Foundation Seminars

• Instructor: Professor Mark Spiro, Biology: Sustainable Harvest

  Wendell Berry famously said, "Eating is an agricultural act." This quote alludes to the social, economic and environmental impacts of our daily consumption of food.

  Through food and agriculture, we will explore societal connections to the biological fields of evolution, ecology, botany and human nutrition.

   

• Instructor: Professor Chris Camuto, English: Exploring Nature/Writing Prose

  We will read a classic text in environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, to give ourselves a scholarly, historical background for our field trips around the region.

  This will enable us to discuss the history of land use back through Colonial times as a way of thinking about current sustainability issues. We will learn to use field guides as a way of engaging a scientific understanding of nature and as a means for stimulating creative thought about nature.

  We will study the work of three authors — Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and E. O. Wilson — to show the development of environmental awareness, and the evolving terms of its concerns, during the past half-century.

  Since these scientists are also superb writers, we will use them as examples of how to write effectivity, in both an empirical and an imaginative way, about nature.