Students examine policies for managing human activities to sustain the health of regional ecosystems and planetary life-support systems. Selected problems of the international commons (oceans, marine resources, atmosphere, migratory species); global and regional carrying capacity (population, resource consumption), internationally shared ecosystems (transboundary watersheds and waterbodies, tropical forests); and the relevant international institutions and politics for policy formation, conflict resolution, and implementation. Using a policy-analytic framework, students develop case studies to assess international policies and institutional arrangements to achieve the objectives of Agenda 21--Earth Summit Strategy to Save the Planet.

Provides an introduction to the major concepts associated with monitoring change in ecological communities. Students develop an appreciation for such issues as: identification of appropriate baselines for comparison; use of indicator species; the tools used to inventory common, rare, and secretive species; how trend data are analyzed; and the implications of failing to detect an indicator species. Lab.

Applied sampling and statistical techniques for assessing current forest conditions and predicting future growth, yield, and structure. Topics include plot and point sampling, ecological inventory, and evaluation of site quality and stand density.

After 30 years in common parlance, the success of "Sustainability" still seems far from its goal. In part, this is because sustainability is typically applied as another way to manage scarcity, a paradigm informing economic and social policy for well over a century. Underlying this dominant view of sustainability, an increasing number of approaches to sustainability projects, some of longstanding are entering the mainstream as pieces of an identifiable, and distinctly novel, paradigm based on the assumption of abundance, rather than scarcity. These include ideas of the Natural Step and Natural Capital, as well as Cradle to Cradle and Biomicry. The goals of this seminar are (1) to survey and discuss this growing literature and its application to the solution of sustainability problems; and (2) research and analysis towards transforming scarcity-based to abundance-based solutions. To be considered as a capstone option for majors in Environmental and Conservation Sustainability, students must also register for NR 754 in the Spring semester.