AMH 2631-2E60 History of Sustainability

Syllabus

History of Sustainability, Fall 2017
AMH 2631-2E60
Prof. Jack E. Davis
davisjac@ufl.edu
Rm: K-F 111
T: 1:55-2:45, Trs: 1:55-3:50
Ofc Hours: T, 11:40-1:40/Trs, 12:40-1:40
Ofc phone: 273-3398

Summary

This course is offered to help satisfy a core requirement in the Sustainability Studies major. The course, however, is open to all students.

Sustainability is not a new concept. Historically, it has existed under different names: conservation, scientific management, efficiency, wise use, natural resource management, land ethic. It has been driven by economic, ethical, social, and political incentives. It has been shaped by religious or spiritual beliefs, public and corporate policy, by science and scientific trends, economic conditions, and, most importantly, by nature itself.

The proposed course will offer a survey of sustainability that deals with these principles and covers the full sweep of American history. It will begin not with an examination of EuroAmerican beliefs and practices but with native ones. The so-called seventh-generation concept did not originate with a modern-day cleaning product or as an ecological concept but with the cultural beliefs of traditional peoples. Students will explore the origins of the concept and its clash with EuroAmerican priorities in colonial America. Semantical differences are important to understanding that clash. In place of animist beliefs of natives, EuroAmericans imposed the label of natural resources on nature, creating a predetermined prism through which Americans still view nature and reinforcing their tendency to set themselves apart and above the natural world.

Students will also look at evolving imperatives in American societylocal, regional, and global–that forced many Americans to rethink their relationship with the natural world. Tobacco planters in colonial and antebellum Virginia, for example, desperately searched for ways to sustain their fast-depleting soil to stanch population loss to fresh lands on the western frontier and further South. Settlement in territorial Florida was to a large extent a product of this challenge unmet and solutions ignored. Another theme of the course will be cataclysmic events (economic depression and so-called natural disasters, for example) and major events in American history (industrialization and urbanization; technological and scientific developments; the rise of the consumer republic, for example) that inspired calls for and innovation in sustainable practices. A review of different practices and the personalities behind them will constitute an important component of the course. Finally, the course will conclude with an analysis of sustainability today as a product of multiple historical antecedents.

As a principal goal, the course will provide students with an understanding of the past that helps them make more informed decisions about the present and future. As in any upper-level history course, students will be required to read a range of assigned texts and undertake research and writing projects (using archival and Internet sources, primary and secondary) that will enhance cognitive and communication skills.

Course Objectives:

  • Expanding ones knowledge of sustainability and its place in the larger American experience.
  • Introducing the student to scholarship in the history of sustainability.
  • Promoting critical thinking about social and environmental ethics.
  • Advancing the students experience in the reading, researching, and writing tasks of the historian.
  • Improving the students cognitive and communication skills.

Course Requirements:

  • Class participation* 40%
  • Take-home essays (2×20%) 40%
  • Research essay, Clamelot 20%
  • Writing-mechanics exercise (factored into writing assignments)

*The History of Sustainability will not resemble a traditional lecture course. Lecturing will be kept to a minimum. Instead, you the students will carry the discussion of the course. Each class, I will call the names of students randomly to answer questions based upon the reading(s) for the assigned day or week. Each student will receive a grade based on her/his response to the question. If you are unprepared or have not completed the reading and cannot answer the question, you will receive a zero for your effort. If you are not present when your name is called, you will receive a zero for your performance that day. Remember, class participation counts for 40% of your course grade.

(Please see last section of syllabus for a description of other course requirements.)

Course Grading Scale (see UF grading scale at end of syllabus):

  • A+ =97-100
  • A =94-96
  • A- =90-93
  • B+ =87-89
  • B =84-86
  • B- =80-83
  • C+ =77-79
  • C =74-76
  • C- =70-73
  • D =65-69

Assignments not completed earn a 0

Plagiarized assignment (see plagiarism section below) earn a 0

Assignments not turned in before or by stated due date will not be accepted. All assignments must be made available in hard copy. Emailed assignments cannot be accepted.

Only course grades of C or better will satisfy Gordon Rule, general education, and college basic distribution credit.

