Marine Science Building 205E, 205F
1000 Pope Road
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808) 956-2913
Fax: (808) 956-9225
Email: ges@soest.hawaii.edu
Web: oceanography/GES/

Faculty

M. Guidry, PhD (Undergraduate Chair)—biogeochemical modeling, mineral precipitation/dissolution kinetics, K-12/university curriculum development
R. Alegado, PhD—marine microbial ecology, influence of bacteria on animal evolution, Hawaiian fishponds
H. Annamalai, PhD—diagnostic and modeling aspects of the Asian Summer Monsoon system, prediction and predictability of the Asian Summer Monsoon system, dynamical and physical link between Monsoon-ENSO
J. M. Becker, PhD—geophysical fluid dynamics, nonlinear waves and stability, coastal processes, general ocean circulation
D. Beilman, PhD—long-term terrestrial ecology, paleoscience approaches to global change science, carbon cycling
R. R. Bidigare, PhD—bio-optical oceanography, pigment bio-chemistry, plankton metabolism
S. Businger, PhD—evolution and structure of destructive atmospheric storms including: frontal cyclones, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorm
B. C. Bruno, PhD—planetary geosciences, geoscience education
G. S. Carter, PhD—physical oceanography, ocean mixing, tides, internal waves, underwater ocean gliders
Q. Chen—environmental changes and use of multiple tools to address these issues
A. D. Clarke—physical and chemical properties of aerosol in remote troposphere, aircraft studies of aerosol in free troposphere
M. J. Cooney, PhD—high rate anaerobic digestion, bio-oil extraction from biomass, and the analytical characterization of chemical microenvironments surrounding immobilized enzymes
E. H. De Carlo, PhD—aquatic chemistry, metals and their anthropogenic inputs, transformations, fate and transport, sedimentary geochemistry, marine minerals
J. L. Deenik, PhD—soil fertility and soil quality, nitrogen and carbon cycling in agroecosystems, traditional agroecosystems, biochar and sustainable agriculture
E. F. DeLong, PhD—application of contemporary genomic technologies to understand the ecology, evolution and biochemistry of complete microbial assemblages
S. Dollar, PhD—biogeochemistry, nearshore processes and effects of human activity on the coastal zone
J. C. Drazen, PhD—physiological ecology of marine fishes, energetics and tropodynamics, deep-sea biology, adaptions of fishes to the deep-sea
K. Edwards—phytoplankton ecology, community ecology, ecological theory and statistics, benthic communities
M. Edwards, PhD—marine geology and geophysics, remote sensing of the seafloor, Mid-Ocean Ridges, Artic Basin
A. El-Kadi, PhD—hydrogeology, modeling groundwater systems
R. C. Ertekin, PhD—hydrodynamics, computational methods, offshore and coastal engineering, oil-spill spreading, fishpond circulation, ocean renewable energy
E. Firing, PhD—ocean circulation and currents on all scales, with emphasis on observations and dynamics
P. J. Flament, PhD—dynamics of surface ocean layer, mesoscale structures, remote sensing
C. H. Fletcher, PhD—quaternary and coastal marine geology, sea-level history, coastal sedimentary processes
O. Francis—strom-generated ocean waves, meteorological and ocean processes on costal infrastructure, water, and wastewater systems affected by climate change and water shortage
K. Frank—identifying environmental drivers of microbial dynamics and to characterize the impact of the microorganisms on biogeochemical cycling in mineral-hosted ecosystems from mountain ridge to mid-ocean ridges
P. Fryer, PhD—marine geology, petrology, tectonics
E. Gaidos, PhD—molecular evolution; microbiology of extreme environments; biosphere-climate feedbacks; critical intervals in Earth history; exobiology; biological networks
M. O. Garcia, PhD—volcanology, igneous petrology, geochemistry
T. W. Giambelluca, PhD—interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface, including influences of land use and land cover change on climate and surface hydrology and effects of global climate change on hydrologic processes and terrestrial ecology
B. T. Glazer, PhD—biogeochemical processes in marine environments; use of molecular methods to characterize and understand synergy of geomicrobiology
C. R. Glenn, PhD—paleoceanography, marine geology, sedimentology, sediment diagenesis
E. Goetze, PhD—marine zooplankton ecology; dispersal and gene flow in marine plankton populations; evolution, behavioral ecology and systematics of marine calanoid copepods
E. G. Grau, PhD—environmental physiology and comparative endocrinology of fish
M. P. Hamnet, PhD—coastal zone management; fisheries economics; disaster preparedness and mitigation
D. T. Ho, PhD—air-water gas exchange, tracer oceanography, carbon cycle, and environmental geochemistry
S. Howell, PhD—environmental aerosol research, aerosol chemistry
A. Jani—ecology of infectious diseases
C. Karamperidou—ENSO dynamics and predictability, ENSO in past climate, response of mid-latitude atmospheric circulation to climate change and variability.
D. Karl—microbiological oceanography, oceanic productivity, biogeochemical fluxes
P. Kemp, PhD—growth, activity and diversity of marine microbes; biosensor applications in microbial oceanography; molecular ecology of marine bacteria
M. Kirs—environmental microbiology, Microbial source tracking, recreational water quality, quantitative PCR
D. E. Konan, PhD—international trade, microeconomics, computational economics
