Learning about global sustainable energy practices via lectures is one thing. Visiting Europe to see sustainable energy approaches firsthand is another. Students from the colleges of Arts and Architecture, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Engineering got to do both as a part of a unique interdisciplinary course, "Living with Sustainable Energy in a Global Society," this spring.

On a rainy spring morning in Cynwyd, Wales, a group of Penn State students and faculty gather in the local youth hostel, a coal fire burning in the small stove, to recount the stops on their energy tour of Iceland and the United Kingdom. Lara Owens, an undergraduate studying geosciences, begins by describing Icelandic hydroelectric and geothermal power plants that produce enough energy for the small nation, and the country's lone hydrogen-powered car—the first in a fleet, the government hopes—with its own fueling station.

It's not an easy trek to Harlock Hill's wind farm: You have to drive several miles northwest of Ulverston on England's notorious back roads, barely wide enough for a bicycle. The roads are lined by four-foot stone walls, and surrounded by the vivid green foliage only possible in this country where it has rained every day for the last week and a half.

A curriculum that includes touring windmill farms in the UK? How about scaling New Zealand's Southern Alps, scuba diving in the Florida Keys, or camping along the Colorado River?

That's all in a day's work for students involved in the interdisciplinary courses sponsored by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences' Center for Advanced Undergraduate Study and Experience (CAUSE).

Stanlow, England—While thundering along the highways in our diesel-powered van, I've been noticing fields of bright yellow-flowered plants, waving in the wind and glowing during those rare moments the sun comes out.

This May sixteen Penn State undergraduates and three faculty members spent two weeks traveling through Iceland and the United Kingdom. They stayed in youth hostels, ate at truckstops, rode for hours in large diesel-powered vans, and suffered through days and days of bone-chilling rain. Their mission: to chart the West's progress from 18th-century rural economy to the post-industrial economy of the 21st century, focusing on the significant role that energy resources have played in that transformation.

Policy debates—the students' idea—drove the second semester of CAUSE 2000. "There are lots of characters in the class, lots of different points of view," says student Kate Darby. "Some people are technical and some aren't. It's a diverse group, which makes it interesting," she says.

Last November, CAUSE student Kate Darby attended the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in the Netherlands with other students, scientists, lobbyists, heads of state, and presidents of countries with environmental concerns. (Al Gore and Bill Clinton would have attended had it not been for the on-going presidential election.) The conference goal was to negotiate a final draft of the Kyoto Protocol, which sets greenhouse gas emission limits on countries in an effort to curb climate change.