Required Books:

  • Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale University Press, most recent edition).
  • Additional readings are on reserve in Library West or available on-line.

Weekly Schedule

Week I: Aug 22 & 24 – The Historical Problem

  • Introduction to the Course
  • Defining Sustainability: What Does it Mean from a Humanities Perspective?
  • Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination, chap 12.
  • Robert Goodland, The Concept of Environmental Sustainability, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 26 (1995): 1-24 (in Jstor).

Week II: Aug 29 & 31 – Where Humans Fit

  • William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, 69-90.
  • Comparing Native and EuroAmerican Perspectives: Economy, Society, and Natural Endowments
  • David Suzuki and Peter Knudtson, Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature, chap 1, 1-22.
  • William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, chaps 3-5.

Week III: Sept 5 & 7

  • Comparing Native and EuroAmerican Perspectives, cont.
  • From Infinite to Finite or Not
  • Nash, Wilderness and the American Minds, chap 2 and 3.

Week IV: Sept 12 & 14 -The New Republic

  • Forgotten Roots of American Sustainability
  • George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, chap 3, 128-329 (E-book).

Week V: Sept 19 & 21

  • Writing Mechanics Exercise Due
  • Forgotten Roots, cont.
  • Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chaps 4 and 5.
  • National Identity
  • Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, prologue and chap 1.

Week VI: Sept 26 & 28

  • Hidden Connections
  • Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures With nature in Modern America, chap 1
  • Prologue to a New Gospel
  • Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chaps 6 & 7.

Week VII: Oct 3 (no class) & 5 (yes class)

Biophilia

Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, prologue.

Week VIII: Oct 10 & 12 – The Science of Efficiency

  • Take-Home Essay 1 Due
  • Resource Sustainability During the Progressive Era and Great Depression
  • Woods and Water
  • Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, chaps 8-10.

Week IX: Oct 17 & 19

  • The Urban Model
  • Cyrenus Wheeler, “Sewers: Ancient and Modern,” (Cayuga County Hist. Soc., 1887): 7-29, 42+
  • Available online at: http://www.sewerhistory.org/articles/design/1887_abs01/article.pdf

Week X: Oct 24 & 26

  • Greenspace
    • Anne Whiston Spirn, Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted, Uncommon Ground, 91-113.
  • Wildlife
    • Jared Orsi, From Horicon to Hamburgers and Back Again: Ecology, Ideology, and Wildfowl Management, 1917-1935, Environmental History Review 18 (Winter 1994): 19-40.

Week XI: Oct 31 & Nov 2

  • Sustaining Agriculture in the Wake of Ruin
  • Worster, The Wealth of Nature, chap 6.
  • Kevin Roose, Sheep Lawn Mowers, and Other Go-Getters, New York Times, November 2, 2011(Google the title to find on-line).

Special Note: Class field trip to Seahorse Key! Saturday and Sunday Nov. 4th and 5th. An hours drive west of Gainesville and another mile into the Gulf of Mexico by boat, the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge protects rare undeveloped barrier islands. The refuge is an important rookery for nesting migratory birds and a laboratory for Gulf science. Well meet Saturday morning in the quaint fishing village of Cedar Key (home of Clamelot, your final assignment), travel by boat to Seahorse Key and spend the night in a two-hundred-year-old lighthouse. The field trip fee will be a little under $100; I’ll give you a specific figure as soon as I know class numbers and other details. We will be joining Professor Cynthia Barnetts environmental journalism class. More info, directions and contacts to come by email.

Week XII: Nov 7 & 9

  • The Electric Good and Better Life
  • Wesley Arden Dick, When Dams Werent Damned: The Public Power Crusade and Visions of the Good Life in the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, Environmental Review 13 (Autumn-Winter 1989): 113-53.

Special Note: Tuesday Nov. 7th 6 p.m., Library East: Western park ranger turned environmental journalist JordanFisher Smith, author of Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial and the Fight Over Controlling Nature, who also works in film and magazines, will lecture on how we share scientific knowledge in an era of alternative facts, when even park rangers are constrained in their campfire circle talks (making environmental communication that much more important). Sponsored by UFs departments of History and Journalism, with additional support from the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere and the George A. Smathers Libraries.

