Teaching

Sixty to seventy percent of Dutchess County residents depend on groundwater supplies to meet their daily needs. Ensuring adequate and safe groundwater supplies for humans and ecosystems requires extensive knowledge of the hydrologic cycle and of how contaminants may be introduced into water resources. We explore how rainfall and snowmelt infiltrate into soils and bedrock to become part of the groundwater system, learn what factors govern subsurface flow, and discuss the concept of well-head protection, which seeks to protect groundwater recharge areas from contamination. 

One aspect of environmental justice addresses the unequal distribution of environmental risks by race, ethnicity, and class. In this intensive, we examine potential occurrences of environmental injustice in communities along the Great Lakes coast. 

This course is designed for students who wish to learn more about the environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural impacts of resource extraction and energy production on communities. The Appalachian area of the United States and the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean serve as focal points representing one domestic and one international region, respectively, that have been uniquely shaped by resource extraction. We consider communities within these regions to guide class discussions and to investigate their geological history and natural resources; the history of indigenous communities, colonization, resource extraction and economic development; and the challenges and solutions for sustainability and environmental justice faced by these communities.

This class offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the climate, ecosystem and sustainability principles needed to understand human impact on the natural environment. We discuss the issue of global change prediction and the scientific basis for global change assessments and policy measures. Key topics are the physical climate system and its variability, the carbon cycle and related ecosystem processes, land use issues, nutrient cycles, and the impact of global change on society. Common threads in all of these topics include the use of observations and models, the consideration of multiple scales (temporal and spatial), the interaction of human behaviors and choices with natural systems, and the linkages among aspects of the global change issue.

A lecture/laboratory course in which basic topics in environmental biology, geology, and chemistry are covered with examples from current environmental issues used to illustrate the application and interdisciplinary nature of these fields. This course treats the following topics: energy sources and waste products, atmospheric patterns and climate, biogeochemical cycles, properties of soils and water, and ecological processes. Using these topics as a platform, this course examines the impact humanity has on the environment and discusses strategies to diminish those effects.