Summarize the major US environmental laws and a key international agreement, and design a complete small-scale stewardship investigation applying the full year's toolkit to a self-chosen local issue.
Most of the foundational US environmental laws date from the "environmental decade" of the 1970s and were largely passed with broad, bipartisan support: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1969/1970) requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impact of major proposed actions; the Clean Air Act (1970, Weeks 22-23) regulates air pollutants; the Clean Water Act (1972) regulates pollutant discharge into US waters, connecting directly to Week 20's point-source concept; the Endangered Species Act (1973, Week 12) protects listed species; and the EPA itself was created in 1970 to implement these laws. Internationally, the Montreal Protocol (1987, Week 23) remains this course's clearest example of a successful global agreement, while newer agreements such as the Paris Agreement (2015) attempt a similar international model for the larger, longer-timescale climate problem -- a real, current, still-evolving policy structure worth knowing about factually rather than judging as finished or failed.
This closing week returns explicitly to Week 1's opening distinction, which has run through every policy-adjacent lesson this year (Weeks 27, 31, 35): environmental science tells us what is happening and often what options exist along with their trade-offs; deciding which trade-offs to accept is a values question for citizens, voters, and communities, not something science alone can answer. The course closes not with a rhetorical flourish but with a genuine synthesis task: apply the full toolkit built across 36 weeks -- a testable question, systems and feedback thinking, the relevant science content, a realistic action, and data to check whether it worked -- to one small, real, self-chosen local issue.
Mastery looks like: They can correctly match a scenario to the most relevant named environmental law, and can independently design a complete five-part stewardship investigation (question, system/feedback, content area, action, data) for a self-chosen local issue, then carry out at least its first real step.
Common stumbles: Proposing a capstone action too large or vague to actually complete or measure this term; slipping back into treating a policy opinion as a scientific conclusion, the exact distinction this course opened with in Week 1.