This course explores the science behind environmental topics. It delves into the interface of science and policy, environmental decision-making, and ethics. This course starts with biological principles, explores experimental evidence and data pertaining to environmental topics, and investigates how this evidence informs (or sometimes fails to inform) environmental policy. The environmental topics covered include biodiversity, environmental toxicology, food production, and global climate change. In-person attendance is necessary for graded participation and groupwork opportunities in both lecture and laboratory components of the course. In lab, students conduct the work of biologists, proposing hypotheses, conducting experiments, and analyzing/interpreting data. This course is intended to engage non-biology majors in the work of biology, studying current biological knowledge through evidence-based discussions of what is currently known, and by addressing science that is unknown to the students (and, at times to the biological community) through the generation and testing of hypotheses, collection and analysis of data, and practice of making data-informed conclusions.
Gopher Grades is maintained by Social Coding with data from Summer 2017 to Summer 2026 provided by the University in response to a public records request
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