Author Archives: carlzimring

About carlzimring

I study junk and talk trash. Author of Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America and general editor of The Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage.

Introducing the Sustainability Studies Minor at Pratt Institute

PrattlogoBeginning in the Fall 2013 semester, all interested Pratt Institute undergraduates may declare for a minor in Sustainability Studies.  The minor in Sustainability Studies at Pratt deepens the understanding of the interdisciplinary approach to sustainable environmental, economic, and social practices, providing students with a broad understanding of the complex interrelationships between humans and ecosystems and the best practices for protecting environmental quality and fostering social equity.   The minor can be combined with any undergraduate major and requires the completion of 15 credits approved in Sustainability Studies.

Two 200-level courses are required for all students in the minor.  Students are required to take the common core course SUST 201 The Sustainable Core as well as MSCI 270 Ecology (or the equivalent MSCI 271 for Architecture majors, or MSCI 280 for Construction Management majors), as these two courses provide foundations in ecological literacy, social justice, and environmental justice. SUST 201 The Sustainable Core, which I will teach this fall Monday afternoons from 2-4:50pm,  involves the participation of faculty from several other departments at Pratt as guest lecturers.  This gives students the sense of how particular professions (such as industrial design or architecture) relate to broader socio-environmental issues including fair trade, zero waste practices, and environmental justice.

In addition to the two required courses, students may take 9 credits at the 300 or 400 level from a variety of options.  Several, such as PHIL 356 Environmental Ethics, IND 487 Sustainability and Production, INT 332 Environmental Theory, and MSCI 426 Toxics in the Environment, are existing courses in the undergraduate catalog.  Two new additions to the catalog are SUST 401 Power, Pollution, and Profit and SUST 405 Production, Consumption, and Waste.  I taught special topics versions of each of these new courses last spring and will offer each again next year.  (SUST 405 is offered as a SS 490 Special Topics course in the fall.  The course is currently registered at its capacity.)

I am delighted to co-ordinate this new minor. When I decided to come to Pratt last year, the Institute’s existing sustainability initiatives included incubation of startup firms devoted to sustainability, community outreach both in its immediate Brooklyn environs and throughout New York City, graduate programs on planning and facilities management, a center for sustainable design studies, and a plethora of undergraduate courses approaching sustainability from disciplines ranging from architecture to philosophy. This new minor shapes an interdisciplinary program from several of those courses,providing students a broad overview of sustainability problems, concerns, values, and approaches.

For me, the chance to introduce this minor is irresistible. My work is concerned with the consequences of consumption and waste on the environment and society, including unintended consequences of the disposal of mass-produced goods, stigma associated with handing wastes, and particular attention to the ways in which attitudes concerning waste and society shape each other over time. Pratt students are creative leaders who shape art, fashion, industrial design, and the built environment in ways that will affect consumption and waste streams long after I am gone. The minor, as well as SUST 201, SUST 401, and SUST 405, are unusually vivid opportunities for this historian to apply my training and concerns to improve the future.

I look forward to working with the initial cohort of interested undergraduates, and students curious about the minor may contact me with questions.


Every Architecture Student Should Watch This Program

Geoffrey Baer is a deceptively brilliant tour guide. He has spent decades giving tours of Chicago’s architecture, and his friendly, conversational style has made several WTTW documentaries about Chicago architecture, history, society, and food that are both scholarly and popular.

With his longtime producer Dan Protess, Baer has now developed the first national version of this documentary style. 10 Buildings That Changed America aired on PBS this week, and it is both a wonderful continuation of the Chicago documentaries and an astonishing step forward.

Thomas Jefferson's Virginia State Capitol (1788), featured in 10 Buildings That Shaped America.

Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia State Capitol (1788), featured in 10 Buildings That Changed America.

The continuity lies in the exhaustive research behind the show that somehow never feels exhausting. The scripts tell coherent stories about what architects such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Frank Gehry experienced as they developed their landmark buildings. The architects are people living in particular times and places, acting and reacting to significant changes around them. Sometimes their reactions produced unintended consequences, and those are discussed at length by a wonderful array of historians and critics. Architecture enthusiasts will recognize Paul Goldberger, and speaking as a historian, I was delighted to see Gwendolyn Wright, Charlie Hyde (the commentator on my first ASEH panel) and Tim Samuelson among the many interview subjects.

Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), featured in 10 Buildings That Changed America.

Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), featured in 10 Buildings That Changed America.

The step forward is in the scope and pace. Where Baer’s earlier documentaries put the greater Chicago area under the microscope, this one has a truly national scale. Arranged chronologically, the buildings tell a story of the United States, from founding father Thomas Jefferson’s visions of a new architecture for a new nation, moving coast to coast through the nineteenth century’s new churches in Boston, skyscrapers in Manhattan, Chicago, and west to St. Louis (along with the prairie architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright), the advances of the Industrial Revolution (and Fordism) and the reactions to nationalism, internationalism, postwar consumerism, and modernity in the twentieth century before finishing the journey with Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Although each of the ten segments focuses on one building, every segment shows how that one building both came from previous influences and then influenced other buildings. This is a video textbook of American architectural history, one which places the built environment squarely in the social, cultural, political, and technological history of the nation.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House (1909), featured in 10 Buildings That Changed America.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House (1909), featured in 10 Buildings That Changed America.

All this takes place in 56 minutes. The pace of 10 Buildings That Changed America is much faster than any of the earlier Baer/Protess productions with astonishingly quick editing throughout the program. Blink during the Louis Sullivan segment, and you’ll miss Baer walking alongside the Auditorium Building (complete with advertisement to enroll in Roosevelt University, the resident of Sullivan’s Michigan Avenue masterpiece since just after World War II). Blink during the segment on Robie House and you’ll miss many of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses that pepper Oak Park. (Some of these are featured on this Saturday’s annual Wright Plus architecture tour. My wife and I worked on the past two Wright Plus tours and missing this one was a lamentable result of my moving from Roosevelt University to the Pratt Institute.) The scope of these brief edits is enormous; I would not be surprised if more than one hundred buildings are included overall.  If you stop to think about how many images and interview subjects are in this episode, you will be amazed at how dense it is with visual and verbal information. That is only if you stop and think, for the result never feels rushed or clausterphobic, merely conversational. The deceptively brilliant accessibility of the Baer/Protess documentaries endures.

The Adam J. Lewis Center at Oberlin College (2001) did not make the list.

The Adam J. Lewis Center at Oberlin College (2001) did not make the list.

The result is a program that any student of architecture should watch and that any student of American history ought to enjoy. The selection of these ten buildings will no doubt inspire debate, as will the producers’ online list of ten more buildings of note. I have only one criticism. I hope that a future edition of this program will include William McDonough and David Orr’s Adam J. Lewis Center at Oberlin College (2001) as a vision which has influenced environmentally-sustainable architecture not simply as a straightjacket (as Stanley Tigerman has criticized the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system), but a genuine expression of how the built and natural environments may interact. (I am biased as a former teacher in and neighbor of the building, but I have also seen its influence grow in buildings striving for passivhaus, LEED, and Living Building Challenge performance over the past decade.) The concluding montage of images in the show included a glimpse of Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower (2009), an example of biomimicry, but a discussion of inspired buildings designed for sustainable performance would be a fitting coda to the discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s attempts to build houses to suit the Midwestern prairies.

That point is my only regret about 10 Buildings That Changed America, and it is less a regret than a demand for more. Here is hoping that the audience for this impressive tour of American history leads to more national programs from Geoffrey Baer and Dan Protess.

See the episode. If you like it, WTTW would appreciate a donation as gratitude.


Dirty Work and the Social Constructions of Waste

ChicagoJunkCart1941I’ve spent a long time seeking to better understand how people create practices to classify and manage wastes, and how those practices shape interactions between people. Nine years ago, Environmental History published my article on how concepts of hygiene and xenophobia shaped the waste trades in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Back then I wrote:

A comprehensive understanding of the social construction of waste requires consideration of both the discarded objects themselves and the people whose business it is to discard or reprocess the objects. We occasionally recognize the importance of waste-trade workers, especially when there is a garbage hauler’s strike or other crisis. Without their daily labors, the orderly removal of wastes breaks down. Despite their importance, the waste trades rarely have garnered respect. To call waste-trade labor “dirty work” is not novel, for waste handling involves unsanitary conditions. Stuart Perry titled a 1998 study of San Francisco garbage haulers Collecting Garbage: Dirty Work, Clean Jobs, Proud People. In Perry’s conception, the work is low-status, high-risk, and physically dirty, but also honorable and necessary. Perry’s study rightly emphasizes the importance of garbage hauling, but it does not examine the many ways in which garbage haulers and related occupations are seen as dirty.

