Welcome to Swarthmore College’s Environmental Studies (ENVS) program. Begun in 1992 due to student demand as a concentration (minor), ENVS expanded to a Tri-College minor in 2012, then added a major in 2016 and an honors major in 2018. Environmental Studies is inherently interdisciplinary, and brings together the humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and the social sciences to tackle environmental issues of great complexity and socio-political importance. In relation to climate change, for instance, natural scientists provide data to understand the scope of the problem and the processes that result in global warming, while social scientists seek to understand and craft policies informed by the social structures and relations of power and the human behaviors that cause climate change. Humanistic scholars, among their other contributions, help provide analyses of the moral, ethical, aesthetic, and historical frameworks shaping human/nature relationships and draw on the power of image and story for understanding right relations and interdependencies between humankind and otherkind. Among the environmental values that our students seek to study are those that relate to people’s relationships with the land, with the natural and built environment, and with each other.
