University of California, San Diego
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

UC San Diego has adopted a definition of sustainability that is outlined in the UC San Diego Principles of Sustainability. According the Principles of Sustainability listed on the Sustainability 2.0 website, UC San Diego generally defines sustainability as taking from the Earth only what it can provide indefinitely, thus leaving future generations no less than we have access to ourselves. UC San Diego acknowledges that sustainability should be a foundational value of all campus operations, including curriculum. According to the Principles of Sustainability, UC San Diego is committed to encouraging the incorporation of sustainability concepts in all academic disciplines and across all levels of education and campus operations. Although these principles stress the importance of sustainability in academics, the Advisory Committee on Sustainability is currently working to establish a formal curriculum-explicit definition of sustainability.

According to the report, the criteria for a course to be identified as an “environmental” or “sustainable” course was used to base a list of undergraduate and graduate courses originally posted on the http://conserve.ucsd.edu and http://sustain.ucsd.edu websites. This list was compiled in 2005 by Mr. Chris Cohen (now at Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and identifies courses listed in the UC San Diego General Catalog with an “environmental” or “sustainable” emphasis. Instead of developing a new definition for “sustainable or “environmental” courses, Sustainability Solutions Institute (SSI) used Mr. Cohen’s list as a starting point and adopted a broad construction of “environmental” and “sustainable” courses. The Council of Undergraduate Education faculty (comprised of departmental undergraduate vice chairs for education or equivalent and undergraduate program directors) reviewed and updated the previous campus listing of environmental/sustainability courses and self identified new additions to the course collection in spring 2010.