MESPOM volunteed for the Quality Assurance exercise by the European Commission and has been selected as one of six Erasmus Mundus courses (out of about 100 existing). The purpose of the exercise is to examine how the joint character of Erasmus Mundus courses contributes to their high quality. Here are some thoughts which I prepared for the first visit of the EC QA team to Lund.

Facing the recently outlined challenges we should be exploring innovative ways to conceptualize multidisciplinary environmental education in the international context. One such perspective views the environmental arena not as a profession implying a standard set of skills and knowledge, but as a practice, focusing on ‘mind-set’ of environmental practitioners, the way they should think about environmental problems.

I ended the last entry with a question:

Will general environmental education of the type provided by MESPOM become unnecessary in the future? Will it be replaced, on the one hand, by ‘mainstreaming’ environmental knowledge into other professions, such as law, economics, engineering, medicine and on the other hand by proliferation of specialized courses in say, water resources management, climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity protection etc.?

May be.
Or may be not.

Don't Bet your Gas On It (update to the Environmental Car Story received from the Pacific Institute)

An automotive marketing company made a startling claim in a study released earlier this year: the Hummer H3 and other SUVs have a lower life-cycle energy cost than the Toyota Prius and other hybrids. This analysis raised some eyebrows at the Pacific Institute, and we decided to take a look at the science behind this surprising finding.

A report on environment and security in Eastern Europe was launched on May 21st, 2007 at the OSCE Economic and Environmental Forum in Prague. What does it have to do with MESPOM?

Google approved licensing Google Apps Education Edition to MESPOM. In particular, this means e-mail addresses @mespom.eu will be available for the members of the MESPOM community. Read more about a set of case-studies about Google Apps at different universities.