Mounting concerns about a variety of environmental issues, from pollution to global warming to the extinction of species, have begun to inform the practices in art, design and media. Those concerns imply forms of action being taken about those issues. But what ethical assumptions underlie various actions? Is it a concern for human well-being? For animals? For all life? Or, even more broadly, for ecosystems? In other words, which things count ethically? The primary goal of this course is to prepare students to understand and to critically evaluate various ethical perspectives on human beings' interactions with nature and these perspectives' applications to environmental issues. An important secondary goal is to provide students with tools to integrate those perspectives into their practice as cultural workers.
Course Content (for this specific offering of the course)
In this particular course we will consider how written, oral, visual, and digital discourses frame human relationships to the land, the sea, our watersheds, and the non-human (animal, plant, mineral)—in short, to the ecological systems that we depend upon. We may mull on the space between ecological ethics and environmental justice, as well as what constitutes an ecological praxis in the process of exploring ethics as an open question, an ongoing dialogue, an ability to listen and to respond with reflection, creative acts, and lifelong learning. We will engage with questions of how to foster respectful relations to place, specifically the unceded Coast Salish territories on which we are situated, as well as places further away that we may not have seen but that we nevertheless rely on.
- Teacher: Rita Wong