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Environmental Science & Sustainability

What is happening to the only planet we will ever have? From Sagan's Pale Blue Dot to Attenborough's witness testimony of collapse — the evidence, the math, the politics, and the question of what we do now.

15 Units

Early Units (Foundation)

Building Skills

Advanced Concepts

Capstone/Synthesis

A Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam

On February 14, 1990, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward Earth and captured a single pale pixel — every human being who ever lived, visible in a scattered ray of sunlight. This unit uses that image as an entry point for understanding Earth systems, planetary boundaries, and the brevity of industrial civilization on the geological timescale.

The Carbon Cycle: A 4.5-Billion-Year Story

Carbon doesn't disappear — it cycles. This unit traces the carbon atom through four distinct timescales: the biological cycle of photosynthesis and respiration, the oceanic cycle of CO₂ dissolution, the geological cycle of weathering and volcanism, and the anthropogenic cycle that has moved hundreds of millions of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere in two centuries. Along the way, students meet Charles David Keeling, whose 47 unbroken years of CO₂ measurements produced the most consequential graph in environmental science.

Biodiversity: What's Being Lost Before We've Even Found It

Since 1970, the average wildlife population has declined by 69% — not 69% of species, but 69% of individual animals. David Attenborough, at age 93, has witnessed the loss firsthand. This unit examines what biodiversity is, why it matters, what is being lost, and why humans systematically underestimate the scale of that loss — including through a cognitive mechanism called shifting baseline syndrome.

Water: The Most Fought-Over Molecule on Earth

The Aral Sea was the world's fourth-largest lake. By 2014, its eastern basin had vanished — drained for cotton irrigation in a single human lifetime. This unit examines freshwater scarcity from the Ogallala Aquifer to Flint, Michigan, exploring how the mismatch between where water is, where people are, and how we use water is becoming one of the defining crises of the 21st century.

Energy: The Master Resource

Everything civilization does requires energy. Before fossil fuels, that energy came from human and animal muscles, wind, and water. A human body sustains about 75 watts. Today, the world burns 100 million barrels of oil per day. The average American uses energy equivalent to having 60 servants. This unit examines energy — what it is, where it comes from, what it costs the atmosphere, and whether the transition to alternatives is happening fast enough to matter.

The Soil Beneath Your Feet

It takes 500 years to form one inch of topsoil. Industrial agriculture loses 24 billion tons of it per year. This unit traces the Dust Bowl, the Green Revolution, and the unresolved question of whether we can feed 10 billion people without destroying the ground beneath us.

The Amazon Is Speaking and Nobody Is Listening

The Amazon rainforest generates 20 billion tons of water vapor per day, creating rainfall across South America. Scientists estimate a tipping point at 20-25% deforestation — and deforestation is currently at 17%. This unit examines the science of 'flying rivers,' the politics of sovereignty, and what it means to approach a threshold we cannot uncross.

The Ocean Nobody Sees

The ocean has absorbed 30% of all human CO₂ and 90% of excess heat from climate change, saving civilization from far worse warming. The cost: 30% more acidic water, mass coral bleaching, and the slow dissolution of the marine food web. This unit examines what the ocean has been doing for us and what it can no longer do.

Sacrifice Zones: Who Pays for Our Prosperity

Cancer Alley, the Navajo uranium mines, Flint's water — environmental burdens fall with startling consistency on Black, brown, and low-income communities. Robert Bullard proved it in 1979. Studies since have only confirmed it. This unit examines the evidence, the history, and the question of whether environmental inequality is accidental or structural.

Climate Policy: The Most Expensive Game of Chicken in History

The Kyoto Protocol was signed and abandoned. The Paris Agreement is non-binding by design. Current trajectories point to 2.7°C of warming. This unit examines why international climate agreements keep falling short — and whether the economics, the game theory, and the political will exist to close the gap.

The Green New Deal vs. Degrowth vs. Ecomodernism

Three visions for civilizational survival — the Green New Deal, Degrowth, and Ecomodernism — each backed by serious intellectuals, each with serious problems. This unit examines what each framework actually proposes, where the evidence points, and why none of them can simply be dismissed. The future is not decided. But the choice between these paths is one of the most consequential decisions humanity will make.

Technology Won't Save Us (But It Might Help)

The world's largest direct air capture plant removes 0.00001% of annual CO₂ emissions. Solar costs have fallen 99% since 1976. Both facts are true. This unit applies honest mathematics to the full portfolio of technological solutions — solar, wind, batteries, nuclear, direct air capture, and geoengineering — to distinguish what engineering can deliver from what wishful thinking promises.

Your Health Is the Planet's Health

Air pollution kills 7 million people per year — more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Most of those deaths are invisible, recorded as heart attacks and strokes rather than what they are: the direct consequence of the air outside the hospital. This unit follows the full chain from atmospheric chemistry to human biology to public health policy, and then traces how the same industrial forces that pollute the air are also expanding the geographic range of dengue fever, flesh-eating bacteria, and tick-borne disease.

Greenwashing, Denial, and the Struggle to Communicate

In 1982, Exxon's internal scientists told management that CO₂ from fossil fuels could double by 2060 with 'potentially catastrophic' consequences. Exxon then spent an estimated $30 million funding organizations to cast doubt on the same science its own researchers had confirmed. This unit traces the anatomy of manufactured doubt — its origins in the tobacco industry, its deployment against climate science, and the cognitive mechanisms that made it work.

The Next 50 Years: Choosing Our Trajectory

Two futures are fully supported by current science. Neither is hypothetical. Both emerge from the same models, the same physics, with different assumptions about human choices. This unit presents both scenarios honestly — with specific, sourced projections for what 1.5°C and 3°C warming mean for agriculture, sea level, disease, and biodiversity — and then examines the real evidence that suggests the trajectory is not yet fixed.

Learning Progression

This course is designed to be taken sequentially. Earlier units establish foundational concepts that later units build upon. While you can explore units in any order, following the numbered sequence provides the most coherent learning experience.