Environment-Society Track

Environment, Society, and Sustainability Geography in Action

The Long March to Isiolo Town. A large herd of camels is herded into town in search of grazing opportunities in Isiolo Town, Kenya amidst a severe and persistent drought across the wider Horn of Africa. This photo represents the coping strategies used to sustain peri-urban livelihood strategies in an arid region of Northern Kenya. Photo: Sarah Posner.
there is no place like home
Phurwa and goats
SaraFleming
Winter is Coming! A scene from a village in the summer monsoon months in Sikkim near the Indo-China border. Village women are returning home after gathering firewood in preparation for winter while the men are out collecting caterpillar fungus in the alpine meadows. This photo was captured while conducting preliminary research for my dissertation project titled, ‘Caterpillar Fungus and the Making of Borderland Lives in Sikkim, India.’ Photo: Tsering Lhamo.
Sunset in Drido, Tibetan Plateau. Sunset at a ranch of a household of pastoralists who are trying to stay on the land despite intense pressures to move away from herding. Photo: Emily Yeh.
Untitled. Construction of the Laos-China Railway over a village in northern Laos. Photo: Jessica DiCarlo.
Leishan, 2012. Sometimes fieldwork isn't that exciting
Uncooperative horse. Household in Drido, Qinghai, Tibetan Plateau. This horse they hoped to ride has other ideas. Photo: Emily Yeh.

Environment, Society, and Sustainability Geography Concentration

Population, political, urban, social, and cultural geography
 
From its earliest development as an academic field, Geography has been concerned with the manifold relations between societies and their natural and built environments.  Societies adapt and transform the environments they inhabit.  They depend upon the use of resources and reduction of hazards for their survival and material well-being.  They also assign meanings to the environment that vary over place and time, but that help define their identity and values within the world.  
 
Geographers tend to study these phenomena under the broad headings of resource use, natural hazards, sustainable development, landscape studies, cultural ecology, and environmental conservation. The University of Colorado has special strength in land and water resource issues in the American West, Africa, Latin America, and Asia.  Students concentrating on environment-society relations are advised to take the introductory courses in human and physical geography and then, depending upon their academic interests and aims, to concentrate on specific topics and regions in the environment-society area. 

Courses Related to this Concentration

Lower Division

  • GEOG 1100: Colorado Geographies: Environment, Society and Change in the Centennial State
  • GEOG 1200: Climate Change Geographies: Science, Impacts, and Action
  • GEOG 1972: Sustainable Futures, Environment & Society
  • GEOG 2053: Mapping Our World
  • GEOG 2092: Advanced Introduction to Human Geography
  • GEOG 2552: Healthy Places, Toxic Spaces: Geographies of Wellbeing, Risk, and Care

Methods

  • GEOG 2421: Visualizing Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events
  • GEOG 3023: Statistics and Geographic Data
  • GEOG 4023: Advanced Quantitative Methods for Spatial Data
  • GEOG 4173: Research Seminar
  • GEOG 4722: Field Methods in Human Geography

Upper Division