At Allegheny, A Wealth of Environmental Courses

Environmental issues affect almost every area of our lives. Global warming, for instance, is a political issue around the world. Water is an asset that humans fight over when it's in short supply. A degraded environment promotes the spread of disease. And environmental issues factor widely into the economic decisions of business and government. Allegheny's large spectrum of environmental courses, programs, and internships reflect this. Here is a sampler of what you can find at the College today.

At Allegheny, students can major in environmental science or environmental studies. But they can also major in environmental geology, which focuses on interactions between humanity and the earth that affect water quality, flooding, and the climate. Or, if they want to write about the environment, they can major in English with an emphasis on environmental writing. The minor in arts and the environment not only bridges disciplines but is one of the few of its kind in the nation.

Allegheny recognizes that students need to venture beyond Crawford County to study the environment. Off-campus study includes work at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, Israel; the School for Field Studies in Costa Rica; the Duke Marine Biological Lab in North Carolina; and the Ecosystems Center at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

The College offers a number of off-campus internship programs, including work on watershed management with the French Creek Project. This project brings together conservationists, land owners, farmers, the business community, local government officials, and academic institutions in a collaborative effort to protect French Creek, one of Pennsylvania's premier streams.

Environmental courses can be found in a number of disciplines. Here are some examples:

• Strategic Environmental Management focuses on ways that companies can increase profits by satisfying the demand for environmentally sound products and by reducing the costs associated with environmental impacts.
• Understanding Third World Environmental Problems examines the causes and consequences of environmental degradation in less developed countries.
• Global Environmental Politics investigates the ways in which environmental issues are shaping domestic and international political relations.
• Introduction to Studio Art and the Environment explores the relationship between art and the environment and the role of the artist in the environmental era.
• Climate Change Past and Future looks at the implications of global climate change.
• Conservation Biology focuses on biological diversity and the increasingly severe effects of human society on populations of wild organisms.

Words of Praise for Allegheny's Environmental Programs

The quality of Allegheny's environmental science program was evaluated by a panel of reviewers from Emory, Bucknell, and Middlebury. Here is what their review said in part:

"The accomplishments of Allegheny's Environmental Science Department are widely known in the field of environmental studies. Indeed, the department has a national reputation for educational excellence in the field. Allegheny's Environmental Science Department provides a nationally recognized model for a curriculum that can develop talented first-year liberal arts students into sophisticated environmental thinkers and researchers in four years."