Sustainability and Civilization

Our civilization faces multiple sustainability challenges. Climate change often dominates public conversation, but in fact, a whole range of environmental, economic, political, and cultural trends threaten the structures that sustain the societies we know. These problems cannot be understood in isolation, because they interact in complex ways. Solving them will require collaboration across many different fields, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities. This one-unit course brings together over two dozen faculty from across the entire university for a series of interdisciplinary conversations around cross-cutting themes. Our aim is to encourage dialogue and perhaps even future collaborations among students and professors who might otherwise rarely interact in a classroom. All students are welcome, but frosh and sophomores may find the course especially useful as an introduction to a wide range of sustainability-related disciplines and teachers at Stanford.