Week XIII: Nov 14 & 16

  • The Electric Good and Better Life, cont.
  • Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, chaps, 5 & 6, 145-213.
  • Film: Cadillac Desert, episode 1.
  • Post-WWII

Week XIV: Nov 21 (Thanksgiving Nov 23)

  • An Unsustainable Course
  • Lyndon B. Johnson, Beautification, Roderick Nash ed., American Environmentalism: Readings in Conservation History, 181-86.
  • Rachel Carson, Pesticides, Nash, American Environmentalism, 191-94.
  • Presidents Science Advisory Committee, Pollution, Nash, American Environmentalism, 195-201.
  • Paul Ehrlich, Overpopulation, Nash, American Environmentalism, 202-05.
  • Barry Commoner, Fundamental Causes of the Environmental Crisis, Nash, American Environmentalism, 206-14.
  • The Council on Environmental Quality, The State of the Environment, Nash, American Environmentalism, 215-26.

Week XV: Nov 28 & 30

  • Mechanisms of Sustainability: High-tech Management and Planning
  • Clamelot Paper Due
  • Samuel P. Hays, From Conservation to Environmentalism, Nash, American Environmentalism, 144-52.
  • Film: Gimme Green
  • Redefining Parameters
  • Andrew Kirk, Appropriating Technology The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture Environmental Politics, Environmental History 6 (July 2001): 374-94.
  • Mauricio Schoijet, Limits to Growth and the Rise of Catastrophism, Environmental History 4 (October 1999): 515-30.
  • Aquaculture and the Cedar Key Model

Week XVI: Dec 5

  • Take-Home Essay 2 Due

Course Requirements Descriptions:

All written work for the course must be typed or computer generated and in 12-point double-spaced print with default or one-inch margins. Your work must also be presented in third-person language.

Writing Mechanics exercise can be found on my web site. Click the Writing Mechanics Exercise link under the Course Handouts section. Printout and answer the questions by circling that which you believe to be the correct response. You will be required to follow the rules of writing mechanics in all writing assignments for the course. Up to five points will be deducted from your assignment grade if you violate these rules.

Take-home essays will represent responses to a set of discussion prompts posted on my web site. The prompts will be drawn from the assigned readings and the course discussions, and you will be expected to use the course readings and your class notes as sources to answer the questions (do not consult any other sources). Each answer must be presented in essay format, using formal, academic language and style (i.e., complete sentences, tightly constructed paragraphs, no colloquialisms). Do not, in other words, provide answers in lists or bullets. Those exams that address each prompt in a rigorous and organized manner are more likely to earn a decent grade. These grades, too, will be dependent in part on your compliance with the rules in the Writing Mechanics exercise.

Research essay, Clamelot: The object of this assignment is to have you research and write about the conversion of Cedar Key, Florida, from a traditional fishing economy, following the 1995 gill-net ban, to an economy based on sustainable aquaculture. You will need to hunt down research materials, construct a paper, and prepare to discuss this historical development in class. You should focus on themes of sustainability, which may take you beyond Cedar Key (hint, the Suwanee River).The final product of the assignment is a five-page, double-spaced writing assignment. Use default margin and footer and header settings. Use 11- or 12-point font. You must also footnote or endnote your sources and provide a bibliography of all sources consulted. Remember, this is a history course, and your assignment is a history research paper. So dont write solely, or even extensively, about what Cedar Key is doing now.

Again, following the rules of the Writing Mechanics exercise is imperative to doing work of full potential.

Class Rules are relatively minimal. You may take notes with a computer. But if I catch you emailing or texting, I reserve the right to post your maleficence on Facebook. Cell phones should be turned off as if you are traveling on a commercial airliner. If your phone rings, I reserve the right to answer it.

Plagiarism:

Keep in mind that your written assignments must represent original work. You cannot copy the work of anyone else or text from the Internet or any other source and pass it off as your own. Do not cobble together paragraphs or passages of separate texts and then try to claim that you have done original and legitimate work. You must write with your own ideas and in your own words. If you copy the words of someone else without putting those words in quotation marks, REGARDLESS OF CITING THE SOURCE, you are plagiarizing. Plagiarism is theft, and it is academic dishonesty. Plagiarism is grounds for an automatic failing grade on the assignment, a grade that is final and that cannot be made up. Please, if you have any questions about how you are citing or using sources, come to me for the answers.

