Environmental Residential College

The Environmental Residential College (ERC) explores issues of environment, ecology, conservation, extinction and climate activism through interdisciplinary lenses drawn from the humanities, social sciences and life sciences, as well as the fields of engineering and management.

The classes offered by the ERC specifically address how environmental history, literary ecocriticism, Anthropocene discourses, cartography, environmental art and environmental writing can enrich our understanding of place, time and ecological change. To do this, we must grapple with diverse environments (urban, rural, changing biomes, etc.), their shifting realities (sea level rise, "freak storms," widespread drought) and the new normal of environmental havoc, which impacts the human and nonhuman alike.

The experiential activities planned by the ERC set out to investigate and consider the different scales of our placements: in central Pennsylvania, within the wider mid-Atlantic, in the Global North and upon Earth.