JSIS 351 B The Global Environment

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JSIS 351 B

The Global Environment

Course Introduction

Professor Celia Lowe: contact your instructor through Canvas Mail. She will respond within 48 hours.

Welcome to The Global Environment! With the first images taken of Earth from space, it became obvious that we live in a globally connected ecosphere, and humans share a common destiny with each other and with other living creatures. At the same time, anthropologists, geographers, and other social scientists observe that human disparities in wealth and power indicate that the benefits of environmental use and the burdens of environmental decline are not distributed equally. This five-credit course explores the human and environmental implications of living in an economically globalized and physically interconnected world. By the end of the course, you will understand these implications through examples of toxins in the human body, biodiversity conservation, climate change, and environmental movements. Lectures will be presented using voice-over PowerPoint technology.

Course Objectives

My goals for you in this course are that you will appreciate environmental issues at a variety of scales, and that you will value both biophysical interconnectedness and social disparity in relation to the global environment.

By the end of this course, you will be able to

· analyze environmental issues, taking both physical and social interconnectedness into account; and

· use several theoretical concepts to interpret contemporary environmental issues.

Course Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course. You should be prepared to do some independent online and field research activities for the course.

Technology Requirements

There are no technology requirements for the course other than a computer with internet access. You should have speakers or headphones, since lectures will be presented as narrated PowerPoint presentations.

Completion Requirements

To successfully complete this course, you must do the following:

study the reading notes and read all the assigned readings;

listen to all lecture materials and complete the lecture quizzes;

complete and submit all five project assignments; and

actively contribute to each lesson's online discussion topic as specified in each lesson.

Communicating with Your Instructor and Student Peers

In addition to contacting the instructor through Canvas Mail, your course offers the following tools for communication:

· profiles, where you can post information about yourself—your instructor may have specific instructions about what to post; and

· discussion forums, where you can post your opinions, research results, or structured responses to a question, and carry on a conversation with your classmates.

Course Materials

You will be required to purchase the following textbooks:

· Kolbert, Elizabeth. Fieldnotes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. ASIN: B001TKBLGM

· Lowe, Celia. Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0691124629

· Steingraber, Sandra. Having Faith. Cambridge: Perseus, 2001. ISBN-13: 978-0425189993

One book, several book chapters, and articles are also posted online for you to read.

About This Course

This course is divided into five units. The first unit constitutes an introduction to the Global Environment, and subsequent units explore the environment by starting with the small scale of the human body, and moving up to larger scales of landscape and atmosphere. The final section on environmentalism is intended to assess actions taken in the name of the environment. Here we examine different scales of governance that are necessary to take action on environmental issues.

Each unit includes three main lectures:

· a “main lesson,” which is a unit overview;

· a set of reading notes on the assigned readings; and

· a lecture that digs down into a specific theme or concept.

In each unit, you will be asked to

·  complete a quiz;

·  post on a discussion board; and finally

·  complete a major assignment for each unit. These assignments will be activities that allow you to explore the topic in greater depth and to show what you have learned.

Discussion Forums

Each unit has its own discussion forum. These forums are designed to allow you to express your understanding of each topic, and to hear back from and share ideas with other students in the course through a threaded online discussion format. The instructor will post a prompt question that you will respond to.

Knowledge Checks

The lectures will provide you with opportunities to test your own grasp of the material by answering short questions and receiving the correct answers immediately. These activities are not graded; they are provided for your benefit, and you may use them to assess your own progress.

There will also be opportunities to apply what you are learning to new situations by speculating, predicting, and so on. These activities are not graded; they are provided to help you grasp the relevance of the course material to your own life or to your neighborhood, city, state, or nation and so on.

About the Units

The Global Environment has five learning units: Unit 1 (Understanding the Global in the Global Environment),  Unit 2 (The Body in the Environment), Unit 3 (Biodiversity Conservation: Preserving the Parts),  Unit 4 (Climate Change), and Unit 5 (Environmentalism in International Perspective).

