About Geography & GIS
Geography is the study of the environmental, cultural, political and economic processes
that produce distinctive local, regional and global patterns across the Earth’s surface.
It is one of the few academic disciplines that bridge the gap between the natural
and social sciences. Geographers analyze how complex interactions among these spatial
processes create constantly changing human and natural landscapes across the world.
Students can choose from one of three emphasis areas: Geographic Information Sciences
(GIS), Global and Area Studies, and Secondary Teaching. Our programs are student-centered,
with abundant opportunities for interacting with faculty and pursuing personal and
professional interests.
About the GIS Lab
The Department’s Laboratory for Geographic Information Science is used by both faculty
and students within and outside of Geography & GIS. This lab contains 25 PCs with
advanced graphics cards, an HP Designjet 4500 large-format plotter, 15 entry-level
GPS units and 10 high-end Trimble Juno GPS units with associated Trimble Pathfinder
software. The PCs have specialized software for cartography and geographic Information
systems (GIS), including CorelDraw and ESRI’s flagship software ArcGIS. The GIS Lab
also maintains a depository of paper map and air photo sets, and a large digital GIS
database for campus use. The Department’s Paleoenvironmental Research Laboratory has
equipment for sediment and tree-ring analysis.
About Environmental & Sustainabiilty Studies
Sustainability at UNC
Sustainability involves making decisions that support the environmental or social-cultural
systems on which we depend. It requires a coordinated approach involving personal
lifestyles, workplace practices, and planning and policy-making that fosters diverse
and flourishing ecosystems and healthy, diverse human communities marked by social
and cultural integration with stable equitable economies.
Our Mission
Why: A major or minor in this program enables students to understand and address the
significant challenges facing a growing human community dependent on finite resources.
We address human problems which require sophisticated understanding of interacting
systems: natural, economic, historical, aesthetic, socio-cultural, spatial, and political.
In order to prepare students for lives and careers that will address these challenges,
we provide a dynamic approach that requires the study of multiple disciplines and
perspectives.
How: We offer a challenging, integrative, and provocative education to help students
understand concepts, principles and practices that ensure ecological sustainability
while meeting human needs. We promote interactions with the public and policy makers
in implementing practical solutions to local, state, national, and global environmental
problems. We advocate experiential opportunities for students throughout the program
through internships, field studies, case studies, and community engagement.
Graduation Expectancies: Stewardship of the earth is the hallmark of this program. Graduates will think systematically
and critically about environmental sustainability issues and how solutions can be
implemented. Graduates will examine, challenge, and reflect on contemporary assumptions
about environmental sustainability and be able to analyze and evaluate how complex
systems are integrated.
Program Learning Outcomes
Our students will:
- Understand how past and present attitudes and ways of valuing the environment have
created modern resource conditions and policies.
- Apply knowledge of energy, resource, and waste flows to forge and apply ecological
and economic models of sustainability that complement the interdependent aspects of
the natural world.
- Demonstrate how the environment fits into a sense of individual and multicultural
community identity.
- Recognize the interdependence of the natural world and the socio-cultural world created
by humans.
- Evaluate environmental issues and policies from a sustainability perspective.
- Generate solutions to a set of given problems from a sustainability perspective.
Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to environmental scholarship, the Environmental
and Sustainability Studies program at UNC aspires to the formation of a more ecologically
sustainable society, both on our campus and around the world, through the education
of effective local, national, and international environmental leaders. Our faculty
contribute to the field of environmental and sustainability studies from a diverse
background of interests and skills, with representation from many departments at UNC.
