Semester in the West

Whitman Semester in the West (SITW) is a full-semester program in environmental studies, focused on the intersection of environmental justice, natural resource management, environmental science, and environmental humanities. The 20-year legacy and unique signature of SITW is its deep engagement with a vast yet particular geographical place: The North American West.

Camping under the stars each night, students spend over 90 days in the field as they travel throughout western North America and learn about its unique geography, ecological communities, and people. The program strives to understand the natural world, in all of its scientific, political, and ethical complexities, but also more broadly explores interlocking crises and eco-social emergencies through interdisciplinary, cross-divisional study. Struggles over land use, stressed energy and water infrastructures, endangered biospheres, and the historical and cultural forces that have given rise to these events ground students in the most urgent contemporary issues facing inhabitants of the West and the planet at large. The program provides a supportive, interdisciplinary learning community that seeks to understand the contours of living and working in the West during the Anthropocene. The SITW curriculum is shaped around an inclusive, liberal arts vision for understanding environmental and social justice challenges in the North American West. In the field, students connect with local experts, activists, writers, artists, ecologists, Indigenous peoples, poets, politicians, loggers, ranchers, federal land managers, fisheries biologists, hydrologists, geologists, journalists, and many others.