Requirements

Requirements

Program Requirements


Environmental degradation and the challenges of environmental protection and sustainable development rightly command growing public concern. These issues are certain to raise some of the 21st century's most difficult moral and policy questions. A central purpose of undergraduate environmental studies is to deepen students' understanding of these questions, enabling them to respond effectively to emerging environmental problems whose resolution is bound to involve controversy, conflict, and hard tradeoffs. More broadly, liberal arts education should promote environmental literacy: an understanding of the world around us - the built and the natural, the local and the global, our role in it, and our effects upon it. To this end, Bowdoin's Environmental Studies Program encourages a multi-disciplinary environmental literacy by applying analytic techniques and integrating insights from natural scientists, social scientists and humanists.

Environmental studies at Bowdoin reflects the college's recognition that humans must learn to live in harmony with nature and that human activities are dependent upon natural processes. This recognition, coupled with an aspiration to present and future human well-being, provides a critical perspective from which to interpret history, science, politics, law, economy, religion, and the arts.