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Sustainability: Greening the Curriculum in the Humanities

Sustainability: the “S” Word
Sustainability is just a term to get a discussion going culture-wide on changes that we all need to make, on three levels—individual, governmental, and corporate. The discussion has been going on for decades—since at least Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the first Earth Day in 1970—but without much traction on the corporate level.

This new term, “sustainability,” has found favor among corporate powers because it’s derived from “sustainable development” (an oxymoron) and suggests the possibility of retaining much of the status quo while being environmentally responsible [for example: ExxonMobil Community & Society ].

The task of the humanities in regard to sustainability is to increase awareness. As a culture, we must change our consciousness, and that starts with talking about everything with sustainability in mind.

Greening the Curriculum at other Colleges
At the PSU conference last spring “Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities,” a number of faculty presented ways they were incorporating “sustainability” into the curriculum:

Willamette University, History Professor

• Applying for a grant for a new course, “Western Civilization and Sustainability”
• Asks a general question about whatever under discussion: “Was this civilization sustainable?”[ Comment: It’s generally far more effective to incorporate such questions into existing courses like this than to isolate or ghettoize them into separate courses. (It’s more effective to present African American texts in a general literature courses that everyone takes than to confine them to African American Literature courses that only those already interested sign up for.)]
• Pairs texts—an historic text with a green text, so they play off each other.
• Calls attention to what might pass unnoticed—for instance, the use of wind and water technology in the Middle Ages.

Lafayette College, English & American Studies Professor

• All 600 incoming freshman last year had to read the same text—Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma—as part of their freshman orientation.
• The professor talked the administration into letting him grow corn on the quad—since the book begins with corn, and the idea that much of the food we purchase in supermarkets has corn in it.
• Students made high fructose corn syrup from the corn; at one point a hundred people ate the corn; and they made corn husk dolls.
• Out of the experiment, a community garden started on the campus, with two acres set aside to grow food for the dining hall.
• A film studies class recorded the various events, and produced a 45-minute documentary entitled Dig the Earth.

Ideas from other faculty at the conference

• People do not change how they behave based on facts, but rather based on values.
• There needs to be an element of pathos in the curriculum to engage students; it can’t be purely intellectual.
• Often it’s something done outside the classroom that everyone does together that actually engages the students (service learning, field trips, group projects).

My Greening the Curriculum at PCC

Writing: EcoComp

• Michael McDowell, “Talking about Trees in Stumptown: Pedagogical Problems in Teaching EcoComp” [PDF] in Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment, ed. Michael P. Branch, Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998), 19-28.
• Bring in local issues relating to sustainability which also relate to everyone’s life in Portland: Bull Run Water; streetcars and light rail; urban growth boundaries; wind energy; Zip cars; downsizing one’s living quarters; locavarism; farmers’ markets’; etc. The issues in the Portland metropolitan area are not the issues elsewhere; the solutions for Portland are not the solutions that might work other places, because the people, attitudes, climate, resources, weather, and terrain are different.
• Avoid polarizing issues into opposite sides. There are always multiple ways of viewing an issue, although the popular media—meaning newspaper articles dealing with the issue—tend to see every problem as having just two sides which totally disagree with each other. The choice is seldom between an extreme “green” position and status quo.
• Connect students’ work on “green” issues with what they’re doing in other courses as well; reward cross-curricular connections, and let their new expertise in other courses benefit them in their assignments.
• Let questioning our culture’s basic assumptions about “how to live” become part of the curriculum. Change the terminology from “standard of living” to “quality of life.”
• Avoid advocating any particular cause or position, but rather present what advocates of different positions have to say, and let students choose. Avoid identifying with any one position.
• Be sure that unpopular or little-discussed positions of importance get fair treatment, and that extremist positions of little importance (which the media heavily cover) don’t dominate. Legitimate business positions require understanding, sometimes requiring an instructor’s explanation. Absurd proposals don’t need dwelling upon.
• Avoid military or courtroom models for discussion of issues. The goal is not winning, but understanding. Often every position has elements of truth and validity. Classroom discussion should leave the student needing to figure out a position for him- or herself.
• Writing 121 Fall 2009 Plans
  • Readings & essay assignment on “Home”
  • Reading & essay assignments on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food
  • Readings, research, & essay assignment on a Portland neighborhood, street, or institution
  • Readings in the e-edition of the Oregonian, free to students and instructors, to add current local issues: Log-in

Literature: Ecocriticism

Resources

Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE): Teaching Resources

Adamson, Joni, and Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2002.

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the US and Beyond. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard UP, 2001.

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.

Devall, Bill, and George Sessions. Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered. Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, 1985.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.

Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium (HEASC).

Love, Glen. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.

McKibben, Bill. Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. New York: Holt-Times, 2007.

Portland State University. Sustainability Home Page.

Smith, Alisa, and J. B. MacKinnon. Plenty: Eating Locally on the 100-Mile Diet. New York: Three Rivers, 2007.

Waage, Frederick O., ed. Teaching Environmental Literature: Materials, Methods, Resources. New York: MLA, 1985.