Undergraduate Academics
Environmental Studies
Environmental studies at Sarah Lawrence College is an engagement with human relationships to the environment through a variety of disciplines. Sarah Lawrence’s environmental studies program, a critical component of a liberal-arts education, is an intersection of knowledge making and questions about the environment that are based in the humanities, the arts, and the social and natural sciences. Sarah Lawrence students seeking to expand their knowledge of environmental studies are encouraged to explore the interconnections between disciplinary perspectives while developing areas of particular interest in greater depth. The environmental studies program seeks to develop students’ capacities for critical thought and analysis, applying theory to specific examples from Asia, Africa, and the Americas and making comparisons across geographic regions and historical moments.
Courses include environmental justice and politics, environmental history and economics, policy and development, property and the commons, environmental risk and the rhetoric of emerging threats, and cultural perspectives on nature, as well as courses in the natural sciences.
Students may participate in internships during the academic year or in rural and urban settings across the country and throughout the world during the summer. Guest study at Reed College (Portland, Oregon), the semester in environmental science at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, Massachusetts), and other programs are available to qualified Sarah Lawrence students. Vibrant connections across the faculty mean that students can craft distinctive competencies while building a broadly based knowledge of environmental issues, problems, policies, and possibilities.
Environmental Studies 2026-2027 Courses
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 1 credit
ENVI 2205
Note: Pass/Fail.
As the desire to engage in individual and collective efforts toward sustainable and climate-change mitigating solutions increases, this workshop offers an opportunity for students to explore the multiple ways in which “sustainability” can be fostered and developed at an institution like Sarah Lawrence College. Students will work in small groups on a variety of projects and produce research and educational material that can lead to concrete and actionable proposals for the College and our community to consider. Students will determine their own areas of interest and research, from energy and water-usage monitoring to composting solutions, recycling/reusing and consumer sobriety, landscaping choices, pollinators and natural diversity, food growing, natural and human history of the land, and community collaborations, to name a few. As part of their project efforts, students will engage with College administrators who are actively working toward sustainable solutions, as well as students, staff, and faculty groups such as the Warren Green vegetable garden, the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collective on the Environment (SLICE), and the Sustainability Committee. We will also explore the possibility of writing grants in coordination with other actors at the College. Most of the course work will happen during class time. Skills in areas of any expertise are welcome, from environmental science to writing to visual and studio arts—but any interest in issues of sustainability and a strong sense of dedication will suffice.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Fall | 5 credits
ENVI 2302
How do we understand humans and their relationship to nature—and how do these understandings shape the ways we design our societies, relate to each other and the natural world, and imagine our world into the future? This lecture course will introduce political theory through environmental questions, focusing on two central themes. First: how does introducing a concern for “the Earth” or “ecology” deepen, and often complicate, our understanding of key political concepts like justice, freedom, democracy, and power? Second: how do the perspectives and methods of political theory relate to those of other disciplines—ecology, climate science, history, anthropology—which approach similar questions in very different ways? We will begin by examining what political theory is and exploring how different understandings of human nature and the natural world have shaped political thinking across traditions. We will then explore how environmental concerns reshape core political questions about governance, collective action, and social change—and how we might imagine and practice political futures within planetary limits.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall | 5 credits
ENVI 3219
How do humans respond to existential threats? This seminar will examine psychological and political patterns that emerge during crises—environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, pandemics, and rapid technological change. We will explore how fear shapes desires for certainty, belonging, and control; how communities form through inclusion and exclusion; and how perceived existential threats reshape relationships between individuals, groups, authority, and the broader-than-human world. Drawing on psychology, political theory, and environmental studies, we will consider some of what is known or hypothesized about destructive and constructive individual and collective responses to crises. Some of our topics may include: mortality salience, terror management theory, in-group/out-group dynamics, scapegoating and purification fantasies, imagined histories, the appeal of hierarchy under threat (including toward the natural world), the feedback loops that intensify these patterns, and alternative forms of belonging and solidarity. The course will emphasize collaborative inquiry: we are all trying to understand what humans are capable of in dark times, including recognizing these patterns in ourselves and exploring how we might work with rather than against our shared vulnerability in the present.
