This course attempts to make students more self-conscious about their own views of the environments they inhabit. We study first how a variety of people in the past have defined their connections to the natural landscape and then consider some current perspectives in light of what we have learned. To what extent are human being regarded as "part and parcel" of nature? To what extent are people distanced from the natural landscape? Is nature seen as nurturing or threatening, balanced or chaotic? How are we, as individuals, to reconcile – or to live with – the many contradictory perspectives that we encounter from other people and within ourselves?

Though our readings change each year, our central proposition remains consistent: that the human imagination plays a central – and often misunderstood—role in how we view the world around us and that altering our relationship to nature ("solving the ecological crisis") is as much an imaginative act as it is a matter of social policy, political program, or technological adjustment.

We read a mixture of literary, historical, and ecological texts, and also look at photographs, paintings, and a couple of films. Many of our examples come from New England history (from William Bradford to Henry Thoreau) and from writings about the American West (from John Muir to Terry Tempest Williams). We also read ecologists such as Aldo Leopold and Daniel Botkin. This year, we will add a particular focus on the role of literature in helping us understand attitudes towards nature, as we ask what contributions the humanities and the arts can make to the environmental debate, so often dominated by voices from politics and science. With this in mind, our readings will include Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.