English
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
Human Ecology
Human Ecology is the study of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Students may complete an independent capstone project grounded in this discipline because we believe this area of study is a meaningful framework to explore the ways in which we as individuals and communities interact with and impact the natural world, and vice versa.
Maine Coast Semester Capstone in Human Ecology (½ credit)
Required (P/NP/Pass with Honors)
All students at Maine Coast Semester take a half-credit course, the Capstone in Human Ecology. This practical, inquiry-based course supports an individual project aligned with the Maine Coast Semester mission statement and program values. Thematic support and modeling for the project are specifically provided throughout the Maine Coast Semester curriculum, guest lectures, and weekly seminars in energy, farm, and food systems. Through investigations of the Maine Coast, students develop a skill set for learning about a place deeply, and learn to apply these tools wherever they go. Students are led by our faculty through the process of designing a successful research study in their home community. By the end of the course, students will have developed a profile of their home community that identifies and describes its human and natural systems, as well as their interactions. From this profile, students will make informed suggestions of feasible projects that strive to improve some aspect of their community’s relationship to the natural world. This project will culminate in students sharing their process and product with the broader community, both as means of feedback and celebrating student work.
Sustainability Seminar (NC)
Farm and Food Systems is a holistic seminar that uses our farm and food system as a means of investigating the larger implications and opportunities in making day-to-day choices about the food we eat and the farms we support through that process. We explore our farm as an ecosystem, focusing on agricultural practices related to livestock and pasture management, diversified vegetable production, and forestry management. The arc of the course includes an exploration of food and farm economics, labor and social justice issues, food policy and regulation, and food ethics. The course culminates in each student writing a personal statement of belief about their relationship to food and engaging in a dialogue around how to apply what they know about food systems back in their home environments as empowered and thoughtful consumers. We read a wide variety of sources for this course, including current articles about farming and food systems and essays and articles written by farmers. Many of our course materials are resources and records generated on our farm, including economic overviews of cost versus value of different livestock and vegetable systems.
Energy Systems explores the current state of energy production, use, and efficiency in the United States and globally as we investigate technological and behavioral solutions to our most pressing challenges in sustainability. The course surveys fundamental concepts in the sustainability movement, new techniques and challenges within the conventional energy industry, and emerging technologies in renewable energy and how those are adopted by society at large and implemented on a small scale at Chewonki. We explore the energy systems and infrastructure at Chewonki as the basis for exploring both challenges and solutions in our lived environment.
