Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of the course with a C or better, students should be able to:

1. Identify, define, and evaluate kinds of environmental literature.
2. Identify and explain the strategies which poets, novelists, essayists and other writers have used to address environmental questions.
3. Use the methods of literary analysis and literary history to identify changing trends in environmental tropes and concerns.
4. Apply an understanding of environmental literature to explain the interconnected environmental effects of everyday decisions we make as individuals and a culture.
5. Critically examine the complex and interconnected relationship between human behavior and  the environment through a lens of sustainability and the “triple bottom line” of people, planet, and profit.

Class meeting time may include lecture, videos, discussion, small-group discussion, in-class writings, and perhaps guest speakers. Students may post blogs or messages and comment on other students’ postings. Out-of-class activities may include field trips to local manifestations of the content of the readings; regular observations of a particular outdoor environment throughout the term; and a service-learning project engaged with the environment.

Instructors vary on methods of assessment, but generally instructors employ some combination of quizzes, exams, essays, reading notebooks, and observation journals. Students who miss more than a week's worth of class may not receive an A; those who miss two weeks' worth of class may not pass the course. The final grade is generally based upon the quality and extent of students' understanding of the course readings and discussions, as demonstrated in writings, discussion in class, and conferences.

Themes

• Relationship between people and landscape
• Sustainability
• Environmental justice

Concepts

• Bioregion
• Ecosystem
• Nature
• Natural resources
• Nature deficit disorder
• Ecological literacy
• Dwelling in Place
• Topophilia
• Edges
• Liminal character
• Garden
• Pastoral
• The commons
• The frontier
• Savages
• Manifest destiny
• American exceptionalism
• The built environment vs. the natural environment
• Economic centralization vs. decentralization
• The Great Economy
• Secondary lands
• National sacrifice zones
• Ecofeminism
• Peak oil
• Climate change