This course provides an introduction to the Master of Environmental Management program. Participants will gain an appreciation of the complex and transdisciplinary nature of environmental management issues and of the inherent challenges in multi-disciplinary group approaches to environmental management issues. The emphasis is on exploring conceptual and practical frameworks for environmental management. Starting from the premise of sustainability as a current broadly-endorsed framework for environmental management, the following are explored: the development of the concepts of sustainable development and sustainability; problems in practically interpreting and implementing sustainability; disciplinary perspectives on the concepts (e.g. from philosophy, planning, economics, health sciences etc.); the "principles" of sustainable development and experience in their application; responses to the "sustainability framework" at different levels of governance, by different sectors, by corporations, by professional organizations; critiques of sustainability as a framework for environmental management; alternative models’; the problem of denial’; and possible solutions.