Y. H. Li—geochemical cycles from solar nebula to human brain
K. Lowry, PhD—design, planning and evaluation of ocean and coastal management programs; experience in Hawai‘i, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Thailand
R. Lukas—physical oceanography, interannual and decadal climate variability
D. Luther—tides, internal waves, abyssal mixing, energy flow, wave interaction at the coast, interactive ocean observation
F. T. Mackenzie—geochemistry, biogeochemical cycling, global environmental change.
S. J. Martel, PhD—engineering and structural geology
M. A. McManus, PhD—descriptive physical oceanography, coupled physical-biological numerical models; development of ocean observing systems
G. M. McMurtry, PhD—geochemistry, geology and geophysics
C. Measures, PhD—trace element geochemistry, elemental mass balances, hydrothermal systems
M. Merlin, PhD—biogeography, natural history of the Pacific
M. A. Merrifield, PhD—physical oceanography; coastal circulation; sea level variability; current flows and mixing in the vicinity of coral reefs, islands and seamounts
A. Misra—material science, remote sensing, remote Raman, micro Raman, High Tc_Superconductor, stress strain sensors
T. Miura, PhD—remote sensing of terrestrial vegetation, GIS
G. F. Moore, PhD—marine geophysics, structural geology
M. J. Mottl, PhD—hydrothermal processes, geochemical cycles
P. Mouginis-Mark, PhD—volcanology from space, remote sensing of natural hazards
P. K. Müller—ocean circulation, waves and turbulence
C. E. Nelson, PhD—structure and function of natural bacterial communities in aquatic habitats such as coral reefs lakes, streams, and open ocean
A. B. Neuheimer, PhD—quantitative ecology of fish and aquatic invertebrate populations, with applications to evolutionary biology, physiology, ecosystem dynamics, resource management, and climate issues
A. Nugent—mountain meteorology and cloudy physics, orographic convection and precipitation, shallow cloud dynamics, cloud microphysics
B. N. Popp, PhD—isotope biogeochemistry, organic geochemistry
J. N. Porter, PhD—atmospheric science, use of satellites to study aerosol and cloud forcing, ship measurements of aerosol and cloud optical properties
J. Potemra, PhD—general ocean circulation and its relationship to climate; oceanic processes in the western equatorial Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean and their connection
B. S. Powell, PhD—numerical modeling, variational data assimilation, ocean predictability, ocean circulation, and ecosystem dynamics
B. Qiu—large-scale ocean circulation, ocean atmosphere internation, satellite observations, and numerical modeling of ocean circulation
M. S. Rappe, PhD—ecology of marine microorganisms; genomics; coral-associated microorganisms; ecology of microorganisms in the deep subsurface
G. Ravizza, PhD—paleoceanography and environmental chemistry; geologic history of chemical weathering; geochemistry of recent and ancient metalliferous sediments; anthropogenic influences on the geochemical cycles of the platinum group elements; chemical signatures of extraterrestrial matter in marine sediments; biogeochemistry of molybdenum in the marine environment
K. J. Richards, PhD—observation and modeling of ocean processes, ocean dynamics, ocean-atmosphere interaction, ecosystem dynamics
M. A. Ridgley, PhD—resource management and human-environment system analysis
J. Roumasset, PhD—environmental economics and sustainable growth
K. Rubin, PhD—isotope geochemistry, chronology
K. Ruttenberg, PhD—biogeochemistry of phosphorus and phosphorus cycling in the ocean, rivers, and lakes; nutrient limitation of aquatic primary productivity; effects of redox chemistry on nutrient cycling; early diagenesis in marine sediments with focus on authigenic mineral formation and organic matter mineralization
C. L. Sabine, PhD—global carbon cycle, ocean inorganic carbon, ocean acidification, carbonate biogeochemistry, air-sea gas exchange, multitracer relationships, sensor and ocean platform development
F. J. Sansone, PhD—trace-gas geochemistry, hydrothermal geochemistry, suboxic/anoxic diagenesis in sediments, lava-seawater interaction
N. Schneider, PhD—decadal climate variability, tropical air-sea interaction, coupled modeling
J. Schoonmaker—sedimentary geochemistry and diagenesis; paleoenvironment and paleoclimate sedimentary records
K. Selph—biological oceanography, microbial ecology, protistan grazer feeding dynamics, phytoplankton distributions, use of flow cytometry in ecological research
S. K. Sharma, PhD—atmospheric instrumentation and remote sensing; Lidar, Raman, and infrared spectrometry and fiber-optic environmental sensors
C. R. Smith, PhD—benthic and ecology, deep-sea biology, sediment geochemistry, climate-change effects on Antarctic ecosystems, marine conservation
G. F. Steward, PhD—aquatic microbial ecology, molecular ecology and diversity of viruses and bacteria
B. Taylor—plate tectonics, geology of ocean margin basins
R. Toonen—dispersal and recruitment of invertebrate larvae, population genetics, evolution and ecology of marine invertebrates
B. Wang, PhD—atmospheric and climate dynamics
R. Wright, PhD—hyperspectral imaging instrument development, remote sensing, infrared radiometry, volcanology
R. E. Zeebe, PhD—global biogeochemical cycles, carbon dioxide system in seawater and interrelations with marine plankton, paleoceanography, stable isotope geochemistry

