Master of Environmental Management

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The M.E.M. (Master of Environmental Management) is a degree designed for students with primary interests in careers in environmental policy and analysis, stewardship, education, consulting, or management dealing with natural resource or environmental issues. The program requires course work in both the natural and social sciences, with a particular focus on the relationship among science, management, and policy. The ultimate purpose of the degree program is to prepare students to address ecological and social systems with scientific understanding and an ability to make sense of the complex underlying social and ecological context.

The value of an interdisciplinary environmental degree is best espoused by Aldo Leopold, who obtained a Master of Forestry degree.

"One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land is an understanding of ecology, and this is by no means co-extensive with 'education'; in fact, much higher education seems deliberately to avoid ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics. This is as it should be...". [1]

The "Big Four" Master of Environmental Management programs are:

Other programs include:

Many of these schools also offer joint degrees, where the MEM is paired with an MBA, MPP, JD, or M.Div.

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Aldo Leopold

Aldo Leopold was an American author, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has sold more than two million copies.

University of Akureyri

The University of Akureyri was founded in 1987 in the town of Akureyri in the northeastern part of Iceland. It is today a school of health sciences, humanities and social science, and a school of business and science. Over 2000 students attended the university in the autumn semester of 2014, around half of them through distance education, making the university the largest provider of distance education in the country. The University of Akureyri coordinates with other Icelandic Universities to operate the University Centre of the Westfjords located in Ísafjörður, which operates two master's degrees, one in Coastal and Marine Management and the other in Marine Innovation. Additionally, The University of Akureyri coordinates with other Nordic Universities for the West Nordic Studies and Polar Law Masters programs.

Environmental studies

Environmental studies, a term first coined by George Perkins Marsh in his book Man and Nature, is a multidisciplinary academic field which systematically studies human interaction with the environment. Environmental studies connects principles from the physical sciences, commerce/economics, the humanities, and social sciences to address complex contemporary environmental issues. It is a broad field of study that includes the natural environment, the built environment, and the relationship between them. The field encompasses study in basic principles of ecology and environmental science, as well as associated subjects such as ethics, geography, anthropology, policy, politics, urban planning, law, economics, philosophy, sociology and social justice, planning, pollution control and natural resource management. There are many Environmental Studies degree programs, including a Master's degree and a Bachelor's degree. Environmental Studies degree programs provide a wide range of skills and analytical tools needed to face the environmental issues of our world head on. Students in Environmental Studies gain the intellectual and methodological tools to understand and address the crucial environmental issues of our time and the impact of individuals, society, and the planet.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to environmental studies:

Khulna University

Khulna University is a public university in Bangladesh. It is situated at Gollamari, Khulna, Bangladesh, by the river Moyur, beside the Khulna-Satkhira highway. The academic programs of Khulna University started on 31 August 1991 with 80 students in four disciplines. As of November 2019, the university has 29 disciplines under six schools and two institutes. It is the only public university in Bangladesh where student politics is not allowed.

Yale School of the Environment

Yale School of the Environment (YSE) is a professional school of Yale University. It was founded to train foresters, and now trains environmental leaders through four 2-year degree programs and two 10-month mid-career programs. YSE strives to create new knowledge that will sustain and restore the health of the biosphere and emphasizes the possibility of creating a regenerative coexistence between humans and non-human life and the rest of the natural world. Still offering forestry instruction, the school has the oldest graduate forestry program in the United States.

The University of Forestry and Environmental Science (Yezin), in Yezin near Nay Pyi Taw, is the only university specialized in forestry and environmental science in Myanmar. Founded in 1923 as the Forestry Department of Yangon University, in 1992, the University of Forestry and Environmental Science became a separate entity based in Yezin, Nay Pyi Taw. It mainly offers a five-year Bachelor of Science degree program in forestry and environmental science as well as two-year master's and three-year doctoral programs. The university is administered by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation. Undergraduate students are required to take part in a field training program each winter from third year. Graduates of the university typically become forestry officers at the Forestry Department, the Dry Zone Greening Department, the Environmental Conservation Department or the Myanmar Timber Enterprise. Others find employment in non-governmental conservation organizations such as FREDA, UNDP, UNEP, FAO, JICA, WCS, WWF, FFI as well as other local and international research institutions and conservation organizations.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology; and Director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF).

University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability

The School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) is an interdisciplinary professional school focused on environmental science and environmental policy located in the S.T. Dana Building at University of Michigan.

The Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy is a joint initiative between the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Yale Law School.

School of Social Ecology

The School of Social Ecology (SSE) is a school of the University of California, Irvine (UCI) that studies social ecology. As of 2015, the School enrolls nearly 3,000 students and is the third largest school at UCI by student population. Students in the social ecology program at UCI undergo a multidisciplinary program that examines real-world social and environmental issues and that involves the students in off-campus internships as well as on-campus courses. SSE offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, including bachelor's, professional master's, and Ph.D.s.

The Master of Resource Management (MRM) degree is a graduate degree program in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. and the university centre of the Westfjords, Iceland. This program is designed for both recent graduates and individuals with experience in the private or public sector in dealing with natural resources and the environment. The program seeks students from a range of disciplines including biology, engineering, chemistry, forestry, geology, business, economics, geography, planning and social sciences. The program is recognized as an accredited sustainable planning program by the Canadian Institute of Planners and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

The College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech contains academic programs in forestry, fisheries, wildlife sciences, geography, and wood science. The college contains four departments as well as a graduate program in the National Capital Region and a leadership institute for undergraduates.

North American collegiate sustainability programs are institutions of higher education in the United States, Mexico, and Canada that have majors and/or minors dedicated to the subject of sustainability. Sustainability as a major and minor is spreading to more and more colleges as the need for humanity to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle becomes increasingly apparent with the onset of global warming. The majors and minors listed here cover a wide array of sustainability aspects from business to construction to agriculture to simply the study of sustainability itself.

Social ecology studies relationships between people and their environment, often the interdependence of people, collectives and institutions. Evolving out of biological ecology, human ecology, systems theory and ecological psychology, social ecology takes a “broad, interdisciplinary perspective that gives greater attention to the social, psychological, institutional, and cultural contexts of people-environment relations than did earlier versions of human ecology.” The concept has been employed to study a diverse array of social problems and policies within the behavioural and social sciences.

The Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) is a university outside Lilongwe, Malawi. It was formed in 2011 by a merger between Bunda College of Agriculture of the University of Malawi and Natural Resources College (NRC).

Paige Fischer is an environmental scientist from the Pacific Northwest whose research focuses mainly on the human dimensions of environmental changes. She is especially interested in forest ecology and conservation. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability, teaching upper level classes about analysis methods and social vulnerability to climate change.

References

  1. Leopold, Aldo (1949). A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, Inc.