Managing the environment requires interdisciplinary tools and knowledge about natural systems, human institutions, beliefs and values, and the dissemination of these ideas through business, education, nursing and other professions.

Within the curriculum, the social sciences provide perspectives on the environment from a human point of view, balancing the ecological perspectives contributed by the natural sciences with the economic and political aspects of human society.

Courses in the humanities bring the insights of religion and ethics as well as a body of literature and artistic appreciation that connect the natural world to human sensibility.

Natural sciences bring the insights of biologists, chemists, and geoscientists to studies of human interaction with the natural ecosystems, seeking answers to complex, inter-related problems of resources, population and pollution in an effort to care for the world we live in.

Junior and senior-level environmental studies courses draw on these diverse disciplines to integrate understandings of and solutions to environmental problems.