I CATCH A PLAGIARIST EVERY SEMESTER.

Classroom Assistance:

Please do not hesitate to contact the instructor during the semester if you have any individual concerns or issues that need to be discussed. Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office {http://www.dso.ufl.edu/drp/}. The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide that documentation to the instructor when requesting accommodation.

UF Grading Scale

Please note UFs new grading scale with the addition of minuses.

  • A = 4.0
  • A- = 3.67
  • B+ = 3.33
  • B = 3.0
  • B- = 2.67
  • C+ = 2.33
  • C = 2.0
  • C- = 1.67
  • D+ = 1.33
  • D = 1.0
  • D- = 0.67
  • E = 0.0
  • E1 = 0.0 Stopped attending or participating prior to end of class
  • I (incomplete) = 0.0

Additional information can be found at the following link:

http://www.registrar.ufl.edu/catalog/policies/regulationgrades.html

http://www.isis.ufl.edu/minusgrades.html

Course Evaluation:

Students are expected to provide feedback on the quality of instruction in this course. These evaluations are conducted online at https://evaluations.ufl.edu. Evaluations are typically open during the last two or three weeks of the semester, but students will be given specific times when they are open. Summary results of these assessments are available to students at https://evaluations.ufl.edu/results.

Welcome, and good luck!

Take-Home Essay 1 (due December 5 at the beginning of class)

To complete the essay, you are required to write (using third-person language only) a maximum five-page essay addressing the prompts below. You must use twelve-point font (Times New-Roman is the most economical with space), default margin settings (or 1″), and double-spaced lines (not 1.5 or 1.75 but 2 in the space setting). You will need to put a lot of thought not only into the content of the paper but also into the presentation of your response. Your essay needs to be written in a single seamless narrative, without rephrasing the questions and without listing answers in bullets. Draw on assigned readings and classroom lectures only. Do not use any other sources.

Succeeding at this task means that you will want to employ an economy of words in tightly constructed sentences and paragraphs. You should write in clear and concise language that conveys only information that is relevant to the subject. In other words, avoid becoming bogged down in minutiae, but provide the information necessary to show that you have a comprehensive understanding of the reading materials. When you respond to the questions, always think in terms of historical significance and draw on the course readings that cover the period that you are asked to discuss. Organize your paragraphs thoughtfully, ensuring they introduce a main point and remain focused on that point.

(Remember to follow the rules in the Writing Mechanics Exercise. Retrieve it from your class notebook and put it on your desk next to your computer before your begin.) Write this paper as if you are writing to educate someone who has no familiarity with this topic or the course readings. If you quote from one of the readings, either note the authors name in the sentence or the source title and page number in parenthesis at the end of the sentence. For example: According to Donald Worster in The Wealth of Nature, We have no full history of the word, but its origins appear to lie in the concept of sustained-yield. (Note that book titles are put in italics not in quotation marks. Article and chapter titles are put in quotation marks. Additionally, a quote within a quote, as sustained-yield appears here, is placed within single quotation marks. This is the only reason for using single quotation marks. )

  • Discuss the varied and complex meaning of sustainability. This discussion should also address the meaning of sustained or sustainable yield. What are the problems with sustainable yield according to Donald Worster and Robert Goodland?
  • Drawing on the reading from Susuki and Knudtson, Visions of the Natural World, and William Cronons Changes in the Land, discuss the more sustainable relationship of New England Indians with the natural world and how the ecological relationships of European settlers undermined the indigenous way of life.
  • In what way, according to William Cronon, is wilderness a constructed place? According to Roderick Nash, what was the traditional western image of wilderness and how did Romanticism, through art and literature, change that image?
  • What, according to Jennifer Price, had been the complex lesson that has come from the extinction of the passenger pigeon? (Don’t forget about the connection to natural resources.)
  • Sum up by explaining how Romanticism and how extinction as examined by Price have a place in the history of sustainability.

Good luck!