Introducing Sustainability In College Calculus

As the effects of climate change make themselves more apparent with each passing year, it becomes essential to get minds of disciplines across the board involved with the discussion on where human action needs to go from here to address the issues a changing global environment presents. Classrooms of all levels provide the ideal place to begin having the discussion about sustainable living with future decision-makers. Furthermore, mathematics courses provide the perfect opportunity to strengthen the critical thinking and analytical skills needed to approach sustainability issues. This paper summarizes one of the first documented attempts to bring the topic of sustainability into mathematics courses through the introduction of sustainability-related calculus problems and statistically analyzes differences in student perception across the semester.