Nature, Culture & Agriculture (advanced seminar, Hungary)



Ethics, Ideas, and Nature

EVRN/HIST 336-syllabus & schedule—Fall 2014—TuTh 1-2:15pm—location?

Instructor: Gregory T. Cushman, Assoc. Prof. of International Environmental History

Office: Wescoe Hall 3606 Office hours: Tu Th 11-12 (and by appointment)

Office phone: 785.864.9449 E-mail: gcushman@ku.edu

Graduate teaching assistant:

Office: Office hours: E-mail:

Note: We greatly prefer to interact with you in person—after class, or in office hours. Please first address questions regarding graded assignments to your GTA.

Course overview and objectives

What duties do humans have toward the land, water, air, and creatures that inhabit them? What are the historical roots of our troubled relationship with our planetary home? How do we balance the necessities and desires of contemporary society with those of other earthly inhabitants—both present and future? What ramifications does the discovery that our species is altering the evolutionary and geological trajectory of the planet have for our individual and group behavior? What can be done to overcome the historical legacies of injustices inherited from our forebears?

These questions are fundamental to the study of environmental history, philosophy, and ethics. This course will examine the history of environmental ideas and ethical frameworks for thinking about, using, and protecting the natural world. It will adopt a global, comparative perspective with an emphasis on the modern condition. Students will be introduced to both human-centered and environment-centered approaches to understanding human-nature interactions and will be required to apply ethical theories and decision making to environmental issues, both past and present. The main goal of this class is to equip students with perspectives and skills of critical thought necessary for the practical consideration of basic, everyday questions of value, right, wrong, and responsibility, while developing skills of written and oral communication.

Goal five of the KU Core requires the completion of coursework or participation in other forms of engaged learning (such as the participation in an Alternative Break or completion of a Certificate for Service Learning) explicitly designed to help students develop “a strong sense of intellectual integrity and moral behavior, recognize ethical issues in a variety of settings, enhance social and civic responsibility, and gain an awareness of and sensitivity for their physical and social environment.” By the end of this course, students should be able to demonstrate:

• understanding of the historical development of attitudes toward nature and the influence of these attitudes on human action across time (e.g. viewing nature as an essence that imbues and informs the workings of the world; viewing nature as a physical place or collection of phenomena separate from human affairs; using nature as an inspiration, guide, or source of authority for human affairs)

• understanding of alternatives ways of conceiving of nature, its value, and the moral imperatives they entail (e.g. theocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric, ecocentric, and neo-Darwinian positions)

• understanding of subjective (personal) and objective (systemic) strategies for approaching the modern ecological crisis

• the ability to thoughtfully apply these perspectives, strategies, and codes of behavior to resolve ethical dilemmas (e.g. treatment of animals, selection of household products), including instances in which important values are in conflict.

Textbooks

Coates, Peter. Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times. 2nd ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.

Kohák, Erazim. The Green Halo: A Bird's-Eye View of Ecological Ethics. Chicago: Open Court, 2000.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Paul, Richard, and Linder Elder. The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools. Tomales, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2009.

The instructor will also assign a number of brief readings, including book chapters, journal articles, and segments of primary sources. These will be distributed on Blackboard, and students need to follow posted announcements closely.

Evaluation standards: This course will involve lectures, a great deal of interactive discussion, and role playing exercises. Therefore, students MUST do outside reading, attend class regularly, and actively participate for the course to be successful. Overall letter grades are based on grades received on assignments weighted as follows: attendance and class participation 00%, weekly journals , weekly essays 00%, final exam 00%. 88-100% = A, 73-87% = B, 55-72% = C, 50-54% = D, 0-49% = F. Assignments are typically graded on a ten-point scale or pass/fail; +/- grades are granted in exceptional circumstances, such as to reward improvement over the course of the semester or penalize poor attendance & participation.