Degree Offered: BS in global environmental science

The Academic Program

Global environmental science is a holistic, scientific approach to the study of the Earth system and its physical, chemical, biological, and human processes. This academic program is designed to educate leaders and citizenry to become wise stewards of our planet. Global environmental science focuses on the global reservoirs of hydrosphere (water, primarily oceans), biosphere (life and organic matter), atmosphere (air), lithosphere (land, sediments, and rocks), and cryosphere (ice); their interfaces; and the processes acting upon and within this interactive system, including human activities. In the course of their scientific studies, global environmental science students are able to investigate natural as well as economic, policy, and social systems and their response and interaction with the Earth system. Global environmental science has important ties to the more classical sciences of geology and geophysics, meteorology and climatology, oceanography, and ecology as well as to the social sciences. Thus, the scope of global environmental science is extremely broad. This breadth is reflected in the interdisciplinary nature of the faculty, which is primarily drawn from numerous departments and research institutions within the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology.

Global environmental science has much to offer the student who is interested in the environment and the effect of humans on the environment. The skills developed in global environmental science can be brought to bear on local, regional, and global environmental issues. Many of the critical environmental problems confronting humankind involve large-scale processes and interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, cryosphere, shallow lithosphere, and people. Some of the problems derive from natural causes; others are a result of human activities. Some of the issues that global environmental science students deal with are: climatic changes from anthropogenic inputs to the atmosphere of CO2 and other greenhouse gases; human interventions and disruptions in the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, trace metals, and other substances; emissions of nitrogen and sulfur oxide gases and volatile organic compounds to the atmosphere and the issues of acid deposition and photochemical smog; depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer and associated increase in the flux of ultraviolet radiation to Earth’s surface; increasing rates of tropical deforestation and other large-scale destruction of habitat, with potential effects on climate and the hydrologic cycle; disappearance of biotic diversity through explosive rates of species extinction; global consequences of the distribution and application of potentially toxic chemicals in the environment and biotechnology; interannual and interdecadal climate variability, e.g., El Niño/Southern Oscillation; eutrophication; water and air quality; exploitation of natural resources with consequent problems of waste disposal; earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural hazards and prediction; and waste disposal: municipal, toxic chemical, and radioactive. In all cases, the student is encouraged to understand and appreciate the social, economic, and ultimately the policy decisions associated with these and other environmental issues.

