Environment & Society is the foundational course for the Environment & Society Foundation within the Marine Estuarine Environmental Science (MEES) Program. The fundamental goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of the social and natural science approaches to studying and addressing socio-environmental issues. Disciplines covered include anthropology, environmental science, economics, and political science, among others. Students built on this disciplinary knowledge to review and critique various approaches to studying coupled human and natural systems. Coupled human and natural systems is a conceptual framework that is now widely used to bridge cultural, socio-economic, and natural science environmental research.

Students are expected to compare and contrast different theoretical and applied disciplinary approaches for researching environmental issues. In addition, students critique approaches to environmental issues in terms of contributions to coupled human and natural systems research and practice. In developing these critiques, students took turns producing blogs to summarize each class time discussion, often with guest lecturers from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds.