The Environmental Policy Major: Rising to the Moment

The Environmental Policy Major has long attracted students with serious interdisciplinary interests in the environment, sustainability, and politics — and that has never been more true than today. Rooted in the Department of Political Science, the major prepares students to grapple with two interconnected sets of questions: What drives environmental problems like climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss? And — the harder, more political question – how can policymakers, interest groups, and the public actually do something about them? Answering those questions requires fluency in both the natural science foundations of the environment and the political science of institutions, public opinion, electoral behavior, and interest groups.

The current political climate makes this work feel more urgent than ever. Students in the major are engaging environmental policy at a moment of genuine turbulence — with federal investments in clean energy and climate innovation facing rollback, and skepticism about climate science emanating from the highest levels of government. If anything, that makes the rigorous, politically-grounded training our major provides all the more essential. 

We are also actively expanding what the major can offer: new environmental politics faculty — Shiran Victoria Shen and Juan Dodyk — are teaching courses that broaden and deepen the major's political science core, and long-serving faculty have developed new and revised courses as well. We are currently developing a minor in Environmental Policy to extend this training to a wider range of students, and we are launching alumni programming this year to connect our current students with graduates who have successfully built careers across the environmental policy world.

There has never been a more important time to study these issues — and our students are more than up to the challenge.

Dino P. Christenson
Professor of Political Science
Director of the Environmental Policy Major