Specifically with respect to learning objectives, the students develop competency in understanding how the physical, biological, and chemical worlds are interconnected in the Earth system. They obtain skills in basic mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology that enable them to deal with courses in the derivative geological, oceanographic, and atmospheric sciences at a level higher than that of qualitative description. In turn, these skills enable the students to learn the subject matter of global environmental science within a rigorous context. The students develop an awareness of the complexity of the Earth system and how it has changed during geologic time and how human activities have modified the system and led to a number of local, regional, and global environmental issues. They become competent in using computers and dealing with environmental databases and with more standard sources of information in the field. They are exposed to experimental, observational, and theoretical methodologies of research and complete an environmentally focused senior research thesis in environmental study using one or more of these methodologies. Project field work is encouraged for the senior thesis and, depending on the topic chosen by the student, can be carried out at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology’s Coconut Island facility, E. W. Pauley Laboratory, associated He‘eia ahupua‘a, Ka Papa Lo‘i O Kanewai, or elsewhere.

The ultimate objective of the global environmental science program is to produce a student informed in the environmental sciences at a rigorous level who is able to go on to graduate or professional school; enter the work force in environmental science positions in industry, business, or government; enter or return to teaching with knowledge of how the Earth system works; or enter the work force in another field as an educated person with the knowledge required to become a wise environmental steward of the planet.

Advising

Students contemplating a major in global environmental science should visit the program coordinator at the earliest opportunity. Inquire at the global environmental science office, Marine Science Building 205; tel. (808) 956-2913, fax (808) 956-9225; email: ges@soest.hawaii.edu.

BS in Global Environmental Science

University Core and Graduation Requirements

Of the 31 credits of General Education Core Requirements, 10 are in math and science and are fulfilled through the GES degree. Graduation Requirements include 8 Focus courses, 7 of which can currently be taken through the GES program requirements [Contemporary Ethical Issues (OCN 310), Oral Communications (OCN 490), and 5 Writing Intensive courses (BIOL 171L, OCN 310, 320, 401, and 499)].

Global Environmental Science Requirements

Aside from General Education Core and Graduation requirements, the global environmental science program has core requirements of two basic types: basic sciences and derivative sciences. The former provides the foundation to understand and appreciate the latter in the context of basic skills and mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics. Both global environmental science core requirements provide the necessary cognitive skills to deal with the higher academic level courses within the global environmental science curriculum. These include 7 required foundation courses in global environmental science and a minimum of 4 coupled systems courses. It is within this latter category of course work that the formal course program will be tailored to the individual student’s needs. For example, we anticipate that most students will follow closely a natural science track of study, perhaps concentrating on the terrestrial, marine, or atmospheric environment. However, because of the human dimensions issues involved in the subject matter of environmental change, some students may wish to expand their academic program into the social sciences that bear on the issues of global change.

A minimum grade of C must be obtained in all GES required courses.

Core Basic Sciences Requirement (38 credits)

  • BIOL 171/171L, 172/172L
  • CHEM 161/161L, 162/162L
  • MATH 241, 242
  • MATH 243, 244 or OCN/GG/ERTH 312, ECON 321
  • PHYS 170/170L, 272/272L

Core Derivative Sciences Requirement (11 credits)

  • GG/ERTH 101/101L or GG/ERTH 170
  • ATMO 200
  • OCN 201/201L

Foundation Course Requirements (18 credits)

  • GES/OCN 100 Global Environmental Science Seminar
  • GES/OCN 102 Introduction to Environmental Science and Sustainability
  • GES/OCN 310/310L Global Environmental Change/Lab
  • GES/OCN 320 Aquatic Pollution
  • GES/OCN 401 Biogeochemical Systems
  • GES/OCN 463 Earth System Science Databases

Coupled Systems Courses (4 minimum–Examples)

