A detailed, comprehensive investigation of selected environmental problems. Guest speakers from the government and industry will give their acccounts of various environmental cases. Students will then present information on a case study of their choosing.

The Amazon is burning. The glaciers are melting. Heat waves, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and droughts devastate ever larger swaths of the earth, producing crop failures, air pollution, soil erosion, famine and terrifying individual hardship. At the same, time the so-called Western World is literally walling itself off from the millions who are fleeing from disaster and war with what little they can carry. White militants chant "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us," social media spreads memes and talking points about "white genocide" and "white replacement" and online ideologues fantasize about building white ethnostates. Are these developments connected? Is there a causal relationship? Or are these conditions purely coincidental? Increasingly, arguments about limits to growth, sustainability, development and climate change have come to stand in competitive tension with arguments for social and racial equality. Why is that case? What are the claims and underlying anxieties that polarize western societies? How do white nationalist movements relate to populist and fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century? What is new and different about them now? What is the relationship between environmentalism, rightwing populism and the climate crisis? And how have societies responded to the climate crisis, wealth inequality, finite resources and the threat posed by self-radicalizing white nationalist groups?

Fossil fuel powered the making--now the unmaking--of the modern world. As the first fossil fuel state, Pennsylvania led the United States toward an energy-intensive economy, a technological pathway with planetary consequences. The purpose of this seminar is to perform a historical accounting--and an ethical reckoning--of coal, oil, and natural gas. Specifically, students will investigate the histories and legacies of fossil fuel in connection to three entities: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Under instructor guidance, students will do original research, some of it online, much the rest of it in archives, on and off campus, in and around Philadelphia. Philly-based research may also involve fieldwork. While based in historical sources and methods, this course intersects with business, finance, policy, environmental science, environmental engineering, urban and regional planning, public health, and social justice. Student projects may take multiple forms, individual and collaborative, from traditional papers to data visualizations prepared with assistance from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. Through their research, students will contribute to a multi-year project that will ultimately be made available to the public.

Geomorphology, the study of the Earth's landforms and surface processes that have formed them, have evolved rapidly over the past decades. Traditionally, this sub-discipline of geology was largely descriptive, with the shape and relationships of various landforms attributed to the interplay of tectonic and climatic forces. In the 1950-60s, scientists began to quantify the processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales, and the field of Process Geomorphology replaced the descriptive framework. A quantitative approach is now integrating regional structural framework, climatology, and biologically mediated (including anthropogenic) processes to generate predictive models of landscape change. This course will include applications of high-resolution near-surface geophysical method, ground-penetrating radar (GPR), to help visualize the subsurface aspects of landform analysis. Along with understanding the morphodynamic feedbacks based on sediment transport, this geophysical application will help integrate the active earth surface processes with antecedent conditions (paleo-landscape). Lecture material will be complemented with manuscript analysis and the course will culminate with a rigorous research-based term project.

This course covers basic groundwater flow and solute transport modeling in one-,two- and three-dimensions. After first reviewing the principles of modeling, the student will gain hands-on experience by conducting simulations on the computer. The modeling programs used in the course are MODFLOW (USGS), MT3D, and the US Army Corps of Engineers GMS (Groundwater Modeling System).