Life on Earth: New course focuses on sustainability
By Jim Barlow, News Bureau Staff Writer 217-333-58022; jebarlow@illinois.edu
The textbook for a new elective course last spring was a cartoon guide. The professor was outside her specialty. However, she and her 13 students – most of them upper-level undergraduates – took the class seriously. After all, the focus was life on Earth and the future of civilized society. The new course, “The Challenge of a Sustainable Earth System,” is offered by the UI department of geology. It ponders the course of human survival amid rapid population growth and dwindling resources. The challenge is big. For example, one homework assignment had the students creating their own ecological footprint, an exercise that considered the rates of consumption and resource utilization of themselves or that of a family member. One student found that it would take 16 planet Earths if everyone now alive lived the lifestyle of her father. In a world whose population is projected to rise from 6.4 billion to 9.3 billion by 2050, the challenge of sustaining any individual’s level of life, let alone that of many societies and countries, is staggering. The object of the assignment was to stimulate resolutions for how individuals might change their behaviors for the good of the planet. The underlying theme of the course, sustainability, is difficult to define, said Susan W. Kieffer, the Charles R. Walgreen Jr. Chair and professor of geology. “It’s easier to define what is not sustainable,” she said. “We go with a variation on the Brundtland report, which says that sustainability ‘is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.’ “ The Brundtland Report was issued in 1987 as “Our Common Future” by the World Health Organization headed by Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway. It stated that a direct link exists between the economy and environment; the needs of the poor in all nations must be met; to protect the environment, the economic conditions of the world’s poor must be improved; and “in all our actions, we must consider the impact upon future generations.” Kieffer’s spring-only course should be on the radar screen for all students at Illinois, said Joe Brewer, a graduate student in atmospheric sciences from Wheaton, Mo., who took the course last spring. “It is such an important subject,” he said. “It is the question of our times: Can we find a way to live sustainably? If yes, then we will be forced to change our behaviors substantially. If no, then catastrophe will rebalance the Earth. “All too often, our education is merely job training. Too rarely do undergraduate students experience directly the intellectual and emotional needs of our planet that beckon us,” Brewer said. “Sue has put together a course that seeks to connect the knowledge students gain with a sense of responsibility and introspection about how we affect our world.” Kieffer is an expert on fluid dynamics, which considers such things as the movement of water and wind, volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts, but this new course is her passion. The course can accommodate up to 20 students. “I enjoy teaching this course - a lot. It is an adventure to teach something you have no experience with, but it is important to nurture leadership in sustainability,” she said. “Our children and grandchildren will inherit a different world. The whole planet is now interconnected, and we are using up resources that took millions of years to form.” Last spring, the discussion-oriented class used “The Cartoon Guide to the Environment,” by Larry Gonick and Alice Outwater, as a textbook. The book, by way of cartoons, covers chemical cycles, life communities, human population growth and global warming. The class also read and discussed “The State of the Planet,” a series of articles that appeared in 2003 in Science magazine, and students reviewed a book on ecology. One day each week the students came armed with notes about a current event. “We were challenged to find both good and bad news stories from around the world,” said Nicole Bettinardi of Downers Grove, Ill., now a graduate student in geology. “I was already aware of the negatives of today, but the positive advances in science and procedure in various countries were very interesting, and encouraging, to hear about.” A homework assignment that had students envisioning life for future generations was an eye-opener, Brewer said. The students selected eight or more properties of a society and tracked them seven generations both backward and forward. “It was incredibly thought-provoking, because I had to imagine what the world may be like in specific ways as humans continue to significantly alter our planet is unprecedented ways,” he said. A group project had each student randomly playing the role of a world leader or other affected individual to argue about keeping or removing megadams. They focused on the histories, goals and environmental problems of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China. Their work resulted in a 34-page report to a ficticious National Academy of Sustainability. The students, Kieffer said, learned the difficulties of reaching a consensus on a controversial topic. They concluded that neither keeping nor removing the Glen Canyon Dam was the answer. They recommended that output should be lowered “in an attempt to re-mediate the river’s natural flow” and that the dam should become a living museum to educate the public about the “uses and misuses, hazards and securities that such a dam can offer.” The students in the initial class last spring were guinea pigs, so “sometimes it was a little rough around the edges, but Sue is very passionate about this subject, and it showed, so that helped a lot,” Bettinardi said. “Her teaching style required us to interact with her and the class, and the class was effectively one big discussion group, aided by assigned papers or projects.” Next spring’s primary textbook will be still be “The Cartoon Guide,” and students may tackle either forest or soil management as a group project. In early November, Kieffer will discuss her course at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, in a special topical session on teaching sustainability. She will describe how she tried “to balance reality and pessimism with optimism and action ideas.” Kieffer is the one of two Walgreen Chairs at Illinois. She earned her doctorate in planetary sciences in 1971 from the California Institute of Technology. She also holds degrees in physics, mathematics, geological sciences and planetary sciences. Kieffer will host a forum on sustainability in April. The forum, “Planet Earth’s Challenges to Human Survival,” is funded by the Walgreen Endowment.
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