  • ANTH 328 Food Origins, Food Culture
  • ANTH 415 Ecological Anthropology
  • ANTH 459 Extinctions
  • ANTH 482 Anthropology and the Environment: Culture, Power, and Politics
  • ASTR 210 Foundations of Astronomy
  • ATMO 302 Atmospheric Physics
  • ATMO 303 Introduction to Atmospheric Dynamics
  • BIOC 241 Fundamentals of Biochemistry
  • BIOL 265 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
  • BIOL 301 Marine Ecology and Evolution
  • BIOL 310 Environmental Issues
  • BIOL 340/CMB 351 Genetics, Evolutions and Society
  • BIOL 360 Island Ecosystems
  • BIOL 404 Advanced Topics in Marine Biology
  • BIOL 410/GEOG 410 Human Role in Environmental Change
  • BOT 350 Resource Management & Conservation in Hawai‘i
  • BOT 480 Algal Diversity and Evolution
  • CHEM 272 Organic Chemistry I
  • CHEM 273 Organic Chemistry II
  • CHEM 445 Synthesis & Analysis of Organic Compounds
  • CMB 351/BIOL 340 Genetics, Evolutions and Society
  • ECON 321 Introduction to Statistics
  • ECON 358 Environmental Economics
  • ECON 458 Project Evaluation and Resource Management
  • ECON 638 Environmental Resource Economics
  • GEOG 300 Introduction to Climatology
  • GEOG 310 Introduction to Planning
  • GEOG/SUST 322 Globalization and Environment
  • GEOG/TIM 324 Geography of Global Tourism
  • GEOG/SUST 330 Culture and Environment
  • GEOG 388 Introduction to GIS
  • GEOG 401 Climate Change
  • GEOG 402 Agricultural Climatology
  • GEOG 404 Atmospheric Pollution
  • GEOG 405 Water in the Environment
  • GEOG 412 Environmental Impact Assessment
  • GEOG 413 Resource Management
  • GEOG 414 Environmental Hazards & Community Resilience
  • GEOG/TIM/SUST 415 Nature-Based Tourism Management
  • GG/ERTH 301 Mineralogy
  • GG/ERTH 309 Sedimentology and Stratigraphy
  • GG/ERTH 325 Geochemistry
  • GG/ERTH 413 Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis
  • GG/ERTH 420 Beaches, Reefs, and Climate Change
  • GG/ERTH 425 Environmental Geochemistry
  • GG/ERTH/OCN 444 Plate Tectonics
  • GG/ERTH 450 Geophysical Methods
  • GG/ERTH 455 Hydrogeology
  • GG/ERTH 466 Planetary Geology
  • HWST 457 ‘Âina Mauliola: Hawaiian Ecosystems
  • HWST 458 Natural Resources Issues and Ethics
  • HWST 459 Strategies in Hawaiian Resource Use
  • HWST 460 Hui Konohiki Practicum
  • MICR 401 Marine Microbiology
  • MBBE 412 Environmental Biochemistry
  • NREM 301/301L Natural Resources Management/Lab
  • NREM 302 Natural Resource and Environmental Policy
  • NREM 304 Fundamentals of Soil Science
  • NREM 461 Soil and Water Conservation
  • OCN 318 Introduction to Environmental Monitoring Systems and Measurements
  • OCN/ORE 330 Mineral and Energy Resources of the Sea
  • OCN 321/PPC 340/SUST 323 Applied Principles of Environmental & Energy Policy
  • OCN 331 Living Resources of the Sea
  • OCN 340 Ecology of Infectious Diseases
  • OCN 403 Marine Functional Ecology and Biotechnology
  • OCN 418 Advanced Environmental Monitoring Systems
  • OCN 430 Introduction to Deep-Sea Biology
  • OCN 435 Climate Change and Urbanization
  • OCN/CEE/SUST 441 Principles of Sustainability Analysis
  • OCN/PLAN 442/TIM 462 Principles of Environmental Management Systems
  • OCN 457 Ridge to Reef: Coastal Ecosystem Ecology and Connectivity
  • OCN 480 Dynamics of Marine Ecosystems: BiologicalPhysical Interactions in the Oceans
  • OCN 481 Introduction to Ocean Ecosystem Modeling
  • OCN 620 Physical Oceanography
  • OCN 621 Biological Oceanography
  • OCN 622 Geological Oceanography
  • OCN 623 Chemical Oceanography
  • OCN 633 Biogeochemical Methods in Oceanography
  • OCN/GG/ERTH 638 Earth System Science and Global Change
  • PEPS 310/SUST 320 Environment and Agriculture
  • PEPS 451 Environmental Law
  • PH 201 Introduction to Public Health
  • PH 310 Introduction to Epidemiology
  • PH 340 Public Health and the Environment
  • PH 341 Public Health Biology and Pathophysiology
  • PHIL 316 Science, Technology, and Society
  • PLAN 310 Introduction to Planning
  • PLAN 414 Environmental Hazards and Community Resilience
  • POLS 315 Global Politics/International Relations
  • POLS 316 International Relations
  • POLS 380 Environmental Law and Politics
  • POLS/SUST 387 Politics of the Ocean
  • SOC/GHPS 412 Analysis in Population and Society
  • TIM 321 Sociocultural Issues in Tourism
  • TIM/GEOG 324 Geography of Global Tourism
  • TIM/GEOG 415 Nature-Based Tourism Management
  • TIM 420/SUST 421 Sustainable Tourism Policies and Practices
  • ZOOL 410 Corals and Coral Reefs
  • ZOOL 466 Fisheries Science