Faculty
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Open, Small Lecture—Spring | 1 credit
ENVI 2205
Note: Pass/Fail.
As the desire to engage in individual and collective efforts toward sustainable and climate-change mitigating solutions increases, this workshop offers an opportunity for students to explore the multiple ways in which “sustainability” can be fostered and developed at an institution like Sarah Lawrence College. Students will work in small groups on a variety of projects and produce research and educational material that can lead to concrete and actionable proposals for the College and our community to consider. Students will determine their own areas of interest and research, from energy and water-usage monitoring to composting solutions, recycling/reusing and consumer sobriety, landscaping choices, pollinators and natural diversity, food growing, natural and human history of the land, and community collaborations, to name a few. As part of their project efforts, students will engage with College administrators who are actively working toward sustainable solutions, as well as students, staff, and faculty groups such as the Warren Green vegetable garden, the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collective on the Environment (SLICE), and the Sustainability Committee. We will also explore the possibility of writing grants in coordination with other actors at the College. Most of the course work will happen during class time. Skills in areas of any expertise are welcome, from environmental science to writing to visual and studio arts—but any interest in issues of sustainability and a strong sense of dedication will suffice.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits
ENVI 3424
What is environmental writing, and what politics, ethics, and visions of human-nature relations does it embody? This seminar will examine canonical and contemporary environmental writing through close reading, tracing the genre’s evolution from 19th century Romanticism through contemporary multispecies and Indigenous perspectives. We will read broadly chronologically, beginning with foundational texts like Thoreau and Muir, moving through Leopold's land ethic and Carson's environmental advocacy, and continuing into contemporary voices that challenge and expand the tradition. As we read, we will ask: How do different writers imagine the human place in nature? What narrative forms and voices has the genre privileged, and what has been excluded? Whose relationship to “nature” gets to count as a part of the genre? How has environmental writing responded to ecological crisis, and what futures does it make imaginable? Through close reading and discussion, we will develop skills in literary analysis while examining environmental writing as a political and ethical practice. The course will investigate both the beauty of the genre and its limitations, attending to questions of access, social position, and the changing meanings of “nature” itself. Topics may include: Romantic and transcendentalist traditions; conservation and the land ethic; environmental advocacy and Silent Spring; solitude and contemplation; Indigenous perspectives and reciprocity; multispecies writing; place and belonging; the politics of wilderness; and environmental justice.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Small Lecture—Spring | 5 credits
ENVI 2129
What is technology, and how does it shape our relationship with nature—especially amid environmental crisis? These questions might sound abstract, but they are central to how we understand the causes of environmental issues and the kinds of responses we think are possible. Some environmental thinkers see technology as the source of all our ecological and social problems; others see it as the solution to them. In order to evaluate these positions, let alone identify our own, we need to understand what different thinkers mean by technology, how deep down its mediation goes, and why it is so often framed as either the cause of our problems or a silver bullet fix. In this course, we will approach these questions by broadening what counts as technology. We start with familiar examples: things like solar, or artificial intelligence (AI). But then we ask what happens to our thinking as we expand the category. How does our view of “environmental problems” change if we imagine agriculture as a form of technology? Or writing? Or even language itself? Drawing on work from environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and philosophy, we will explore perspectives that see technology as fundamental to human existence, perspectives that see it as alienating or destructive, and perspectives that see it as enabling care and attention. Our goal will be, working together, to understand how different ways of thinking about technology open or foreclose different responses to environmental crisis. Lectures will introduce conceptual frameworks through readings, discussion, and collaborative exercises. Group conferences will provide opportunities for students to examine specific technologies, building practical skills in technological analysis and developing their own perspectives. Some of our topics may include: philosophy of technology; perception and mediation; writing and symbolic thought; AI and computational systems; technologies; Indigenous technological traditions; separation and embeddedness.
Faculty
The Center for the Urban River at Beczak (CURB), located on the shores of the Hudson River in downtown Yonkers, is Sarah Lawrence’s first academic research facility beyond the main campus.