From Professor and Chair Daniel Press - As an interdisciplinary department, we contribute to the scholarship of discovery in our own fields and also to the scholarship of integration. We thus aspire to collaborate creatively and successfully, not only understanding where different scholars come from, but discovering new ways to pose questions, and in turn, provide answers.

In all our research areas, our faculty and students span a wide disciplinary range (including physical and biological sciences, geography, political economy, politics) and equally wide methodological orientations and goals (e.g., experimentation and modeling; participatory action research and education in communities; advising land managers at state and federal levels; policy analysis; social/political critique). We collaborate among ourselves and with other researchers at UCSC and elsewhere to study compelling current environmental problems that appear across these boundaries in agriculture, the management of natural ecosystems and natural resources, global change, and ecological risk.

The Environmental Studies department offers a wide and diverse curriculum for our students. Our undergraduate program prepares students to function as informed citizens, to work effectively across a wide range of careers, cultures and communities and to move on to graduate training in professional and academic fields. Our graduate program prepares doctoral students to work effectively in disciplinary and interdisciplinary environments within the academy, in government agencies, and in public interest organizations and businesses.