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Contemporary Environmental Issues
Course Introduction
How can you decide if global warming, or human population growth, or biodiversity loss represent significant threats to the ecosystems of our planet?
There are many sources for environmental information, but how do you know if a source is credible? And when credible sources disagree how can we decide who's right?
This interdisciplinary course examines a broad range of contemporary global environmental issues, such as biodiversity, pollution, population growth, and global warming, and focuses on how those big issues might affect us locally. It develops students' environmental literacy and enables them to take part in informed debate and action. It explores environmental materials in a variety of media and teaches students how to navigate these materials; how to analyze and evaluate information; how to balance information from a variety of scientific and non-scientific, objective and subjective sources; and how to develop arguments surrounding environmental problems.
This course features field activities that relate the study of local ecosystems to broader environmental issues. You can find information on some of the field activities used in this study at this field activity web site. (created by the course developer and instructor).
This course uses StatCrunch (an online statistical analysis package). You can view a StatCrunch tutorial here.
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