We dig into the challenge of creating a sustainable and just future: study ways to care for each other and our planet, explore how we adapt, and examine how we define a sense of home and embody our place in the world. 

We do this by strengthening our relationships as collaborators, by deepening understanding of our shared environment, and by imagining climate action rooted in place. We each bring a different lens to this work, and our individual backgrounds and perspectives create individual responsibilities that we work on collectively. 

Environments and Change offers courses, organizes and facilitates formal events and trainings, informal gatherings, drop-in opportunities, and more.

The Learning Collaborative in Action

Coursework

In Water Resources in the Built Environment, taught by Professor of Hydrology Christina Cianfrani, students examine the questions: Where do we get clean water? Where does water go when it rains? This course explores these topics using a systems thinking approach to gain an understanding of how our water resources are tied to the surrounding ecosystem and human populations. Students work collaboratively on project and in-class activities throughout most of the semester. We use the Hampshire College campus as a living laboratory with occasional field trips.

Black Nature: Survey of Black and Brown Environmental Writing taught by Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & African American Literary Arts Nathan McClain, explores the ways that for centuries, our writing about the living world has been defined by Anglo-American perspectives, though Black and brown poets and writers have offered unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. In this course, students consider and examine the literature of nature from the lens of these poets and writers as well as explore their own unique relationships to the living, natural world through original poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and hybrid forms.

Projects

“Anyone Can Garden: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Gardening and Battling Climate Change”

Alexis Espinoza | Div I

As a Div I Student, Alexis engaged the campus community in addressing the program of climate change through gardening and food production. They led gardening workshops for community members of all skill levels. The aim was to build people's confidence in their ability to grow food and contribute positively to combatting the climate crisis. Learning to grow some of our own food, even at a small scale, can be a crucial first step.

Community

As part of the spring 2025 LC Symposium, Michelle Martinez, director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment at the University of Michigan, offered “Movements are Ecosystems: Grounding in the Moment,” a presentation and interactive workshop about how to navigate the current political moment and what we can learn from past movements. 

Amidst the turmoil of the slow walk to authoritarianism, activists and organizers are strategizing their next best move while responding to multiple urgent political and ecological crises. There are key lessons learned through the last 20 years of uprising from the Bush-era Anti-War Movement to Occupy Wall Street, and from the Climate Movement to Abolition, to more recent Movement for Black Lives, MeToo, and Palestinian Liberation actions. Our movements are ecosystems that support simultaneous complimentary, and at times contradictory, moments that reveal our collective power; and different theories of social change nourish the ecosystem and build resilience.