The first goal of the Sustainable Futures framework is to “equip Carleton students with the interdisciplinary, place-based skills and knowledge needed to advance sustainability and environmental justice, preparing them to engage for change where they live now and in their future communities.” While decarbonization technologies and conservation practices are vital, perhaps more so is this awareness of the ripple effects our intellectual pursuits might have. Here are five examples of how sustainability is realized across the curriculum.
Arts 113
Field Drawing, Fall 2024, Spring 2025
“The Environment” can be a daunting and amorphous thing to understand. In Field Drawing, Eleanor Jensen ’01 wants her students to develop an intimate relationship with nature. Each fall and spring term, the Arb often becomes the classroom, as students use drawing as a tool for observation, learning about local natural history and the story of the landscape.
Nancy Braker ’81 and Matthew Elbert, Arb director and manager respectively, share information about Arb management, native and invasive species, and the difference between remnant and restored prairies. Students work in their sketchbooks to note the location, date, time, weather, and seasonal shifts, and then they draw what they see: native prairie plants, spring ephemeral flowers, forested and prairie landscapes.
While sustainability isn’t the explicit focus, this kind of close attention allows students “to root down more specifically in this part of Minnesota, and think about where they are and why it’s worth preserving,” Jensen says. “My main effort in teaching is to use the skills and habit of drawing to better see the natural environment around us, and to foster a deeper relationship with it.”
Political Science 333
Global Social Changes and Sustainability, Spring 2025
In the basement of Hasenstab Hall, political science professor Tun Myint has two prototype products designed by students: a silver-bladed windmill designed to turn moving air into power for a cellphone, and a pedal-powered generator for a laptop. But what do these items—created in Carleton’s Makerspace and later made available for public use at instructables.com—have to do with political science?
They’re a rich entry point into discussions on the theories and practices that link social and ecological changes. “Political science has to deal with resource allocation such as ‘financial’ and ‘common pool’ resources like air, water, and land,” Myint says. The use of these resources is governed by laws, yes, but also by “coercive structures,” the norms and mores we develop socially.
“If you take one fish from a lake, your act has coerced other members of your society to not have that fish,” he explains. “My goal in this class is for students to think about how these coercive structures can be channeled to create more livable, enjoyable, and sustainable societies. What is your definition of sustainability, and how can we implement that concept in a product that people can use without even thinking about sustainability? These products are nearly nonexistent in the market, but we refuse to conclude as much in this class.”
Sociology and Anthropology 203
Anthropology of Good Intentions, Fall 2024
Hunt campus squirrels. That survival mission is the final assignment in environmental anthropologist Constanza Ocampo-Raeder’s class. Students, organized in families, rove campus with toy bows and arrows and one rule: no direct shots. The exercise shows that we innately possess traditional ecological knowledge. Everyone knows where the albino squirrel lives, so when reports come in, all families have identified it, proof that one quarry can’t possibly “feed” us all. “Just saying that you’re going to act sustainably isn’t enough. You have to share this environment with others,” Ocampo-Raeder says.
The hunt follows weekslong discussions on a thorny question: what does “sustainability” really mean? “What kind of power you have, what society you come from, and what your underlying assumptions are will all guide the policies and methodologies that you wind up using” in tackling issues related to climate change, Ocampo-Raeder says. She then asks students to analyze a product billed as sustainable. “We’re surrounded by the language of environmentalism, but we need to think critically about who’s dominating the discourse and what the possibilities and limitations are of that.”
Sometimes this analysis exposes the potential flaw indicated in the class title: sometimes good intentions—when implemented without the input “of impacted communities” or deep consideration of long-range consequences—can have negative effects.
Environmental Studies 289
Climate Change and Human Health, Fall 2024
Chemistry professor Deborah Gross wants to help students “develop processes with which to look at really complex things”—in the case of this class, how two vast systems intersect: the Earth’s climate and human health. The class applies systems thinking to topics from mosquito-borne diseases to biodiversity conservation to the body’s response to extreme heat. “By the end of term, students will have drawn more systems diagrams than they can probably count,” she says.
Another tool is a risk analysis framework. “I want them to ask: with the hazard they’re thinking about, who is vulnerable? What kind of exposure do they have to it? How does that fit into thinking about how we should approach addressing it?”
Gross then invites guests like Roger Faust ’19, Carleton postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Studies; a panel of locals working in sustainable agriculture; and Braden Kay ’05, extreme heat program manager in the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, to speak on their work.
Whether students pursue climate-adjacent careers or not, Gross hopes that they’ll realize “that whatever career they choose, they’ll have the agency to learn what they need to learn, to think about hard things, and figure out how to be a player in that realm.”
History 205
American Environmental History, Winter 2025, Fall 2025
In his survey of the American environmental experience from pre-colonial times to the present, George Vrtis seeks to turn attention to a long-overlooked feature of historical analysis—the natural world. Instead of treating nature as the backdrop to human affairs, he aims to examine and teach history by placing nature at the center of the inquiry. “We have reorganized the natural world in really fundamental ways,” Vrtis says, “and environmental historians are interested in the myriad of ways that those changes shape our complicated relationships with the natural world and one another.”
Vrtis organizes the course along three intersecting planes of inquiry. “One is to recognize and take seriously the agency of nature,” he says. “The second is to think about the way we have inscribed sociocultural systems into the natural world. And the third is to think hard about how cognition—the way we think, the way we believe, the way we value—is intimately involved in all of those relationships.”
One key takeaway for students is to see environmental history as a valuable problem-solving tool: “Many of our environmental problems have roots that stretch deep into the past, and exploring those roots can change the way we think about, understand, and respond to environmental problems today.”