The student may also wish to take additional courses in fundamental physics, chemistry, biology, or mathematics.

In addition to students being able to choose their own coupled systems courses to customize their degree per their interests and goals, the global environmental science program also has four tracks (with defined coupled system courses) in the cross-disciplinary environmental science areas of (1) environmental planning, (2) environmental health, (3) sustainable tourism, (4) sustainability science, and (5) environmental anthropology. For each of these tracks, the collaborating department and their faculty have agreed to support the major required research thesis project so that global environmental science students are able to focus both their curricular and research experience in track’s subject material.

  1. Environmental Planning (cross-disciplinary with Department of Urban and Regional Planning): Global environmental problems like human-induced climate change challenge local strategies to manage natural resources, protect sensitive species’ habitats, and ensure the longterm health of ecosystems. With over fifty-percent of the world’s population now living in urban areas and consuming most of the earth’s resources, the way we plan, design, and regulate our cities exacerbates local conditions. At the same time, urban areas are also important locations for solutions. Environmental planners adopt solutions-oriented approaches to address environmental problems, such as supporting local food production, building disaster risk reduction, deploying clean sources of energy, conserving biodiversity and natural habitats, managing urban waste, adapting to sea-level rise, and preserving freshwater resources. Planning as a discipline has a long tradition in problem solving across different scales from neighborhoods to entire regions with extensive community involvement. Graduates will be uniquely positioned for careers as environmental planners, specialists, and consultants employed by government agencies or private firms required to review planning permits, develop master plans, prepare environmental impact studies, or develop mitigation strategies to minimize development impacts.
  2. Environmental Health Sciences (cross-disciplinary with Office of Public Health Studies): This track enables a student in the Global Environmental Sciences Program to concentrate his/her academic studies in areas of significant importance in the relationship between environmental issues and public health. The inter-relationship between the environment and its impact on human health is vast and constantly changing. Issues such as food security, emerging zoonotic diseases, water scarcity, air and water pollution, over population, waste disposal, pesticide use, depletion of resources on land and in the sea are just a few of the pressing environmental issues that affect the health and well-being of millions of people worldwide. In this track students will gain the basic scientific knowledge necessary to understand the underlying science of the environment while simultaneously being exposed to public health principles that are essential for establishing cause and effect relationships between environmental conditions and human health, as well as understanding the compromises that sometimes must be made to accommodate economic, health, and environmental preservation goals. Graduates of this track will be uniquely positioned for careers in the environmental health field ranging from laboratory workers to regulatory policy and enforcement officers with environmental agencies.
  3. Sustainable Tourism (cross-disciplinary with the School of Travel Industry Management): The relationship between tourism and the natural environment is intimate and complex. The desire for contact with nature drives enormous volumes of tourism, yielding not only tourist spending and associated jobs and tax revenues, but also pollution, waste, and overdevelopment resulting from the transportation of masses of people and the construction and operation of tourism-related facilities. Indeed, such pollution, waste, and overdevelopment diminish the quality of the very environments that impel nature-based tourism to begin with. In addition, issues such as food security, water scarcity, overpopulation, urban sprawl, pesticide use, global warming, rising sea levels, and depletion of resources on land and in the sea are just a few of the pressing environmental issues that affect the attractiveness, competitiveness, and sustainability of destinations throughout the world. Graduates will be uniquely positioned for careers as planners, specialists, and consultants employed by government agencies required to prepare environmental impact studies and/or tourism plans, consulting firms that prepare such studies and/or plans for government agencies, and nonprofit organizations that operate tourism “ecocertification” programs that provide tourism-related businesses with credentials of their “greenness.”
