This course fulfills the core curriculum requirement in Environmental Awareness. It is built on several key premises:

1. Becoming more aware of our place in the environment (on both large and small scales of time and space), and of our relationship to the environment (both societally and personally) is key to improving environmental issues.

2. We are inspired to act in concert with nature more through apprehending nature’s wonder, beauty, and beneficence than through learning a litany of our negative impacts on nature, as important as these might be. With these premises in mind, we will seek to enhance our environmental awareness in this course through a variety of means—reading and discussing key literature, engaging in a variety of interactive learning activities, looking at case studies, examining current issues, diving into a single topic of personal interest, spending time outside, and completing an experiential learning activity.

 

This course was an introduction to environmental issues. The first half of the semester was focused mostly on learning terms and gauging exactly how ecosystems, water systems, and other environmental processes work together to maintain life on the planet. The second half of the semester was spent learning about the impacts people have on the environment today. We explored the effects of overpopulation and overconsumption on global warming, waste production, water pollution, and many other environmental catastrophes. We spent about two weeks making and presenting lectures about these issues. Most of our learning was from the textbook, and time in class was spent mostly doing role-playing activities such as one in which groups were asked to save fictional towns from a water shortage. This was beneficial because we were able to see real-life applications of our textbook readings. A large portion of the class was keeping a nature journal, which was nice because it forced everyone to actually interact with nature.