Clark University
AC-3: Undergraduate Program

The ES&P undergraduate track in the Environmental Science major prepares you to deal with the complexities of environmental issues in society. The program provides you with an in-depth understanding of how human activity is impacting the natural environment and provides scientific, social science, and policy perspectives on how these impacts can be managed and mitigated. The strong emphasis on the natural sciences ensures students understand the technical as well as the social aspects of the world’s most pressing environmental issues.

This major will enable you to understand and think critically about the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics transforming our world. Working with faculty with Ph.D. degrees in anthropology, education, political science, history, to economics, students acquire a broad analytic background in the social sciences. Not simply thinkers, IDSC students become doers prepared to tackle the challenges of global inequity and injustice in the 21st century.

Global Environmental Studies examines the relationships of people, culture, and society with the biophysical environment. It provides a grounding in the human forces that transform the earth and consequences of this transformation for individuals, society, and well being of the planet. These relationships are explored as they interact through global to local and local to global connections.

Environmental biologists explore the ways in which organisms evolve and interact with one another and their environments. Levels of exploration can range from molecular evolution and genomics to ecosystem level function. Conservation biology makes up one component of this field, focusing on the biological knowledge necessary to preserve biodiversity. Because the loss of biodiversity has reached crisis proportions, we offer a focused curriculum that enables you to bring appropriate biological tools and knowledge to efforts to develop conservation strategies and policies. This curriculum is designed to provide this focus, and to allow you to design a curriculum that will prepare you for research and teaching in environmental and conservation biology.

ESS examines the structure and function of the parts of the Earth's lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere and how these system interact with one another. This integrated science, which focuses on connections between these Earth System components, is at the heart of some of our most pressing physical science and nature-societal issues, including global climate change, water availability, and the loss of biological diversity. Clark's ESS program emphasizes the patterns and processes across the Earth's surface (to include both land and ocean) serving as an introduction to earth sciences or geosciences. Intensive field study, satellite remote sensing analysis, geographical information science (GISc), and computer simulation are all used as tools for understanding, monitoring, and predicting Earth System behavior. The ESS track of the Environmental Science major trains graduates for a wide range of professional endeavors as well as more advanced studies involving physical geography, to include landscape ecology, land-atmosphere interactions, hydrology, biogeochemistry, remote sensing, and GISc.