The term “dirty work” may be expanded to include other connotations of dirty behavior. The dirtiness of the waste trades extends beyond issues of sanitation to include notions of ethics and xenophobia. Garbage hauling, toxic-waste storage, and scrap dealing are three waste industries whose images are associated with crime; not coincidentally, they also are associated strongly with ethnic groups who migrated to the United States in large numbers between 1870 and World War I. Contemporary cultural examples abound: Anthony Soprano from HBO’s The Sopranos uses a garbage-hauling business as a front for his mafia operations, mirroring reports of toxic waste handlers being prosecuted for mafia-related activities over the past two decades. The most recent Star Wars films featured a scheming, hook-nosed, seemingly Semitic junk dealer who enslaves the young boy who grows up to be Darth Vader. Scrap and garbage are linked to identifiable ethnic and criminal identities in popular culture, a link that—justified or not—is both strong and long-lasting in American history.

The article goes on to examine xenophobic attitudes by reformers, political bodies, and the customers of scrap dealers, establishing links between public health and safety and unscrupulous practices involving waste materials. Those concerns led to restrictions on who could trade scrap, where it could be traded, where it could be processed, and where it could be stored.

Today we think of recycling as a good, even moral behavior. That was not always true, and concerns over the effects of scrap recycling on children’s health and morals shaped legal structures that have endured for more than a century. The unease with which we have treated the materials and people involved in scrap recycling continues to affect our materials and each other. I examine this relationship more deeply in Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America, and in my current project about constructions of whiteness and purity in American history from the age of Jefferson to the rise of the Environmental Justice movement, I argue that the dynamic between hygiene and whiteness shaped some particularly noxious attitudes regarding race that American society still contends with. (Remember when then-Senator Joe Biden attempted to praise then-Senator Barack Obama by calling him “clean and articulate?” He may not have meant any harm by that, but the comment tapped into this corrosive idea that “white people” are somehow cleaner than people who are not considered white. When and how this attitude evolved is the subject of the project.)

This article has a more narrow focus than that. But it’s a good place to start the conversation.


How Do You Get to Radio City Music Hall? Grade.

Shot of the Radio City Music Hall stage before the Pratt faculty walked onto it at graduation.

Shot of the Radio City Music Hall stage before the Pratt faculty walked onto it at graduation.

I never had the ambition to sing at Radio City Music Hall in front of a full crowd. But that’s what happened today.

Pratt’s 124th commencement ceremony took place at Radio City Music Hall. To ensure enough seats for the friends and families of graduates, all faculty attending were seated onstage behind the podium. Thus, I can legitimately say that my profession took me to the stage of Radio City Music Hall.

But that wasn’t the best part of the day. The best part of the day was spent watching several of my students accept deserved congratulations for finishing their degrees. Ranging from fine arts to architecture majors, if the work I saw from them this year is any indication, these students have bright futures ahead of them. I also was pleased to find that several of them took public transportation to the venue, as the G and M trains were packed with students in caps and gowns. That first step out of the academy is a small one, carbon-wise.

Trustee/Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson gave the commencement address, and then the assembled faculty onstage (myself included) sang the Pratt Alma Mater to close the proceedings. I cannot confirm the rumor that future commencements will be held at Brooklyn’s Barclay Center because the staff of Radio City Music Hall heard my vocal contribution to the proceedings.

Congratulations again to the class of 2013. Those of us who taught you look forward to see what you do in the years ahead.


The 2013 New York City Mayoral Race and Sustainability: Some Questions

Mayor Bloomberg touting the expansion of recycling in 2004.  What will his successor do?  What should New Yorkers ask his successor to do?

