Willy Bemis, director of Shoals Marine Lab on Appledore Island, six miles off the New Hampshire coast, takes to heart the declining health of ocean ecosystems and how people use marine resources in unsustainable ways. A 2006 Science magazine study, for example, predicted that if fishing continues at current rates, global fisheries will collapse by 2048.

One way to influence change, Bemis decided, was to start educating undergraduates about how solutions to today's environmental problems require broad-thinking, interdisciplinary approaches. This past June, he launched a two-week intensive course offered for the first time at Shoals Marine Lab: Sustainability in the 21st Century.

The course, facilitated by Dean Koyanagi, Cornell's sustainability coordinator, coached students to investigate the meaning of the term sustainability and urged them to examine entire systems, rather than single factors, when analyzing a problem. Guest lecturers covered systems thinking, alternative energy, waste management, food systems and policy, the history of fishing and marine environmental stewardship, sustainable engineering systems and climate change.

"When looking for solutions, we need to bring together all of the forces that impact an ecosystem," said Bemis. "We need to find a way for biologists, engineers, economists, media and policy people to begin to get together to talk about issues of sustainability."

Guest lecturer Andrew Rosenberg, a University of New Hampshire professor of natural resources and former Northeast regional administrator for the National Marine Fisheries Service, spoke about the wide range of services the oceans provide and the politics of managing those resources. With so many factors involved, he said, proper management requires communication among people representing many interests and disciplines.

"We want to give students a perspective on how what we perceive as a simple problem is in fact very complex," said Koyanagi.

To delve further into the intricacies, students created flow charts to analyze such problems as the pros and cons of marine reserves, which increase tourism and give overfished species safe havens and time to recover, but simultaneously trigger short-term losses to commercial fishing interests and bolster sport fishing revenues in nearby waters.

During a weekly food delivery, where students helped unload supplies off the ferry, Koyanagi used the opportunity to provide an impromptu, hands-on lesson on becoming aware of where our food comes from, as students in the sustainability course examined the labels of each box and discovered that the shrimp was transported from Malaysia and fish fillets from Finland. In kind, a field trip to a deep-ocean cod fish farm raised questions for Cornell biology major Whitney Larsen '10.

"We know that the natural stocks are declining, and we are desperate to find other ways to increase stocks of fish, but few people have analyzed the environmental effect of these cages [in fish farms]," she said, referring to the huge cages at a New Hampshire aquaculture farm that hold 40,000 to 50,000 cod.

A second field trip introduced students to the realities of economics, labor and ecology on a small livestock farm and associated farmer's market near Portsmouth, N.H.

As a final project, the students used a holistic approach to redesign the island's composting system. They analyzed the waste-management process, interviewed users, diagrammed the system's inputs and outputs, and ultimately designed a new approach that would reduce the rotting smell and rodent populations while raising awareness of landfill alternatives among the island's residents and staff. Results included a composting manual, an entertaining, all-island educational program and a physical system rebuilt from the ground up.