· Unit 1: Understanding the Global in the Global Environment: This unit constitutes both an introduction to the course, and an opportunity for you to explore the global as a scale of analysis.

· Unit 2: The Body and the Environment: When we think of environmental degradation, we usually think at the level of the landscape and how forest, rivers, or seas are harmed. This unit looks at the body as a landscape that experiences both environmental harm and risk.

· Unit 3: Biodiversity Conservation: Preserving the Parts: Moving up from the scale of the body to the scale of species and their conservation within landscapes, this unit puts biodiversity conservation in perspective. It focuses on how plans to preserve and protect biodiversity often consider the aesthetic and scientific values of nature while ignoring and even marginalizing the communities that use that nature for their livelihoods.

· Unit 4: Climate Change: This unit explores why scientists are so convinced of anthropogenic (human-made) climate change, and why there is still a controversy over the science. It also examines the health implications of climate change.

· Unit 5: Environmentalism in International Perspective: This final unit concludes the course with an examination of action taken on behalf of the environment. It places environmentalism in the context of local, state, national, and international governance.

Each unit has three graded components:

· quizzes on readings and lectures;

· participation in the discussion forum; and

· a major unit assignment.  

The unit assignments are as follows:

· Unit One: you will select an image or set of related images that will allow you to discuss the materials from Unit 1. Use Google Images, Wikipedia Commons Images, or another search engine of your choice. You will do a critical reading of the image, identifying its elements of physical, economic, and social interconnection.

· Unit Two: Explore the world of your own chemical exposure. Find some synthetic chemicals that you are exposed to in your own world and research the possible consequences of these exposures. Use the book A Small Dose of Toxicology found in the files folder for this class and at least one other academic article. If you cannot find your toxin in this book, or any scholarly research on your toxin, please find another toxin to research.

· Unit Three: Assess a conservation area. Visit a park, a zoo, a wilderness area or another location with a conservation mission. Your task is to develop a political ecology narrative of this place.

· Unit Four: Climate News: You will find and analyze a story on climate change and human health in the news media. Please pick a story where you can identify some ecosyndemic interactions.

· Unit Five: You will choose an environmental issue and evaluate it from two different perspectives: the individual and the collective.

Assignment Submission Guidelines

You will submit your unit assignments by using the "Upload a file" link in each assignment. See individual assignments for more details. You will receive an assessment of your work in the form of a rubric score together with detailed individual feedback and a grade from your instructor.

Late Work

Every now and then work will be late. There is one uniform policy for late work regardless of the reason that it is late. Once the Canvas site has indicated a late submission, the work is deemed late. You will lose 10% per day for late work. After 10 days, the work will not be accepted. No work may be late in the last module of the course. Late work will not be accepted after the last day on the course schedule.

Assessment and Grading

In this course, you are assessed and graded on three key elements:

· quizzes on lectures and readings;

· participation in discussion forums; and

· unit assignments

Grading

Component	Points per Unit	Total
Quizzes	20	100
Discussion Forums	10	50
Unit Assignments	50	250
TOTAL		400

Study Tips

Get started on each unit early in the week, and try to set aside a specific time for studying and completing assignments.

Be sure to view the unit introduction video on the Overview page for each unit.

Follow the Suggested Workflow on the Overview page to complete all parts of the unit.

Take notes on any unfamiliar words or concepts. If you still have questions by the end of the unit, contact your instructor.

Use the general discussion forum to stay in touch with your fellow students by asking or answering questions

 Start working on the next assignment right at the beginning of the unit to keep a steady pace. This will guarantee that you make timely progress through the course.  

About the Developer

Celia Lowe is Professor of Anthropology and International Studies and is both the developer and the instructor for The Global Environment. She joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology in 1999 and the Jackson School of International Studies in 2010, and she came to her position from the graduate program at Yale University. She has studied biodiversity conservation, climate change, and avian influenza in Indonesia, and her research focuses on social studies of science and technology. She has taught courses on society and environment as well as Southeast Asian studies, including study abroad in Indonesia, and now loves to teach in the online format.