Emory's Interdisciplinary Sustainability Minor

Sustainability, involving far more than simply turning off lights and recycling, is for all students at Emory. Sustainability has implications for:

• how we treat the land, water, and atmosphere;
• how we approach health and well-being on an interspecies level;
• how we produce and consume food and other goods;
• how we justly distribute the benefits and costs of that production and consumption;
• how we derive the energy to maintain both economic enterprises and our everyday lifestyles; and
• how we assess and rethink the proper balance between profit, politics, planetary health, and the common good.

The prevailing theoretical model thus defines sustainability as the intersection of social, environmental, and economic concerns. The Sustainability Minor at Emory acknowledges that these challenges are profoundly crosscutting in nature, and that none of them can be adequately addressed without consideration of the others.

Curricula focused on sustainability foster creativity and an expanded imagination of a thriving social, economic, and environmental world for ourselves and future generations. Students in the Sustainability Minor apply analytical systems thinking to contemporary global and local problems, practice participatory strategies to resolve those problems, and demonstrate an ethical compass that guides their assessments of alternative solutions.