Welcome to Environmental Economics Fall 2014

In this course, you will have the opportunity to explore and research issues relating to the economic impact of environmental changes and policies, both locally and globally. This is an interdisciplinary course which will explore environmental issues from the Economic perspective, as well as from the perspectives of other disciplines, such as Sociology, Architectural technology, Psychology, and Hospitality management. You will also have the opportunity to conduct research on a wide range of topics relating to the challenge of environmental issues.

Open Lab will be used for much of our work. This includes the course syllabus, questions for commenting on assigned readings and on your progress with the semester research project on the course Blog site, and some PowerPoint presentations.

There will also occasionally be supplemental short readings posted here – usually current short newspaper or journal articles. The course site also features daily RSS news feeds on issues relevant to environmental economics from GreeenBiz.com. As part of the course reading requirements and to prepare for weekly discussions, you should visit the course site and read at least a couple of these articles each week.

The assignments to post responses on the Blog will be approximately every few weeks. The comments and thoughts you post on discussion questions related to the readings, the guest lecturers, films, etc. will be an important resource for class discussions. This is also a great opportunity to begin creating a dialog on the issues.

Blackboard will be used for posting midterm and final exam review questions only.