Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

10 Learning in Place: The Campus as Ecosystem

10 Learning in Place The Campus as Ecosystem James H. Capshew History and Philosophy of Science How can we encourage people to think deeply about the environment we live in? To understand basic ecosystem services and energy flows through the world? To creatively face the problems that human civilization has placed on the biosphere? In the midst of global climate change and worldwide environmental degradation, it has become clear than humans must act. But how can we, as individuals, make a di√erence in the face of these overwhelming forces? I would suggest that teaching and learning about the local context—the human culture and the natural landscape that surrounds each one of us—can serve perfectly. Indeed, we all have a certain amount of expertise in dealing with our local place-ways: how to navigate through them; where to find food and shelter; how to get our needs meet. Connoisseurs of the local can explain historical roots, provide esthetic judgments, or create new possibilities in place. Turning our attention to the local increases our knowledge of the world and our place in it, and opens a pathway for appreciation of our rightful place in the web of life. No longer can we a√ord to Learning in Place ⭈ 131 act as if the world exists only to meet the needs of the human population. Now we must nurture a fulfilling appreciation that humans belong to the world. The local context, for millions of college students, is the campus, where they spend a significant portion of their time studying, playing, eating, and sleeping. But the university or college campus is an underutilized foundation for teaching the basics of environmental literacy and the ethics and practices of sustainability. As a physical place and as an institutional nexus of human resources, the campus can function as a laboratory and field site to illustrate environmental history, to illuminate general ecological processes and systems, and to investigate diverse responses to the current state of the environment. The general theme of ‘‘campus as ecosystem’’ provides a broad avenue to grow environmental appreciation and ecological understanding, and has su≈cient scope to customize courses to institutional needs for environmental literacy at all undergraduate levels. Such courses would take the ecological interconnectedness of abiotic features (e.g., rocks, soils, climate, etc.) of the local environment with various forms of life (e.g., bacteria, plants, animals, humans, etc.) as fundamental , treating them as parts of a whole community. This type of study is inherently interdisciplinary, valuing the insights, attitudes, and methods of fields ranging from geology, chemistry, and biology to demography, anthropology, and history. Courses can be tailored according to specific needs for content areas, cognitive skill development, or philosophical and ethical approaches. Biologist Barry Commoner, seeking to capitalize on the enthusiasm of the first Earth Day in 1970, formulated a set of informal ‘‘laws’’ of ecology:§ Everything is connected to everything else.§ Everything must go somewhere.§ There is no such thing as a free lunch.§ Nature knows best. These rubrics are pedagogically useful, and provide ways to connect study in most any discipline to environmental concerns. Connecting to Students’ Lives Using the framework of ‘‘campus as ecosystem,’’ a course organized around the lifecycle of objects encountered in the college lifestyle is a compelling way to introduce students to their place in the web of life. Exploiting items that a typical student might consume or use throughout a normal day, in such areas as food and drink, clothing, transportation, housing, and equipment, lifecycle analysis 132 ⭈ james h. capshew traces an object’s origins ‘‘upstream’’ to its origins as well as ‘‘downstream’’ to its ultimate fate. It traces the linkages among objects (‘‘everything is connected to everything else’’) and the idea that items, once consumed, do not dematerialize or disappear but go into some kind of waste stream (‘‘everything must go somewhere ’’). Reflection on the costs, both financial and moral, of the college lifestyle (‘‘no such thing as a free lunch’’) leads to consideration of philosophical and ethical questions, including contemplation of how we can learn from nature (‘‘nature knows best’’). Lifecycle analysis confronts students with the larger context of their daily choices and gives them exposure to some important environmental consequences of individual choices and collective decisions. Such a course would focus on such items as:§ Food and drink: water, beer, co√ee, potato, corn, chicken, salmon§ Clothing and fabric: cotton T...