Sustainability Attribute Policy
The Minor in Sustainability empowers students to shape a just and sustainable world through core concepts in:
(1) Systems thinking: Systems thinking is a way of seeing interrelationships and interconnections, rather than static or standalone elements of a system and seeking to understand the behavior as a whole. Examining how things relate and affect other parts of the system is essential to understanding large, long-term, complex processes, including climate change, environmental justice, and materials management. Students will learn about components of a system, system dynamics, and how to apply systems thinking to sustainability challenges.
(2) Justice: Creating a safe and just space for people and other beings, now and into the future, is at the core of sustainability. For the Sustainability Minor, students will critically engage with concepts of justice including the following related and overlapping ideas: Environmental Justice, Political Ecology, Social Justice, Intergenerational Justice, Spatial Justice, and Inter-species Justice. Students will study the linkages between environmental quality, power, and social justice, and the importance of promoting dialogue, increased understanding, and action. They will conduct “empirical, researched-based explorations to explain linkages in the condition and change of social/environmental systems, with explicit consideration of relations of power” (Robbins, 2004, p. 12).
(3) Sustainability Knowledge: Key to communicating and implementing sustainable practices is development of an understanding of the core concepts, context, and challenges of sustainability. Students will be expected to engage with core concepts of sustainability including history of the field, planetary boundaries, limits to growth, environmental degradation, and biophilia. Students will develop the context to be able to explain sustainability as comprised of interconnected systems, and they will be able to identify the large-scale challenges that face society locally and globally, as well as some of the difficulties with addressing these issues including climate change, biodiversity loss, changes in land use, poverty, and environmental racism.
(4) Integration: Developing a sustainability worldview requires a level of awareness of oneself and others, as well as the ability to integrate multiple perspectives and ways of thinking and doing. Essential to the development of the integration of perspectives are the concepts of and relationships between interdisciplinarity, multiscalar (spatial and temporal) understanding, and cultural difference.
(5) Acting for Positive Change: Embedded in the concept of the sustainability minor is the idea that education for sustainability is essential to the co-creation of a better future. Students will gain insights into how to become agents of change and how to be engaged citizens as they work toward well-being for all. Students will examine what makes agents of change effective in individual, local, regional, and global contexts. Being effective as an agent of change relies on actualizing core competencies of a liberal education, including communication, problem-solving, analysis, and cultural literacy. Students will learn how engaged citizens effectively formulate goals and develop solutions.
The sustainability curriculum follows the structure of the Triple Bottom-Line Approach (Society/Equity, Economy, Environment/Nature) and includes consideration of the impacts of our actions, personally and collectively, on others, as well as a sense of self-efficacy to work toward improving conditions that foster the well-being of people and the environment now and into the future.
We invite colleagues who wish to have their courses count for SUST credit to submit a short but substantive description of how their course fits the Sustainability minor curriculum. The Sustainability Minor targets students outside the Environmental Studies and Geography Majors to allow ALL UR students to learn and work toward sustainability.