The environmental studies capstone course (Envir St 600) is a required component for students completing our major. Priority is given to students declared in the environmental studies major.
Spring 2025 Capstone Courses
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Envir St 600 Section 001: Urban Food Systems and the Environment
Professor Monica White
Tuesdays, 2:25–4:25 p.m.
This course will examine the relationship between food systems and the environment and allow students to identify a project of interest that they will develop from a research question to data collection and analysis. We will pay particular attention to the social, political and environmental impacts of local food organizations. In an effort to examine community responses to food insecurity, students will explore the food landscape from production (i.e., agriculture) to distribution and participate in community service activities, like work at a community gardening project. Students will work with local organizations active in the urban agriculture in Madison and the state.
Envir St 600 Section 002: Environmental Justice: Land, Water, Air and Food
Professor Monica White
Thursdays, 2:25–4:25 p.m.
This course will explore several environmental justice organizations for land, water, air, and food. Students will select a specific local, regional or national organization to support in order to examine the strategies a community utilizes to respond to environmental concerns that impact access to and quality of land, water, air, and food.
Envir St 600 Section 003: Exploring the Depth of Place — Practicing Land Care through Environmental History
Ben Lebowitz and Ryan Hellenbrand
Mondays, 2:25–5:25 p.m.
Through this capstone, students will develop skills and practices for telling multilayered stories of place. Conservation and restoration are fields that rely on a broad set of analytical tools to understand the environmental conditions of particular sites. Achieving a deeper understanding of place necessarily includes insights from environmental history and ethics to determine the trajectories of restoration and conservation goals.
We ask students in this course to engage critically with the history of conservation thought, land ethics through time, and what these offer for land care practice and stewardship today. Students will learn to apply a variety of historical methods in relation to ecological practices in tandem with the UW Arboretum.
Envir St 600 Section 004: Community-Engaged Agroforestry
Hannah Kass
Wednesdays, 1:20–3:15 p.m.
In this course, students will learn from the Madison chapter of the Neighborhood Planting Project (NPP) to develop a range of grassroots, community-based responses to climate change and food insecurity through agroforestry. The NPP acquires tree saplings from the Department of Natural Resources and friends who propagate saplings to distribute free fruit and nut trees to Madison neighbors at our annual Spring “tree distro.”
We also work in collaboration with the Madison Parks Board, Madison Permaculture Guild, and others invested in community gardening, and hope to scale up our projects and collaborations in spring 2025. This course will invest students in that process of community engagement and project organizing.
Students will critically examine top-down approaches to reforestation and food sovereignty, and the role of grassroots, community-based approaches to resolving socio-environmental problems; gain basic agroforestry skills and scientific comprehension, including reforestation for carbon sequestration, forest ecology, agroecology, propagation, grafting, and planting; acquire community organizing skills, including how to buy, propagate, care for, distribute, and plant fruit and nut trees with and for people in the Madison community.
Note: Students should be prepared to meet at the UW Arboretum and Lakeshore Nature Preserve several times throughout the course, and attend off-campus field trips.
Envir St 600 Section 005: Imagining Better Infrastructure: A Critical Look at the Built Systems That Sustain Us
Justyn Huckleberry
Tuesdays, 5–7 p.m.
Infrastructures are socio-technical systems of facilities and services (i.e., transportation networks, power, water systems, housing) essential to the basic functioning of our society. Historically these elements of the built environment have been shaped by investment and political decisions of key actors and institutions, embodying divergent priorities and power differentials.
This capstone will review the sociopolitical histories of key built systems, pinpointing ways infrastructures have shaped opportunities for people and communities, climate resilience, socio-spatial inclusion, and equity. We will find, interrogate, and elevate better ways of designing infrastructure that can enhance our resilience, decrease emissions, and create the conditions that enable people to move more freely through the world.
A community-based component of this course is in progress of being developed.
Envir St 600 Section 006: Sustainability in Practice
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
An integrative capstone experience involving interdisciplinary teams applying the triple bottom line principals of sustainability to campus-based challenges.