future generations? How should the costs of mitigation and adaptation be apportioned between countries? Should significant funds be allocated to the study of geo-engineering? We will consider these and other questions in an effort to understand our responsibilities in respect of climate change, with a special focus on the structure of the analytical frameworks that have been dominant among policymakers.
Survey of sub-Saharan Africa to 1860, with attention to the range of methodologies used in writing early African history, including oral history, archaeology, and anthropology.
In this course, we will study health differences between social groups. We will begin by examining the extent to which health is unevenly distributed across groups defined by nationality, neighborhood, race, gender, and class - differences highlighted in stark terms by the COVID-19 pandemic.
CE 10 pursues the creation of a “better normal.” Using an interdisciplinary exploration of the liberal Arts, you will develop and apply transformative ideas to tackle today’s societal challenges, such as racial injustice, climate change, and strained health and wellbeing.
Students in this class will explore the connections between environmental exposures and human health outcomes. Students will learn about the environmental factors that contribute to the onset of common non-communicable diseases, including asthma, cancer, and diabetes, as well as exacerbate the severity of infectious diseases.
By tracing out the development of core concepts, this course offers the chance to survey a series of complex dynamics of dependence, control, crisis, and escape that govern the interplay between man and the environment.