Mayor Bloomberg touting the expansion of recycling in 2004. What will his successor do? What should New Yorkers ask his successor to do?

The New York City mayoral race is heating up with several candidates in each of the Democratic and Republican primaries, as well as several potential independents. With the primaries this September and the general election in November, voters have a few months to get to know the various candidates.

Campaigns have reached out to seek student interns, and after a recent request, I was moved to write back with a few questions. Given the local concern over these issues, perhaps some general phrasing of these questions for all of the candidates might serve to inform voters of how New York may move forward on issues of the environment, social equity, and the economy.

While certain candidates have platforms on safe housing issues, we see few details about the current land use and zoning procedures in place in New York City. Recently, these policies (as depicted in Kelly Anderson’s documentary My Brooklyn) have been linked to the destruction of community fabric in Brooklyn as high-rise condominiums and big box commercial developments replace working-class businesses and housing. What steps (if any) will the candidates take to ensure existing communities are not destroyed and that affordable housing is readily available for working-class New Yorkers?

While candidates mention expanding recycling services, we have not heard discussions about composting food or biodegradable packaging, materials which are significant contributors to the solid waste stream. Large-scale composting would allow businesses to distribute biodegradable packaging that would otherwise sit in landfills. What specific steps do the candidates propose to expand composting? What timetable can New Yorkers expect for these composting services?

Continuing on the question of reducing local solid waste streams, thousands of plastic bags are distributed at local stores every day. These plastic bags are difficult to recycle because they jam processing equipment and they are light enough to fly out of trash cans and garbage trucks. From there, they produce visible blight in trees and threats to wildlife in our waterways. Several other communities have policies in place to limit or even eliminate plastic bags. Washington D.C., for example, has a small fee for each distributed bag. San Francisco has outright banned plastic bags in favor of paper or reusable canvas bags. Both policies have demonstrated effects at reducing plastic bags in their respective waste streams. Do the candidates support policy measures to limit plastic bag distribution, such as taxes or outright bans?

Last year, the current administration proposed developing waste-to-energy programs in the city despite a long track record of public opposition to incineration. What positions do the candidates have on WTE plants? Have they discussed the costs of maintaining and operating the plants, or the potential emissions?

Finally, it is encouraging that the CitiBike program is beginning this spring, and that New York City has a wide network of bicycle lanes. These developments are crucial elements of the PlaNYC platform on transportation. (Link opens a PDF.) That said, rare are the lanes that are not regularly abused by trucks and automobiles double-parking. What steps do the candidates propose to enforce and protect the existing bike lanes?

These are some of the important questions facing New York City. I hope the many politicians seeking to become the next mayor choose to address them in the days ahead so that the citizenry may make the best informed decision about the future of the city.


Celebrate Earth Day: Watch the Documentary Trashed Online

sm_TRASHED_MOVIE_POSTER_A3_WEB_V3Last night, Jeremy Irons presented a new documentary he’s narrated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s theatre.  Trashed is a global look at how our use of the waste stream — and especially plastics — has affected the land, air, and water.  For scholars of waste, the film isn’t a huge revelation.  Indeed, the summary I just gave sounds not all that far removed from the thesis of Joel Tarr’s 1996 book The Search for the Ultimate Sink.  And we may quibble about various points in the film, from a simple look at recycling to a lack of discussion of cradle to cradle design solutions to minimize waste.

Those, though, are quibbles about an otherwise impressive accomplishment.  The film presents an accessible narrative of the real threats to human and environmental health from our out-of-sight, out-of-mind waste disposal patterns.  It presents a conversation of how we can change our cultural patterns and infrastructure for more sustainable practices.  It does so with production values and a celebrity narrator who have the potential to reach a far wider audience than most scholars do.  As I mentioned to Mr. Irons, while I’m glad to have the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage available to interested readers to learn more about the waste stream, this film will be seen by many more people than who will ever read it.  Getting the general public aware of the consequences of waste is crucial to devoting the effort and resources necessary to create those more sustainable practices.

The film has limited screenings, but anyone reading this post can see the film.  It begins streaming over the net today. Click the link at the previous sentence to watch.

