This course presents chemistry as applied to air and water contamination, energy production, and solid and hazardous wastes. The course does not require background or courses in chemistry. However, students should be comfortable with chemical concepts and should become familiar with basic chemical vocabulary. The course introduces students to behaviors of contaminants in the environment including, as appropriate, their formation, transport, fate and effects. Air and water are emphasized since they are the most significant contaminant pathways to humans and other organisms.
Energy production is emphasized because it produces more waste than any other industrial activity.
There will also be some discussion of contamination prevention and remediation. Readings will be assigned from the text and from supplementary material from scientific and popular literature. Writing the Stories Celebrated in story and song, paintings and photographs, and as the destination of cultural elites and individual journeys of discovery, the American landscape has yielded not only the raw materials of nation building but also unique monuments of cultural identity. Assignments will include autobiographical writing as well as general non-fiction. In addition to conferences and written comments from the instructor, students will serve as a community of readers for their peers.