Environmental and Sustainability Science

Emily Stutzman, Assistant Professor

Located within the Department of Social Work and Sociology, the mission of Environmental and Sustainability Science is to develop and advance sustainability science through education, research, professional training, and service to the community. The founding principles of sustainable practice can translate to all professions, cultures, organizations, economic markets and natural environments. Sustainability refers to a holistic approach to solving complex problems that accounts for social, environmental, and economic concerns and takes a long-term view.

Environmental and Sustainability Science Major (ESS)

The Environmental and Sustainability Science (ESS) major has a 52-55 hours total, depending on the emphasis selected. ESS is broken down into a 40-hour core of required courses. Students select one of the two emphases: Social science, Communication, and Policy, (12 hours) or Biology (12-14 hours). Students completing the biology emphasis will have an earned biology minor.

By the very nature of our trans-disciplinary field, we expect our students to include a diverse range of interests. Our curriculum has been deliberately designed to give each student a strong core knowledge base as well as pursue a student’s area of interest in order to build a rigorous but personalized course of study.

One of the defining characteristics of our program is the requirement that all students perform and publicly present the results of their applied independent study at a departmental seminar or Lipscomb University’s Student Scholars Symposium in the spring. Independent research may take the form of hypothesis-driven ecologically-based scientific research, research question-driven projects using existing data, development of a solution to a specific problem in an applied field, or a business plan.