Today is Earth Day.  Historian Adam Rome has a new book out about the history of Earth Day, characterizing it as an event that galvanized a disparate group of people with shared concerns, if not up to that point shared organization.  A result was a more coherent environmental movement in 1970.  In the United States, we have seen limits to action created by that organization (and a retrogressive pushback that has unfortunately transformed the Republican Party from an active agent in environmental protection to a force bent on endangering American citizens and ecosystems to the benefit of few).  Sharing Trashed with casual fans of Jeremy Irons or Vangelis, or to friends and neighbors, is an excellent way to continue the inclusive spirit of Earth Day.  Discussing our present concerns, future challenges, and future opportunities is utterly in keeping with the conversations women’s groups, college students, workers, scientists, suburbanites, Gaylord Nelson and all those who gathered 43 years ago did on the first Earth Day.

See it online.  Schedule a screening.  But watch, and discuss it.


Spaces Still Left for the Fall 2013 Sustainable Core at Pratt

How do humans live in concert with the environment?  Discuss this question in these two Fall 2013 courses.

How do humans live in concert with the environment? Discuss this question in these two Fall 2013 courses.

An update on my two sustainability seminars at Pratt for Fall 2013.  Each of these courses may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, and there are no prerequisites for any of them.

SS 490-24 Production, Consumption, and Waste has filled to capacity.  The seminar examines the ways production and consumption patterns from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the present day have shaped the waste stream, the ways we have defined and handled waste, the consequences of that waste, and ways in which we might reduce the impact of our waste.  Here’s a quick summary:

SS 490-24 Production, Consumption, and Waste
What happens to the trash we toss in dumpsters?  How do we determine what waste is, and why do we make so much of it?  Learn about the environmental and social consequences of mass production and disposal (past and present), and ways to make the waste stream safer.

Fall 2013: Tuesdays, 2pm-4:50pm.  3 credit hours.

The range of topics will in many ways resemble the scope of the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage, as I kept in mind that reference work’s utility in the classroom when I was editing it.  (Students will not have to buy that book, let alone lug it around!)

While Production, Consumption, and Waste has filled up, space is still available in my other course — and it’s an especially good choice for students wishing to get an introduction to the practice of sustainability both at Pratt and in general.  I am leading a team of Pratt Institute faculty teaching the third offering of SUST 201P The Sustainable Core.  This course is designed as our introduction to sustainability, and it is a required course for Pratt’s Sustainability Studies minor.

SUST 201P The Sustainable Core
This course provides an overview of sustainability by exploring definitions, controversies, trends, and case-studies in various systems and locales (urban/rural, local/national/global). Investigation of critical elements of sustainability, including environmental history and urban ecology, sustainable development and landscape transformations, recycling/waste management, ecosystem restoration, and environmental justice.

Fall 2013: Mondays, 2pm-4:50pm.  3 credit hours.

This course may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, and there are no prerequisites for any of them. If you are a Pratt student and have any questions for me about these courses, please feel free to contact me at czimring@pratt.edu.


Trashed Documentary at BAM Sunday April 21

sm_TRASHED_MOVIE_POSTER_A3_WEB_V3In advance of Earth Day, BAM hosts the documentary film Trashed Sunday evening at 7pm along with a Q&A period with its narrator Jeremy Irons.

We buy it, we bury it, we burn it and then we ignore it. Does anyone think about what happens to all the trash we produce? We keep making things that do not break down. We have all heard these horrifying facts before, but with Jeremy Irons as our guide, we discover what happens to the billion or so tons of waste that goes unaccounted for each year. On a boat in the North Pacific he faces the reality of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the effect of plastic waste on marine life. We learn that chlorinated dioxins and other man-made Persistent Organic Pollutants are attracted to the plastic fragments. These are eaten by fish, which absorb the toxins. We then eat the fish, accumulating more poisonous chemicals in our already burdened bodies. Meanwhile, global warming, accelerated by these emissions from landfill and incineration, is melting the ice-caps and releasing decades of these old poisons, which had been stored in the ice, back into the sea. And we learn that some of the solutions are as frightening and toxic as the problem itself.

For tickets and information, please visit the BAM website.


