Environmental Leaders ARC - Required Courses
UGST 112: Topics in the Environmental Leaders ARC
Class overview: Our urgent and complex environmental problems require interdisciplinary solutions from planners and designers, engineers and scientists, legal experts and policy makers, energy experts and farmers, inventors and entrepreneurs, artists and communicators, and those willing to advocate for the needs of humans and non-human species. Whatever your strengths and interests, making a sustainable world requires all of us to engage in creative and critical thinking, challenging the status quo, visionary pragmatism, and muscular optimism.
Green Futures We Want to Build
Take a moment. What is one thing you wish was true about the world today? Now imagine it is true. What impacts would that reality have on you and on others? What would it take to make it real? How might you align your goals and strengths now toward bringing this future to life?
In this ARC you will get to expand your abilities in critical thinking, climate change impacts and solutions, imagination, and creativity. Here you will connect the care and concern you have for the planet to envisioning a range of different futures and what to do now to shape the future you would like to see. You will also get to explore what gets you excited and how to connect what you care about to your college experience, your career goals, and the sustainable future you envision. While we will be authentic about the very real challenges we face with global warming, including the fear, grief, and anger that come with these challenges, we will ultimately focus on shaping a different story—one of solutions and productive transition to a fair and sustainable world for all.
The Environmental Leaders ARC seminar is not a deep-dive into any single environmental topic nor is it a college-level extension of AP Environmental Science. Rather, the ARC seminar is a chance for exploration, experimentation, reflection, community-building, and personal development and goal-setting around multiple ways to make a difference, at UO and beyond. This 4-credit hour course spans two quarters (2 credit hours in Fall, 2 in Winter) and counts for a social science core education credit.
The course is taught by Dr. Sarah Stoeckl, Associate Director in the UO's Office of Sustainability and a literary and cultural studies scholar with training in human-centered design and facilitating groups focused on complex climate-related emotions.
ENVS 203: Introduction to Environmental Studies—Humanities
Students in the Environmental Leaders ARC will also complete an introductory environmental studies course together in fall quarter. This gives you the opportunity to take classes with friends who have shared interests and lets you help one another throughout the term. The course is comprised of a large lecture and a smaller, weekly discussion section. Environmental Leaders ARC students will be together for both the lecture and the corresponding discussion section.
Description: The way we think about the environment changes our perceptions of it and our commitments to it. In this course, you'll engage the humanities' contribution to Environmental Studies, learning how literature, history, philosophy and art can help produce understandings of the natural world and humanity's ethical relationship to it. The course is required for Environmental Studies and Environmental Science majors and Environmental Leaders ARC participants. The course also fulfills basic general education requirements (Arts and Letters) at the University of Oregon, so you do not need to major or minor in Environmental Studies or Science to benefit.