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The New College Environmental Studies Program (ESP) was founded in 1972. Since that time, over 150 of students have graduated with environmental degrees, and many more have benefited from the environmental studies classes and projects. Today, the ESP supports a variety of student and community environmental projects, all of them stressing hands-on, interdisciplinary and regional work.
Our mission is to produce environmentally-focused students who have considered environmental topics from the vantage point of multiple disciplines, and, to serve the campus and local community with insight and expertise on environment matters. Our offices and classrooms are located in the Caples Carriage House.
About the Program
An interdisciplinary program, Environmental Studies draws students from varied backgrounds. Ideally students bring skills from several disciplines to bear on questions regarding the relationship between people and the environment. Complementing the disciplinary knowledge students bring with them, environmentally-related courses are offered in five broad areas: principles of ecology and field biology; human perception of and attitudes toward the environment; environmental policy and management; sense of place in relation to the natural and built environment; and environmental aesthetics, philosophy and ethics.
 There has always been a risk in liberal arts education that knowledge will become detached from practice, that students will become intellectual jugglers of arcana, unable to affect the world. Recently undergraduate education has been criticized for disconnecting academic ideas and scholarship from social and environmental settings. The ESP seeks to ground its students in two ways – first, by emphasizing demonstrated competence in real-world skills and second, by attempting to connect students with a landscape or community.
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