Update on Fall 2013 Pratt Sustainability Courses

How do humans live in concert with the environment?  Discuss this question in these two Fall 2013 courses.

How do humans live in concert with the environment? Discuss this question in these two Fall 2013 courses.

An update on my two sustainability seminars at Pratt for Fall 2013.  Each of these courses may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, and there are no prerequisites for any of them.

SS 490-24 Production, Consumption, and Waste has two seats available as of this morning.  The seminar examines the ways production and consumption patterns from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the present day have shaped the waste stream, the ways we have defined and handled waste, the consequences of that waste, and ways in which we might reduce the impact of our waste.  Here’s a quick summary:

SS 490-24 Production, Consumption, and Waste
What happens to the trash we toss in dumpsters?  How do we determine what waste is, and why do we make so much of it?  Learn about the environmental and social consequences of mass production and disposal (past and present), and ways to make the waste stream safer.

Fall 2013: Tuesdays, 2pm-4:50pm.  3 credit hours.

The range of topics will in many ways resemble the scope of the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage, as I kept in mind that reference work’s utility in the classroom when I was editing it.  (Students will not have to buy that book, let alone lug it around!)

I am also leading a team of Pratt Institute faculty teaching the third offering of SUST 201P The Sustainable Core.  This course is designed as our introduction to Sustainability Studies, is an excellent way to get familiar with the many ways sustainability is practiced at Pratt, and will be required for students opting to minor in Sustainability Studies (an option that is coming soon — watch this blog for details).

SUST 201P The Sustainable Core
This course provides an overview of sustainability by exploring definitions, controversies, trends, and case-studies in various systems and locales (urban/rural, local/national/global). Investigation of critical elements of sustainability, including environmental history and urban ecology, sustainable development and landscape transformations, recycling/waste management, ecosystem restoration, and environmental justice.

Fall 2013: Mondays, 2pm-4:50pm.  3 credit hours.

Both of these courses may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, and there are no prerequisites for any of them. If you are a Pratt student and have any questions for me about these courses, please feel free to contact me at czimring@pratt.edu.


Update on Fall 2013 Pratt Sustainability Courses

How do humans live in concert with the environment?  Discuss this question in these two Fall 2013 courses.

How do humans live in concert with the environment? Discuss this question in these two Fall 2013 courses.

An update on my two sustainability seminars at Pratt for Fall 2013.  Each of these courses may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, and there are no prerequisites for any of them.  (I will have news soon on something else students may do with these courses. Watch this space.)

SS 490-24 Production, Consumption, and Waste has three seats available as of this morning. (Friday afternoon update.  Two seats remain available.)  The seminar examines the ways production and consumption patterns from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the present day have shaped the waste stream, the ways we have defined and handled waste, the consequences of that waste, and ways in which we might reduce the impact of our waste.  Here’s a quick summary:

SS 490-24 Production, Consumption, and Waste
What happens to the trash we toss in dumpsters?  How do we determine what waste is, and why do we make so much of it?  Learn about the environmental and social consequences of mass production and disposal (past and present), and ways to make the waste stream safer.

Fall 2013: Tuesdays, 2pm-4:50pm.  3 credit hours.

The range of topics will in many ways resemble the scope of the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage, as I kept in mind that reference work’s utility in the classroom when I was editing it.  (Students will not have to buy that book, let alone lug it around!)

I am also leading a team of Pratt Institute faculty teaching the third offering of SUST 201P The Sustainable Core.  This course is designed as our introduction to sustainability and is an excellent way to get familiar with the many ways sustainability is practiced at Pratt.

SUST 201P The Sustainable Core
This course provides an overview of sustainability by exploring definitions, controversies, trends, and case-studies in various systems and locales (urban/rural, local/national/global). Investigation of critical elements of sustainability, including environmental history and urban ecology, sustainable development and landscape transformations, recycling/waste management, ecosystem restoration, and environmental justice.

Fall 2013: Mondays, 2pm-4:50pm.  3 credit hours.

Both of these courses may count as a Social Science or Philosophy elective, and there are no prerequisites for any of them. If you are a Pratt student and have any questions for me about these courses, please feel free to contact me at czimring@pratt.edu.


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