Sustainability Minor
The prevailing theoretical model of sustainability defines it as the intersection of the social, the environmental, and the economic. Sustainability thus implies a radical interdisciplinarity of the kind generally hailed as the academic model of the future. The Minor in Sustainability acknowledges the issue of sustainability as one of the most theoretically and practically complex questions of our times. Involving far more than simply turning off lights or recycling bottles and paper, sustainability has implications for how we eat and drink; how we treat the land, sea, air, and atmosphere; how we approach health and well-being on an interspecies level; how we produce and consume goods; how we distribute the benefits and costs of that production and consumption; how we derive the energy to maintain both those economic enterprises and our everyday lifestyles; and how we assess and rethink the proper balance between profit, politics, wealth, and the common good. The challenge of sustainability is its profoundly crosscutting nature; none of these questions may be answered without consideration of the others.