This course examines the law (constitutional, statutory, and administrative) governing the structure, functions, and oversight of federal agencies. It proceeds in three related parts. Part I covers Congress’s establishment of and delegation of powers to agencies, including the constitutional limits of such delegations; subsequent mechanisms by which Congress controls agencies; and the President’s power to direct and oversee the work of agencies, and control them by appointing and removing agency officials. Part II covers the main legal categories of agency action, i.e., rulemaking and adjudication; the choice between them to make policy; and the constitutional, statutory, and other law governing agency action, including the Administrative Procedure Act. Part III covers judicial review of agency action, with emphasis on standing to sue, the availability and methods of review, the timing of review, remedies, and the scope of review as to agency factual determinations, policy decisions, and interpretation of statutes and regulations.

As capitalist relations remake the earth through projects of intensified mineral extraction, carbon-based energy consumption and the production of 'waste', in this course we will examine the diverse histories and practices through which nature-society relations have been studied in anthropology and related disciplines. The course will follow a genealogical approach to understand some contemporary theoretical developments in environmental anthropology, including multispecies ethnography, the anthropology of infrastructure, and ontological anthropology. In what ways do these modes of doing anthropology recapitulate or address some of the earlier debates on race, indigeneity, materiality and alterity? How might recent work in the field generate new ways to remake the world and our understanding of it? The class will combine key theoretical texts in cultural ecology, political ecology and science and technology studies together with ethnographies of natureculture to investigate how earth water, earth, air and fire are being remade in the current moment. It borrows from and builds on the "Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology" by Guarasci, Moore and Vaughn (2018) to rethink and reconstitute what counts as the canon of the field by attending to the contributions of women, people of color, scholars working outside of the United States, and indigenous authors. By examining theentanglements of nature, culture and political economy in the contemporary moment, the course will enable students to situate and construct their dissertation research projects with what is a prolific and compelling literature to imagine and understand our climate changed world.

The Advanced Regulatory Law and Policy seminar is for 3L students who have completed the Regulatory Law and Policy seminar and have been selected to serve on The Regulatory Review's editorial board. This seminar provides a unique educational opportunity for anyone interested in contemporary developments in regulatory law and policy across a variety of issue areas. Throughout the term, seminar participants follow regulatory developments in real time as well as encounter some of the most up-to-date research on regulatory issues. The primary work of the seminar centers around the production of The Regulatory Review, a daily online source of writing about regulatory news, analysis, and opinion. The format of weekly seminars varies, ranging from early lectures on the regulatory process to in-depth discussions of contemporary regulatory issues, and from critique of peer writing samples to analysis of current research articles.

The purpose of this course is to explore the political dynamics that shape the debate, enactment, and implementation of policies to address climate change. By reading the latest research on the political determinants of climate policy, the course will help students develop a nuanced understanding of the ideas, institutions, and behaviors that structure the climate policy process. We will focus primarily on climate policy and politics in the United States, while occasionally incorporating comparative perspectives to provide insight into the US case. Throughout the course, we will discuss why climate policies are designed in particular ways; when and why policies pass or fail to pass; how various institutional, organizational, and public interests influence the climate policy process; and what questions remain unanswered about how to address the problem of climate change.

Air transportation is a fascinating multi-disciplinary area of transportation bringing together business, planning, engineering, and policy. In this course, we explore the air transportation system from multiple perspectives through a series of lessons and case studies. Topics will include airport and intercity multi-modal environmental planning, network design and reliability, air traffic management and recovery from irregular operations, airline operations, economics, and fuel, air transportation sustainability, and land use issues related to air transportation systems. This course will introduce concepts in economics and behavioral modeling, operations research, statistics, environmental planning, and human factors that are used in aviation and are applicable to other transportation systems. The course will emphasize learning through lessons, guest lecturers, case studies of airport development, and an individual group and research project.

This new course will explore multiple dimensions of Africa’s environmental history, drawing upon literature in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. It is one component of a pilot project supported by Penn Global and directed by the instructor on ‘Local Histories of Climate Change in the Horn of Africa”, though we will cover topics and case studies from the entire continent. The course takes an historical perspective on environmental change in Africa, with an eye to engaging current debates on climate change and its impact on contemporary urban and rural communities. Students will read and discuss key works on the African environment, conduct their own literature reviews on selected topics, and prepare case studies of communities which have been impacted by severe climate events in the past half-century. The format combines lectures and seminar-style discussions, and we will draw upon the expertise of guest lecturers in a variety of disciplines which have contributed to the study of environmental change.

