The Master's Program
Revised November 2005
Our goal for the Master of Arts Program in Environmental Studies is twofold: to help you understand emerging environmental problems and to strengthen your competence in managing them. In most fields an MA is a professional degree and this is especially true of the MA in environmental studies at Brown.
We have shaped the program based on our view of emerging environmental problems. Clearly, environmental problems are becoming more global and "multi-disciplinary." As environmental science progresses and our policy analyses become more powerful, increasingly we see environmental problems as complex and interconnected, and thus taxing our institutions and governments to manage them.
To understand present and emerging environmental problems you need to integrate ideas and skills from several disciplines. However, environmental studies is a rapidly developing field and it is not always clear which ideas and skills need to be integrated to address an emerging issue.
Environmental studies is an exciting but challenging field of study, but there are not established, authoritative texts. In the absence of a "received body of knowledge" we believe that it is important for you to learn how to make your own way. Active learning is part of the Brown philosophy of education. But it is especially important in environmental studies, where the next generation of practitioners will need to develop the available guideposts (and write the more authoritative texts).
To help you develop your capacity to develop your own path, we emphasize the use of explicit frameworks of analysis and understanding. The master's thesis is the keystone and the integrative culmination of our program - your courses are pre-selected to support your thesis work.
The faculty have strengths in environmental law, integration of science and policy and public policy with extensive experience in the areas of eco-system analysis, marine science and policy at the state and federal levels, forest ecology, global change, environmental justice, international environmental policy, environmental health, land use change, remote sensing risk assessment and regulation (at the federal level and also for Rhode Island and the New England region). The CES faculty is augmented by an associated faculty, with strengths in biology, history, geology and sociology. Your master's thesis topic - the culmination of your work at Brown, must be compatible with the interests of the faculty.
The program does not begin with traditional disciplines and search for their application to environmental problems. Instead we focus on the problems and from them the development of necessary knowledge, decision and action; which requires learning how to draw information from the disciplines that bear on these decisions. Thus as part of our program, we encourage you to become familiar with the language of science as well as the language of policy, to understand the different vantage points of each, and to integrate them.
The reliance on quantitative analysis differ among students, although we expect you to become competent in some of the quantitative concepts needed to understand the languages of science and policy and to put them in the same framework.