Background

Our environment is the place we call home. It can be one place, but is more likely to be a network including places on many scales from a house, through cities and parks, to states and sometimes countries. Our environment has a history, and we expect it to change in the future. Indeed, the rate of human induced change is now so large that it can easily be seen in a typical lifetime. For such reasons, we will know our past environment increasingly as a memory, rather than a place we can physically return to. We may increasingly rely on art, music, and literature, using the senses of others to imagine and recall our place as it was.

Ann Arbor and its environs is the immediate home of the University community to which you currently belong. Our place is unique. Transporting Ann Arbor to another biophysical habitat would change the town and its environs. So would a different mix of immigrants. Even a few more hard winters here would change the town, although less so today than in the past. A goal of this course is to introduce you to a wide range of philosophies and approaches to discovering your place in the environment.

The course seeks to explore the relationship between humans and the human-occupied environment, using Ann Arbor and vicinity as a laboratory. We will address questions such as how we give meaning to places, how experience (and memory) can shape our sense of place, how we might find new ways of inhabiting or reinhabiting places, why understanding one's homeplace, as well as unfamiliar places, matters.

Format

The heart of the course will be the excursions. Ann Arbor is a remarkably pleasant mix of town, parks, the unique museum/park/landscape art-form Nichols Arboretum, the river winding among the remains of glacial moraines, all set in the midst of a "countryside" of farms, wildplaces, and small towns and villages. Lectures and discussion will prepare us each week to study our place through experience. We will revisit several sites as we move from surveying their features, to seeking explanations for the present in history, valuing places with our own senses and through the senses of others, and looking to the future.

Lectures and discussions will address the principles and philosophies used to study any place. The components of place involve all the disciplinary elements that underlie the real but seamless past, present, and future. These have their origins in many disciplines, differentiated for human convenience. Our task is to integrate traditional elements in working towards a holistic view to be implemented through the excursions.

Geological processes formed the landscape, upon which different soils and ecosystems have developed. What do these ecosystems look like? How do we measure what is there? What processes sustain them? How has the composition of the biophysical world changed over time?

Humans have used the resulting natural resources in many ways - for food, water, transportation, construction materials, recreation for example. How have the biophysical properties of the environment across landscapes affected these uses? What are the impacts of these uses on that environment? Who makes decisions on land and water use? How?

The environment is more than a source of materials for consumption. For many, place offers surroundings for restoration and sources of inspiration for the mind. What effects does the environment have on the way we feel? How can we express these feelings?

What sort of human-environment interactions are likely in the future? Are human uses within the regenerative capacity of ecosystems? Should we change our patterns of use? How? How can we restoration damaged areas? What biophysical, ethical, or esthetic principles should we use?

The exploration of Ann Arbor and its vicinity centers around questions guiding our philosophy for understanding our place in the human-occupied biophysical world. The class will be divided into small groups, each of which will choose a small place within the Huron River watershed for intensive study. You will have to explore maps of the area and go out and scout places in making your choice, with the help of the instructors. Places may include urban, suburban, and rural areas, with land and/or water, woods, and prairie, farmland.

Each group will then apply the principles from the class to the study of that place. These studies will be the mechanism for imagining the future - the fourth question. It is the answers to the question of the future that begin to impact our personal choices of life-style, involvement in institutions that manage our communities, and the environmental values we pass on to others.

Each group will prepare a paper on the chosen place and give a presentation to the whole class, meeting at the chosen place. The paper should be a maximum of 20 pages of text, supported by readings, portfolios and other materials relevant material appropriate to the chosen place.

You are asked to write 3 to 5 pages a week in a journal or diary. Entries should include the following:

• 50% as commentary on assigned readings,
• commentary on other pertinent materials you discover,
• Reflections on issues discussed in class or on excursions.
• Pertinent personal past and/or present experiences.

Evaluation

We expect you to analyze environmental literature from many disciplines, from your own experiences, and apply the concepts and knowledge you obtain to the multi-faceted opportunities and problems posed by human use of the environment. The following vehicles will be used to aid you in your analysis and to help instructors to give you timely feedback:

1)     Journals (30% of grade).

2) Project Paper (30% of grade).

3) Final Exam (20% of grade). This will be comprised of short essay questions covering all aspects of the course.

4) Participation (20% of grade). The success of this, your course, depends on your active participation in discussions, excursions, and the group project.