This course examines how agricultural science has shaped the modern world. It focuses on the lands touching the Pacific Ocean during the industrial era--from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century--to highlight how scientific knowledge of the natural world and regimes of agricultural production interacted to change spatial relations of power between distant places. We will explore the history of botany, chemistry, and entomology in the context of European and Euro-American exploration incursions into the Pacific. We will also explore the history of once-exotic but now commonplace things that sustain our existence, from sugar, rice, and palm oil to guano. In short, this course examines how ideas about nature, methods of converting nature into commodities, and nature itself all influence each other. Students will work throughout the semester to gain knowledge about the intersection of agriculture, science, and empire in the Pacific, while also developing and strengthening their ability to conduct historical research and produce original arguments.

Food production, essential to life, is also today a major contributor to climate change. In this course, we examine farming and food through the rubric of agroecology, an approach that integrates biological, cultural, and historical factors to develop understandings of farming and food history as well as agriculture's multiple contemporary forms, industrial and non-industrial. We will cover basic aspects of crop evolution and growth, soil, water, and nutrients, with a special focus on the historical global diversity of farming systems, especially in terms of potential alternatives to industrial agriculture. This review forms the foundation for a broader consideration of the impacts of food systems on the planet, and ways to address challenges of climate change, food security, and food sovereignty. Graduate students will prepare a research paper.

This is an ABCS course designed to provide the student with an understanding of air pollution at the local, regional and global levels. The nature, composition, and properties of air pollutants in the atmosphere will also be studied. The course will focus on Philadelphia's air quality and how air pollutants have an adverse effect on the health of the residents. The recent designation by IARC of Air Pollution as a known carcinogen will be explored. How the community is exposed to air pollutants with consideration of vulnerable populations will be considered. Through a partnership with Philadelphia Air Management Service (AMS) agency the science of air monitoring and trends over time will be explored. Philadelphia's current non-attainment status for PM2.5. and ozone will be studied. Philadelphia's current initiatives to improvethe air quality of the city will be discussed. Students will learn to measure PM2.5 in outdoor and indoor settings and develop community-based outreach tools to effectively inform the community of Philadelphia regarding air pollution. The outreach tools developed by students may be presentations, written materials, apps, websites or other strategies for enhancing environmental health literacy of the community. A project based approach will be used to include student monitoring of area schools, school bus routes, and the community at large. The data collected will be presented to students in the partner elementary school in West Philadelphia . Upon completion of this course, students should expect to have attained a broad understanding of and familiarity with the sources, fate, and the environmental impacts and health effects of air pollutants.

This elective course provides an overview of : (i) management and operational basics of food animal production systems (dairy, beef, swine, poultry, and aquaculture), (ii) contemporary issues concerning current practice and sustainable future of animal production systems, e.g., food safety & biosecurity, antibiotics & antimicrobial resistance, nutrient management & environmental regulations, and animal welfare & public concerns. Students will work in teams on debates from pre-arranged topics, and will complete periodic assignments.

This course is a foundational course for students enrolling in the Animal Welfare Certificate Program. This course covers the basic principles, history, and application of animal welfare science. Over a series of video modules, online discussions, assignments, and quizzes, this course will teach students to assess the welfare of animals in a variety of settings using science-based methods and reasoning. Students will learn current welfare issues by species. This class will engage in activities that build the skills to find and assess scientific sources of information. Finally, the link between science and ethics will be explored such that students understand various ethical frameworks and how they relate to animal welfare. The objective of the course is to provide students with the background and tools to apply animal welfare science in order to facilitate students' ability to successfully engage in welfare deliberations and welfare science in a variety of fields.

This course is a foundational course for students enrolling in the Animal Welfare Certificate Program. It will describe the changing roles and status of animals in society, and examine the history of human-animal relationships through the lens of subsistence hunting, animal domestication, farming and pastoralism, animal research, and pet keeping. The historical development of ambivalent/oppositional attitudes to animal exploitation will also be described and discussed, and the remarkable diversity of contemporary human-animal relationships and their impacts on animal welfare will be explored across cultures and contexts. The influence of science, government, business, and non-governmental organizations in defining and influencing animal-related laws and policies will also be addressed.

