This course presents an overview of the homeland security and emergency management field and enables students entering the profession or expanding their roles to function effectively given a broad array of emergency management issues. This course provides students with a broad view of issues that focus on policy considerations and align with the five National Preparedness System mission areas of prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. Students learn critical concepts such as the Department of Homeland Security all-hazards approach of emergency management, risk prevention, counter-terrorism, and consequence management and mitigation. This course takes a behavioral science risk-based approach, assessing capabilities and identifying gaps within existing emergency management programs. This approach is instrumental to planning future homeland security and emergency management programs, which facilitate our nation's ability to improve emergency management.

The focus of this course is on disaster preparedness and training and organizing teams that can support communities during disasters. The course provides disaster response process knowledge, such as fire safety, light search and rescue, and disaster medical operations. Community emergency response knowledge is used to develop strategies to protect families, neighbors, and co-workers if a disaster occurs. How to plan, execute, and evaluate disaster preparedness desktop exercises will be addressed.

Students will learn about the nature and practice of science as it relates to biology, and the ways in which our activities have a biological impact on the world around us. Throughout the course, the students will examine the biological messages with which we are constantly bombarded, and by linking background scientific principles to those messages, practice distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

Global experience of human interactions with plants, and the ways in which plants have contributed to the development and the flourishing of human societies. Includes role of plants in providing sustenance, clothing and shelter, quest for spices, the historical consequences of plant explorations and exploitations, the power to heal or kill, plants in mythology and spiritual endeavors, plants that alter consciousness, plant diseases and human history, plants as energy for society, and the Green Revolution in global change and feeding the world in the future.