  4. Sustainability Science: In collaboration with Hawai‘i Natural Energy Institute, Sustainability Science probes interactions between global, social, and human systems, the complex mechanisms that lead to degradation of these systems, and concomitant risks to human well-being. As Sustainability Science has emerged in the 21st century as a new academic discipline, it brings together scholarship and practice, global and local perspectives, and disciplines across the natural and social sciences, engineering, and medicine– facilitating the design, implementation, and evaluation of practical interventions that promote sustainability in particular places and contexts. The GES graduate from the sustainability track is prepared for opportunities in all fields that would hire environmental scientists, and to be especially competitive for those opportunities that target the design, analysis, implementation, maintenance, and/or monitoring of processes or systems that target increased sustainability.
  5. Environmental Anthropology (cross-disciplinary with the Department of Anthropology): Environmental anthropology is distinct from approaches to the environment in other social sciences. While all the social sciences share a common commitment to understanding environmental problems and issues of sustainability as, in essence, social problems, amenable to the tools of the social sciences, anthropology brings a number of distinct emphases and approaches to the problem. Anthropologists have long been committed to understanding the environment from others’ points of view, engaging in the kinds of deeply committed, extended and engaged research that forms the basis of ethnographic inquiry. As a holistic science, anthropologists learn new languages, immerse themselves in other cultures, and strive to understand perceptions of the environment from wholly distinct ideological, linguistic, and cosmological perspectives. As part of their holistic approach, anthropologists have also developed models for understanding human interactions with the environment that draw on evolutionary ecology and ecosystem science, studying such things as energy and nutrient flows through systems that include humans as components of broader networks of interaction. Finally, anthropologists have worked to test the assumptions built in to various models of environmental behavior, empirically testing models from political economy or common property theory, but doing so in ways that dig deeper and overcome more social distance than can the survey-based methodologies of sociology or the econometric, sampling and statistical approaches used by social sciences focused on aggregate social action. This program builds on the Department of Anthropology’s focus on applied anthropology, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. The Environmental Anthropology track will challenge students to question their assumptions about the human relationship to the environment and the practice of environmental management. Students will be trained in methods and approaches that will allow them to understand the linkages between human cultural systems and the environment, and will be trained to contextualize human behavior within broader social, political and economic contexts. Coursework, mentoring, and independent research will address such issues as the social dimensions of sustainability, resiliency, and will emphasize anthropological approaches to environmental problems. GES EA track graduates will be prepared to undertake applied graduate studies and to work professionally in such fields as natural resource management, applied environmental archeology, or advocacy and policymaking for environmental sustainability.

4 + 1 MURP Pathway

In collaboration with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, the GES program offers a “4 + 1” BS+MURP pathway that helps students earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in just five years. The pathway allows GES students to double-count nine credits towards both GES and MURP degrees, including taking two 600-level courses in their senior year. Once in the MURP program, students take the remaining 27 credits necessary to complete the MURP degree.

Directed Reading

  • GES/OCN 399 Directed Reading

Course offering with an individual faculty member to do a one-on-one study on a topic of particular interest to you.

This could be used to explore a topic before deciding on a senior thesis, or because you are interested in an area in which there isn’t a formal course offering. It can be taken for CR/NC or for a grade and you can register for 1-3 credits. This is not considered a CS class.

Senior Research Thesis (5-8 hours)

  • GES/OCN 490 Communication of Research Results
  • GES/OCN 499 Undergraduate Thesis

Each student is required to complete a written senior thesis based on research conducted with one or more chosen advisors, and to make a public presentation of their research results.