Written assignments: Students should use 12-point Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins, and double space. Organize each essay to defend a central argument, expressed in a succinct thesis statement. The instructor will provide more detailed guidelines for each specific assignment. The KU Writing Center (in Anschutz Library) provides trained peer consultants to help you brainstorm, draft, or edit your writing. Please check the website at writing.ku.edu for current locations and hours. It welcomes both drop-ins and appointments, and there is no charge for the services. For more information, please call 864-2399 or e-mail writing@ku.edu.

Weekly journal: At the beginning of class every Tuesday that class meets, students are required to turn in a single, 1-2 page journal entry (250-300 words) that applies an aspect of class content to some recent event or personal experience. Each journal entry should explicitly discuss the ethical dilemmas and competing values illustrated by this event or experience and seek to provide a resolution.

These may be written in manuscript on a standard-sized sheet or typewritten following the above rules; students who turn in illegible entries will be required to type future work. Incoherent or hastily written entries will not be accepted. Entries based on a publication (including web sites) should include a bibliographic citation and brief summary of the piece. Students should come to class prepared to discuss their observations.

Students can get extra credit for the week:

a) by turning in an entry based on a non-English language publication (for 1.5x credit);

b) by turning in an entry based on a cultural experience that involves a public display, performance, lecture, or any other participatory event related to humanity’s engagement with the environment (for 2x credit) (Mass media performances, such as TV and radio broadcasts, internet sites, will not fulfill this requirement.)

Policy on academic dishonesty: Academic misconduct by a student shall include, but not be limited to disruption of classes; threatening an instructor or fellow student in an academic setting, giving or receiving of unauthorized aid on examinations or in the preparation of assignments; knowingly misrepresenting the source of any academic work; unauthorized change of grades; unauthorized use of University approvals or forging of signatures; falsification of research results; plagiarizing of another’s work; violation of regulations or ethical codes for the treatment of human and animal subjects; or otherwise acting dishonestly in classwork or research. IGNORANCE IS NOT A VALID EXCUSE. Academic misconduct will result in sanctions. Nonetheless, students are encouraged to discuss projects and course content with each other, as long as they contribute their own, original work. Students are explicitly prohibited from sharing exam responses.

Make-up policy: Late assignments will not be accepted. If you neglect to turn in an exam or other assignment due to very exceptional circumstances (e.g. documented severe illness) and feel you should be granted an exception, please ensure that the course coordinator and your GTA are contacted as soon as possible.

Accommodations for students with disabilities: Accommodations will be made for students with documented disabilities. It is your responsibility to provide the course coordinator with documentation and arrange for any special accommodations well in advance of examinations.

Copyright notice: All material presented in lectures is the exclusive property of the listed instructors ©2015. These materials may not be published, posted to the internet, broadcast, or redistributed in any medium without explicit, written permission.

SCHEDULE

Week 1

Introduction: What is critical thought?

What is nature? Historicizing the ideal

Core reading: Coates ch 1; Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking

For further reading: Plumwood, “Being Prey”; Williams, “Ideas of Nature” (1980)

Week 2

Foundations of natural philosophy: From the Ancient Near East to medieval Christendom

Core reading: Coates ch 2, 3; selections from Glacken reader pt 1, pt 2; selections from the Hebrew Bible and Qur’an; White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967)

For further reading: Glacken, introductory essays to pt 1, 2 in Traces on the Rhodian Shore; selections from Aristotle, Meteorologica

Application. Role playing exercise: What is the environmental legacy of the Abrahamic religions?

Week 3

The advent of modernity and challenge of non-Western cultures

Core reading: Coates ch 4, 5; selections from Glacken reader pt 3; selections from contact narratives in the Pacific

For further reading: Glacken, Traces, introductory essay to pt 3, 4

Week 4

The modern tension: Arcadian vs imperial views of nature

Core reading: Coates ch 6, 7; selections from Humboldt; Shiva, “Decolonizing the North” in Ecofeminism

For further reading:

Application. Role playing exercise: What is the environmental legacy of colonialism?

