David Brooks
Green Thread
September 2, 2009
Summary of Course Syllabus Revision for: SURVEY OF AMERICAN
ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
In the revised syllabus for my course I include the word and concept
“sustainability” in the course objectives. This will allow me to introduce the idea from
the outset of the course and alert students to its importance as a theme that will appear
throughout the semester in both course content and practices. As content, I have added a
discussion of sustainability as an emerging concept and practice within the larger
environmental movement that this class tracks from its European antecedents and
Romanticism to the present. While placing sustainability within the history of
environmental thought comes near the end of the semester, I will emphasize population
growth, its enablers (such as agricultural practices, technology, etc.), its relationship to
natural resource usages throughout the course. This will allow me to visit frequently the
idea of what environmental practices, social practices, population dynamics,
technologies, and such have been sustainable or have failed to be so. Throughout the
course, I will pose the question: How have sustainable or unsustainable practices shaped
history? And what lessons do we take from that history? For example, these question
will be of particular interest in our class meeting on The Dust Bowl.
I have also incorporated out-of-classroom engagements in my revised syllabus.
This seemed to be one of the key practices that came out of the Green Thread workshop
in regard to designing assignments around the concepts of sustainability. As a formative,
peer-assessed activity, I will have students do a personal observation-based bioregional
history. Students will visit a specific place on campus (much like the activity we did in
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the workshop) and record their sensory observations, thoughts, descriptions and
emotional reactions about that place. Then they will offer an analysis of the
environmental history of that place based on their writing, focusing on what from the past
may or may not be sustainable. As another out-of-class exercise, we, as a class, will tour
the Milltown Dam restoration, UM FLAT and/or HomeWORD’s Gold Dust housing as
part of our unit on “What’s the future of environmentalism?”
I have also incorporated Green Thread concepts in the two assigned essays. For
the first of these, a book review, I have added books about sustainability (many from the
bibliography the workshop generated) to the bibliography from which students will
choose a work to review. For the final, bioregional paper I have given students the option
of working collaboratively to produce a longer, more thorough work that evaluates
historical change, sustainable practices, and projections or plans for the future of the
environment and natural resources in their bioregion of choice. I have also given them
the option of foregoing the bioregional history in favor of doing volunteer work on a
restoration project of their choice. For this option, they would then write a brief history
of what happened that warranted restoration, and what elements of the past environment
the project intends to restore.
Finally, I have included some classroom practices in this course that reflect
practical applications of sustainability. Students will submit and I will grade assignments
electronically. I will encourage book sharing. And, we will use Blackboard for reader
response activities, rather than turning in written abstracts of reading assignments. Since
this is a spring course, I suspect I will continue to tinker with this syllabus in an effort to
make the concepts of sustainability more explicit throughout.
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