Foundation Seminar Options

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

  The theme for the Environmental Residential College is “cultivated spaces, wild places: nature and sustainability.” Through a variety of field trips and projects on the Bucknell Farm (a five-acre on-campus site), the program encourages the first-hand experience of both cultivated nature (especially sustainable forms of agriculture) and remnant “wild nature” (nature reserves of various kinds). This course pursues those program goals through readings and creative writing assignments designed to deepen students’ awareness of the history of interaction between culture and nature in this region. This course is an introduction to ways of observing, thinking, reading and writing about nature in a variety of creative prose forms.

   

• 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. Sustainable Harvest will engage students in an interactive, discussion- and project-based course that will consider how our food choices and national agricultural policies affect our health, the natural environment and the lives of others. We will use our common hour to investigate the wild and cultivated landscape of the Susquehanna Valley, meet with local farmers and take part in projects involving the Bucknell Farm.