Week 5

Developing a sense of place: Here & there

Core reading: Leopold, “A Sand County Almanac,” “Chihuahua and Sonora”

For further reading:

Application: Campus tour

Week 6

The foundations of moral philosophy

Human-animal relations

Core reading: Kohák intro, pt 1

For further reading: Abelson and Friquegnon, Ethics for Modern Life; Van Wyk, Introduction to Ethics; Callicott, “Multicultural Environmental Ethics” (2001); Nash, “Ethical Extension and Radical Environmentalism,” in Rights of Nature; Shepard, “The Others: How Animals Made Us Human”; Lyman, “Mad Cowboy”; Singer, “All Animals Are Equal” (1974); Feinberg, “The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations” (1974); Harrison, Animal Machines: The New Farming Industry (1964); Singer, Animal Factories

Application: Role-playing exercise: Meat, mercy, and/or sustainable farming?

Week 7

Approaches. The ethics of blood & soil: Indigeneity & the natural world

Core reading: Callicott, “South American Eco-eroticism” (1994); ch. 2 of The Huarochiri Manuscript

For further reading: Bolin, selection from Rituals of Respect; Medicine Eagle, “The Rainbow Bridge”; Black Elk, “The Sun Dance”; Chief Seattle, “This Land is Sacred” (1853); N. Scott Momaday, “An American Land Ethic” (1970) and “A First American Views the Land” (1976); LaDuke, “The Seventh Generation” (1999); Byers, “Mohondoro: Spirit Lions and Sacred Forests”; Krech, “Pleistocene Extinctions” from The Ecological Indian; Friedel, et al., ch. of Maya Cosmos

Approaches. The ethics of the fear of the lord and reverence for life

Core reading: Kohák pt 2:i,ii,iv

For further reading: Gottlieb, This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (2004); Haught, “Christianity and Ecology”; Kaza, “To Save All Beings: Buddhist Environmental Activism”; See and Fleming, “Evolutionary Remembering”; Stone, “Should Trees Have Standing?”; Attfield “The Good of Trees” (1981); selections from John Muir; selections from Albert Schweitzer; Taylor, Respect for Nature (1986); Baer, “Land Misuse: A Theological Concern,” Christian Century 83 (1966)

Week 8

Approaches. The ethics of noble humaniity: Utilitarianism & the technocratic ideal

Core reading: Kohák pt 2:iii; Pinchot, “Principles of Conservation, from The Fight for Conservation” (1910); Kelman, “Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Ethical Critique”

For further reading: Mill, “Utilitarianism”; Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Bentham, “Principles of Penal Law”; Gore, “Global Marshall Plan” in Earth in the Balance.

Application. Codes of ethics—the Society of Professional Engineers; role playing exercise Gilbane Gold and the whistle-blowing dilemma

Week 9

From approaches to strategies: the land ethic

Core reading: Kohák pt2:v; Leopold, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” “Wilderness,” “The Land Ethic”

For further reading: Callicott, Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic

From approaches to strategies: deep ecology & deep identification

Core reading: Kohák pt3:i,ii,iii

For further reading: Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep” (1972); Naess, “Idenfication as a Source of Deep Ecological Attitudes” (1985); Naess, “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects” (1986); Devall and Sessions, selection from Deep Ecology (1985); Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism: A Third World Critique”; Smith, “Dance to Heal the Earth”;

Application: Participate in a deep identification ritual

Week 10

From approaches to strategies. The ethics of noble self-interest: the commons and the lifeboat

Core reading: Kohák pt2:vi; Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968); Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor”

For further reading: Hardin, “Living on a Lifeboat”; Mies, “New Reproductive Technologies”; Rose, “Liberty, Property, Environmentalism”; Singer “Famine, affluence, and morality” (1972); Castro, Geopolitics of Hunger; Vogt, “A Continent Slides to Ruin”

From approaches to strategies: Can ecology provide a guideline? Gaia, sociobiology, and the biodiversity ideal

Core reading: Kohák pt3:v,vi,vii; Worster, “Ecology of Order and Chaos”; Van Driesche and Van Driesche, “After the Sheep Are Gone”

For further reading: Whyte, “The Elephant Management Dilemma”; Willott, “Restoring Nature, without Mosquitoes?”