This course looks at animals in the American past, to find out what a focus on an individual animal, a species, or a kind of animal (such as work animals, food animals, wildlife, zoo animals, pets and pests) can reveal by exposing the inner workings of different periods and events. When we make animals the focus of how we look at the past, things change. Making animals visible makes other things visible; hidden, surprising or even shocking aspects of the past appear. Americans have always lived with and employed animals. They also have “thought with” animals, using animals to work out their understandings of society, nature and power. How Americans perceived, named, classified, behaved toward and worked with animals bares the workings of race, class and gender, uncovers power structures, and reveals environmental and legal choices. If we want to understand how the current world came to be, taking a critter approach to history provides a way to explain how we got to now. Changing our view of the past can change our ideas of what the present can be. Though animals are everywhere in the past, they are often hidden from view. We will embark on a hunt for animals, foraging through historical writing, political documents, literature, and primary sources. We will watch movies, examine photographs and study cartoons. We will draw on knowledge from the fields of science, technology, health and environments, and employ the classifications of race, class, gender, nature and culture. We’ll talk about evolution, domestication and wildlife. We will look at zoomorphism, when people or things are labeled as animals (calling people pigs or snakes, or talking about bull or bear stock markets), and anthropomorphism, when animals are thought of or portrayed as people. In this seminar, we’ll begin with case studies from the nineteenth century, then start seeking the animals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Writing, much of it informal, will be a regular part of this course, as will research exercises. There will be different options for writing and for research projects. Course materials will focus on American history and society but projects and exercises may look at places and times from around the globe and across the centuries.

This course targets undergraduate students, such as Juniors and Seniors. Just about every student at UPenn and in particular in engineering is using progressively larger datasets to ask scientific questions. This course will break down how we use data and modeling to ask scientific questions and teach the basic toolkits to do so. The goal of this course is to allow any student who needs to use data to ask questions to see which computational tools they need to use and to use existing tools to ask those questions. All teaching will be small group and team based. The course will use a broad set of data representative of the school. The course is open to upper level undergraduate students who have some knowledge of Python.

In this class we will explore the narrative mode of the apocalypse in the context of the geologic designation of the Anthropocene.

This course aims to provide students with practical skills helpful in the study of animal welfare and in the future offer a bridge to our proposed master's program. Students will be exposed to critical reading of the scientific literature, development and testing of hypothesis as well as examining experimental paradigms used commonly to probe animal welfare and behavior. The goal of the course is for each student to conceive, develop, write, and present a research proposal on a question of interest in animal welfare that could provide the foundation for a future capstone project. Student assignments will include selected readings, synchronous and asynchronous online discussion of relevant course materials, and an oral presentation and written description of their research proposal.

This course is designed to provide the graduate student with an understanding of the fundamentals of aqueous geochemistry.The chemistry of water,air and soil will be studied from an environmental perspective.The nature, composition, structure, and properties of pollutants coupled with the major chemical mechanisms controlling the occurrence and mobility of chemicals in the environment will also be studied.Upon completion of this course, students should expect to have attained a broad understanding of and familiarity with aqueous geochemistry concepts applicable to the environmental field. Environmental issues that will becovered include acid deposition, toxic metal contamination, deforestation,and anthropogenic perturbed aspects of the earth's hydrosphere.

Traditionally, archaeological research has focused on the "site" or "sites." Regional investigation tends to stress settlement pattern and settlement system determined through archaeological site survey. This seminar will stress the space between the sites or "points" on the landscape. Most previous attempts at "landscape archaeology" tended to focus on the relationship of sites and the natural environment. This course will highlight the cultural, "anthropogenic," or "built environment"--in this case human modification and transformation of the natural landscape in the form of pathways, roads, causeways, monuments, walls, agricultural fields and their boundaries, gardens, astronomical and calendrical alignments, and water distribution networks. Features will be examined in terms of the "social logic" or formal patterning of cultural space. These can provide insights into indigenous structures such as measurement systems, land tenure, social organization, engineering, cosmology, calendars, astronomy, cognition, and ritual practices. Landscapes are also the medium for understanding everyday life, experience, movement, memory, identity, time, and historical ecology. Ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological case studies will be investigated from both the Old and New Worlds.

This course will use architecture and the built environmental as a lens to investigate the emerging field of the environmental humanities. Our goal will be to analyze and understand these new intellectual frameworks in order to consider the relationship between global environmental challenges and the process of constructing the built environment. As such, we will oscillate between social and political theory, environmental history, and architectural history and theory. Issues of importance will include: theories of risk, the role of nature in political conflicts; images, design and environmental communication; and the relationship between speculative design and other narratives of the future. These conceptual frameworks will be read alongside examples of related creative projects in art, literature, and architecture, and will be amplified through presentations and discussions with studio faculty and other visitors to the course.

An introduction to the chemistry of the earth's atmosphere. Covers evolution of the earth's atmosphere, its physical and chemical structure, its natural chemical composition and oxidative properties, and human impacts, including photochemistry, and aerosols; stratospheric ozone loss, tropospheric pollution; climate change, and acidic deposition. Chemistry in the atmosphere of other planets in our solar system will be covered.