Garden on the Edge:

California and the Environmental Imagination

ITDS 301

Class meets on Thursdays from 4:00 - 6:40

This course is an exploration of the interrelationship of the human and physical environment. It examines the ways in which the environment has been imagined, exploited and conserved, and has been organized around the themes and tensions of California as an Edenic garden space, a paradise, and as a land of enormous opportunity, ripe for economic exploitation. While we offer an historical overview, our course focuses on the present state and future of California's environments and ecosystems.   Field trips will be taken to various sites that illustrate environments and issues covered in the class. Course fulfills the core requirement for California Cultural Studies and is a component of the General Education upper division linked courses: Garden on the Edge

Some questions we will explore:

• How do we study the ecological regions of California from a biological perspective?
• Where does California begin and end?
• What role has the image of California played in the disasters it has experienced?
• In what ways might California serve as a utopic or dystopic example of western assumptions about nature and its relation to the human species?
• How has California been imagined and described by modern and contemporary scientists, writers, photographers and artists?
• What are the causes and impacts of representative ecological and environmental disasters?
• What is the relationship between the human construction of California and its ecosystems?

See the Course Schedule

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