Application. The challenge of restoration ecology: expanding the Prairie Acre, replacing the Baker Wetland (field trip)

Week 11

Strategies: Communitarian approaches, nonviolence, and environmental justice

Core reading: Thoreau, “On Civil Disobedience”; Curtin, “Gandhi’s Vision of Community Development” in Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World (2005); Principles of Environmental Justice (1993)

For further reading: 1st National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit statement; R D Bullard, Dumping in Dixie (1990); Carl Anthony, “Why Blacks Should Be Environmentalists” (1990)

Strategies: Ecofeminism

Core reading: Kohák pt3:iv; Vogt, Shiva, “Women and Children Last”; Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion”

For further reading: Merchant, “Women and Ecology” in The Death of Nature (1980); Ruether, “Ecofeminism”; Eisler, “Messages from the Past: The World of the Goddess”; Shiva, “The Chipko Women’s Concept of Freedom”; Warren, “The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism”; Mies and Shiva, Ecofeminism; Reuther, From Gaia to God (1994); Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy (2000)

Application: The population problem

Week 12

Strategies: Ecology & ideology

Core reading: Kohák pt 3:viii; Coates ch 8

For further reading: Bookchin, “Deep versus social ecology” (1988); Bookchin and Foreman, “Ecology and the Left” in Defending the Earth (1991); special issue of Dissent Magazine on Earth Day (1970)

Application: Accomplishing the sustainability ideal

Core reading: Thiele, Sustainability, intro, ch 1-2; Kohák postscript

For further reading: Sharma, “On Sustainability”; Krieger, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?”; Sagoff, “Do We Consume Too Much?”; Gambrel and Cafaro, “The Virtue of Simplicity”; J K Galbraith, “How Much Should a Country Consume?” (1958)

Application option: Role-playing : Can the virtue of simplicity solve the ecological crisis?

Application option: Sustainability principles in material engineering (with Prof. Lin)

Application option: Sustainability in university operations (with Jeff Severin)

Application option: Sustainability in city management (with Eileen Horn, Douglas Co. Sustainability Coordinator)

Week 13

Application: Toxicants & the precautionary principle

Core reading: Langston, “The Retreat from Precaution”; Ingram, “Interview with César Chávez”

For further reading: Carson, “The Obligation to Endure: From Silent Spring” (1962); Pollan, “The (Agri)cultural Contradictions of Obesity”; Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and empire”; Wright, The Death of Ramón González; film: Harvest of Fear (U.S., 2001, 120 min.); film The Story of Stuff; Langston, Toxic Bodies; Chávez, “Wrath of Grapes Speech” (1986); Ray Gonzales, “Hazardous Cargo” (2002)

Application: Fair trade, free trade, and transnational ethics: coffee and soy in Brazil (with Chris Brown)

Core reading:

For further reading:

Application: Toxicants in the household environment: from production to consumption. Using the Environmental Working Group guides to healthy cosmetics and household cleansers

Application: From traditional to non-toxic methods of printmaking (with Brian Storm)

Week 14

Application: Pesticides, biotechnology, and the precautionary principle

Core reading:

For further reading:

Application. Climate ethics: competing goods and duties toward future generations

Core reading: Gardiner, “A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics, and the Problem of Corruption”; Fleming, “The Climate Engineers”

Application: the challenges of creating legal frameworks for climate (with Uma Outka)

For further reading: Jamieson, “Ethics, Public Policy, and Global Warming”; Goodin, “Selling Environmental Indulgences”; Gardiner, et al. Climate Ethics; Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm; selection from Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt; R L Cunningham, “Ethics, Ecology, and the Rights of Future Generations,” Modern Age 19 (1975)

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