We developed the material presented here over a number of years as colleagues in the environmental studies program at Bates College. We taught the course for the first time in the winter of 2000 and taught it two additional times before our partnership as faculty colleagues ended. Impressed by the power of the course material, we applied for, and received an NSF curriculum grant for educational materials development and have used those resources to develop this web page.

This page is a "work in progress". We intend to keep modifying it based on own thoughts and welcome input from readers. One of the advatages of a web-based publication is that we encourage users to tailor the material to their own needs, picking chapters or labs that suit their purposes. We encourage readers to send us ideas, or labs, or problems, or comments and -- in the spirit of an "open source" project, they will be incorporated.