Dear Students,
I'm excited to announce the new stand-alone Environmental Studies major at Rutgers University. As I am writing this (July 2026), the skies above New Jersey are filled with smoke and ash from Canadian wildfires thousands of miles away. Meanwhile, livelihoods are being threatened by flooding occurring in Texas, New York, and many places between. Such experiences are being had all over the globe, their effects exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change, legacies of industrial production and deindustrialization, and long-standing patterns of resource consumption. At the same time, not all people experience these conditions in the same way. Their effects are highly unevenly distributed, especially along axes of class, race, gender, and age.
Within this context, and driven by a concern to make the world better for all its inhabitants, our Environmental Studies Program seeks to meet these problems head on by involving students in engaged scholarship and activism.
The Environmental Studies Program at Rutgers University is designed to appeal to students who wish to understand the complexity of modern environmental challenges, including the range of physical and social forces that shape them, how such conditions are informed by our collective and individual histories, and how our ethical positions and philosophical orientations influence decision-making. This program, therefore, encourages students to guide their own
studies by providing the opportunity to learn from a rich intellectual community of scholars from more than twenty different departments in the School of Arts of Sciences, who offer courses on a range of environment-related themes, as well as opportunities for engagement outside of the classroom.
At the same time, we recognize that merely understanding these problems isn’t enough. Instead, students are encouraged to think about how they can change the world for a better future. During their Senior Capstone, students in the Environmental Studies Program at Rutgers are expected to take part directly in engaged and impactful field research on pressing environmental concerns. Students, therefore, have a unique opportunity to bring their interests and concerns to bear on the most important environmental challenges of our times.
I encourage you to contact me any time with your questions, curiosities, and passions.
Nate Gabriel, Ph.D.
Program Director
Environmental Studies