Ball State University
AC-3: Undergraduate Program

The major in natural resources and environmental management prepares students for careers in preserving natural resources, improving environmental quality and global sustainability. Learning outcomes include applying the scientific method, using public participation projects to collect water and soil samples as well as social data, understanding the laws and regulations that govern environmental issues, and critical thinking for effective problem solving.

To prepare students for leadership in the 21st century, Ball State offers an undergraduate minor in sustainability.

Participating students will be provided a breadth of exposure to issues including systems theory, values and ethics, atmosphere and climate, population, energy, water, land, food (land-based and freshwater/marine-based), health (disease and nutrition), materials (including resource harvesting, resource limitations, resource recycling), natural biological systems (including ecosystem services), economies and poverty.

Upon completion of the minor, students will be able to:

Explain the meaning of sustainability.
1. Describe social, environmental, and economic elements of sustainable human communities.
2. Understand the systemic nature of the interrelationships among those social, environmental, and economic elements of civilization.
3. Articulate their personal values as related to this complexity.

Apply concepts of sustainability in decision making.
1. Articulate within a systems context the role of disciplinary knowledge and skills in achieving long-term human prosperity.
2. Analyze problems within current social, environmental, and economic practices.
3. Identify the strategic interventions needed to achieve a thriving civilization.

Sustainable use and development of the land base and its natural resources has become an integral part of fitting human uses to the land in the planning professions.
From such roots within the Department of Landscape Architecture there has emerged a new interdepartmental minor in Sustainable Land Systems to provide a cross- disciplinary forum for integration of ideas in sustainable, or regenerative, land resource use and development.

Sustainable Land Systems (LA 471) serves as the anchoring course within the program. This is complemented by the three core courses (Ecology, Environmental Economics, and Environmental Ethics), a carefully chosen set of electives from which students select three courses, and the closing course within the clustered minors program, Creating a Sustainable Future (SUST 400).

Understand energy, and you will understand a vital driver of any modern society. Ball State’s interdepartmental minor in energy explores the increasingly close connections between energy and flourishing nations. This minor draws a focus on the technical and societal issues involved with energy as a resource.