Texas State University features environmental courses

By Lisa Carter


Texas State University students are not just visiting environmental issues around campus. Deeper discussion about the environment is being encouraged in the classroom as well.

Chad Smith, assistant sociology professor, students in his environmental sociology course discuss sociological concepts dealing with problems such as pollution, waste and global climate change.

“The main things we discuss are humans’ interactions between our social and natural environments,” Smith said. “The overriding idea is how humans are dependent on the natural environment, not always in positive, but also in negative ways.”

Kelly McGauhey, applied sociology junior, said she chose to take Smith’s course because of her job at the River Systems Institute and the importance of general knowledge on environmental issues.

“I expected to come out (of the class) with a better understanding of people and how they interact with the environment,” McGauhey said. “I originally though of humans as separate from nature but after taking this class, I’ve realized that’s not true. I’ve learned a lot about the biotic community and how humans work with the environment.”

Smith said he enjoys teaching the course because it consists of students who are of various majors.

“It is a multidisciplinary class, so we take stuff from other classes and put it into this one, which makes for a lively discussion,” Smith said. “People self-select this class, so they’ve usually done some reading and facilitate some things from other classes that they can put into this one.”

However, not all environment-related courses are discussion-based. Ron Hagelman, assistant geography professor, is the instructor for environmental management, a writing intensive course with a focus on projects and lecture material. He said the projects help students prepare for environmental professions.

“There is one project in which the students will find a job advertisement in environmental management that they might be interested in and do a résumé assessment,” Hagelman said. “It gets them seriously thinking about being employed in environmental fields.”

Hagelman said the students do a project in which they analyze their personal carbon footprint and figure out what needs to be done to cut the result in half. He said the students also compare various cities’ carbon footprints and analyze the differences.

Corina Salmon, environmental studies junior, said the class has met her expectations, despite the workload.

“I’ve gotten a lot of real world experience out of it,” Salmon said. “(The students) are getting to know how to write things such as environmental impact statements for the professional world. We’re all pretty interested in learning about the environment beforehand and we all knew how much work was required.”

Smith said some of his students have the geographical background about environmental issues and have little knowledge about the sociological concepts before starting the class.

“Some students haven’t thought of (these issues) in sociological terms,” Smith said. “They may have in geographical terms, which leads to an interesting discussion about why humans behave the way we do and, if you can, how you change people’s behaviors in terms of global climate change.”