Nature & Innovation Residential College

The Nature and Innovation Residential College explores how humans have interacted with the environment, drawing on interdisciplinary lenses from the social sciences and engineering.

Foundation Seminars in the college explore how humans have historically endeavored to develop technologies to harness our natural world. While these technologies were created to achieve material progress, enrich societies and benefit humankind, we are now witnessing some of the negative impacts of technological progress on our environment, as the U.S. and other regions of the world struggle with human-caused climate change. Even as we acknowledge and benefit from the amazing ability of humans to harness nature, can we now modify our habits or develop new technologies to halt or even reverse these trends?

The Nature and Innovation Residential College will investigate these questions and ideas — in the context of Pennsylvania, the United States, the Global North and our planet — through classes, weekly common hours and experiential activities, including field trips to the Bucknell Farm as well as excursions off campus. You will collaborate with students from across majors and faculty from engineering and the social sciences majors to explore these and many other issues.