In ENVSCI 201 you will study how humans modify environmental systems, the potential impact this has, and what we can do about it. The course focuses on the two major human activities: urbanisation and agriculture. You will link what humans do in urban and agricultural systems to interactions among biological, physical, and social processes to better understand the fundamental issues caused when we build cities and produce food, and how we might go about proposing solutions.
The course will start by considering the challenge of maintaining healthy waters in the face of urban and agricultural development. As part of this you will study the fundamental changes to the physical environment, how the ecological health of systems is changed, how we try to measure and manage those systems, and prospects for restoring some of the natural function of places with a high human footprint. You will then consider how humans can modify the chemical composition of our environment through the release of pollutants. We will cover traditional sources of pollution (e.g. pesticides, persistent organic pollutants) and reflect on how practices have (luckily!) evolved over the last decades with the introduction of international regulation (e.g. Stockholm Convention). Based on the lessons learnt, we will then consider contaminants of emerging concerns (e.g. pharmaceuticals, microplastics) and discuss what can be done to reduce their release and impact on human and environmental health. To round off the course, you will bring together these two ideas (freshwater and pollution) to critically examine a proposed environmental solution. The physical problem is the pollution of urban freshwaters. The proposed solution is to develop the Water Sensitive City. The critical part is to examine how certain assumptions about how the world works get sneaked into the solution, and how this limits its more radical potential. The course therefore establish a foundation for thinking more critically about efforts to deal with the environmental crisis writ large.
The course includes lecture and discussion sessions and a series of tutorials. In the tutorials you will use real-world data to consider issues raised in class. A key focus of those is learning how to interpret data and present them in multiple formats for different audiences. Yes the course is about two major human activities, urbanisation and agriculture, and how they change the ecology, chemistry, and health of key environmental systems. But more than that, the course will provide you with a way into examining the current theories, methods, and approaches put forward to address complex environmental problems and their shortcomings.