Most Americans believe that our world faces "an ecological crisis" - that the "natural environment" is threatened as never before by encroachments from human technology. But what assumptions lie behind these perceptions? What images of the land and of human culture underpin the familiar rhetoric of environmentalism? Can we intelligently decide about the "threat" contemporary human society poses to "nature" if we do not first become keenly self-critical about what we are seeing and how we are seeing it?
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. Using critical and analytic tools from the social sciences and literature, we ask about the myths, assumptions, and attitudes which inform the various perceptions we encounter. To what extent are human beings regarded as "part and parcel" of nature? To what extent are people distanced from the natural landscape? Is nature seen as beneficent or malevolent? Is it a source of nurture or a place of danger? How are we, as individuals, to reconcile - or to live with - the many apparently contradictory perspectives that we read about from others and experience within ourselves?
Whatever specific examples we consider, our central propositions remain consistent: 1) that the relationship between people and nature is complex and paradoxical; 2) that the human imagination plays a central - and often misunderstood - role in how we view the world around us; 3) that changing our relationship to nature ("solving the ecological crisis") is as much an imaginative act as it is a matter of social policy, political program, scientific research, or technological adjustment.
We take some, but not all, of our examples from New England history (including, especially, Thoreau and the Transcendentalist response to the rise of industrialism) and from writings about the American West. We read literary, historical, anthropological, sociological, and ecological texts as a basis for our discussions and also look at films, photographs and paintings. Students write several short essays and produce a long final paper.
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Jan Dizard