MTSU Students for Environmental Action

 

MTSU agriculture sells fresh produce weekly at Small Farming Market

 

 

The new twice-a-week MTSU Small Farming Market will have fresh produce grown on the university farm in Lascassas, Tennessee, available for sale to the campus community.

MTSU School of Agriculture faculty and student workers will be offering the sale from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every Thursday and Friday, or until they run out of produce, said associate professor Song Cui, market organizer.

Beginning Thursday, Aug. 25, School of Agriculture faculty will hold MTSU Small Farming Markets from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every Thursday and Friday this fall while the fresh produce lasts. The market will be set up outside the Horticulture Building, 1704 Lightning Way. (MTSU file photo by Randy Weiler)

The first week wrapped up quickly — by 11:30 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 25, and it will be closed Friday, Aug. 26, because they sold out of veggies. Organizers will return Thursday, Sept. 1.

The farmer’s markets will be held outside the Horticulture Building, 1704 Lightning Way. Organizers plan to conduct the sales throughout the fall. Short-term parking is available outside the building and in nearby lots for vehicles showing MTSU parking permits. To find the building, go here.

Dr. Song Cui

No chemicals are involved with the growing of the produce, Cui said, adding that MTSU agriculture students are learning how to grow the vegetables.

Organizers plan to conduct the sales throughout the fall.

This week, the produce included:

• Four varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

• Three varieties of bell peppers.

• Two varieties of cucumbers and jalapeno peppers.

• One variety of eggplant.

• One variety of okra.

Prices will be one for $3 and two for $5. Customers may pay by cash, check (payable to MTSU) or credit card.

The produce will be placed in 6-by 6-foot trays (tomatoes), in bunches (for carrots when they become available) or in bags after washing (lettuce when it becomes available.)

For more information, contact Cui by email at Song.Cui@mtsu.edu.

The School of Agribusiness and Agriscience is one of 11 departments in the College of Basic and Applied Sciences.

— Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)

The Biggest Little Farm is a 2018 American documentary film, directed by John Chester. The film profiles the life of John Chester and his wife Molly as they acquire and establish themselves on Apricot Lane Farms in Moorpark, California.

In 2010, married couple Molly and John Chester decide to leave their old lives in Los Angeles behind and purchase an abandoned, 81-acre farm near Moorpark in neighboring Ventura County, California. Rechristening it "Apricot Lane Farms", the couple spends the next seven years transforming the arid landscape into a fully functional farm and biodiverse habitat for neighboring flora and fauna. They face hardship as the difficulties of keeping a farm running mount up, often resulting in frustration and anger, but also happiness at their harmonious relationship with nature.

Questions Sep 1

 WB 81-131

1. Was Mark Twain an important influence in your early life? 81 (He was in mine, growing up not too far from Hannibal MO...) Did Twain (Sam Clemens) lack "magnanimity"? 88
2. Do you think "the need to flow, to move outward," to "light out for the Territory" (83-6) and leave one's homeplace has been on balance a good thing for Americans, for the natural and social environments, and for the stability of life generally? Has it stunted our maturity, eviscerated our communities, impaired our relationships? Or do you think westward expansion and personal mobility have been and are mostly good things?
3. Is Aristotle's analysis of tragic drama a clue to what's wrong with our contemporary communal life? 87
4. Is it unusual to encounter regionalists who are not "provincial"? 89
5. Is WB right about our historical "self-righteousness" and the likelihood that our generation will be judged to have been deplorable? 90
6. Do you agree with WB's assessments of globalism and abstraction as "Territories" of escape from responsibility? 91
7. Do you agree with WB about the proper "context of literature"? 93 Can the same be said about philosophy, and every other humanistic discipline?
8. Do you share WB's interpretation of Emerson's statement about suffering? 94
9. Is going home for you a "return to happiness"? 96 If so, are you sure you're not being "sentimental"?
10. Have you ever inadvertently committed "Damage" like WB's pond? 98f. If so, did you learn an important environmental lesson?
11. Do you share WB's sense of the necessity of collecting stories, just as the earth must collect leaves etc., in order to create and sustain a living culture? 103f. How do you think are we doing, in terms of sustaining our local, national, and global cultures? Do we live in a "diminished country"? 104
12. Are our standards too much set by "television and salesmen and outside experts"? 105
13. Do you regret the absence, in most American places now, of the institution of "sittng till bedtime"? 107
14. Is it bad that "succession has given way to supersession"? 111
15. COMMENT?: "the universities are more and more the servants of government and the corporations"...

Add your questions and comments, especially on The Unsettling of America...

==

One of Wendell's biggest fans. He narrates the audiobook version of World-Ending Fire, quite affectingly.

Propaganda

	Art of Manliness ⁦‪@artofmanliness‬⁩ I Want You . . . To Put Away Your Smartphone: Propaganda Posters for the Modern Age buff.ly/3Axfkdn pic.twitter.com/nFPR7cDTWz   8/30/22, 11:57 AM

Aristotle & Wendell

LISTEN. Today in Environmental Ethics we're receiving more Wendell Berry. 

I choose that word deliberately. Wendell's wisdom is a gift, a receipt to treasure. The astute hypothetical aliens who might ask for more Chuck would do well to ask for another Berry too.

In CoPhi it's time for Aristotle. That serendipitously coincides with the lead-off slot I've been graciously asked to fill in the Honors Fall Lecture Series. 

My CoPhi Section #12 will thus crash their party on the other side of campus at 2:40 this afternoon, where we'll consider Aristotle on friendship and happiness. I'm likely to bring Wendell into that conversation as well. I've already noticed some affinity between he and Socrates, now I think I also detect an Aristotelian strain in the farmer-poet from Port Royal. That does leave Plato the odd man out... (continues)

Do humans really need to do this?

Deep-Sea Riches: Mining
a Remote Ecosystem

By Sabrina Imbler and Jonathan CorumAug. 29, 2022

Millions of years ago, a shark lost a tooth.  The tooth fell thousands of feet and settled on the deep ocean floor.

Over millennia, minerals in the seawater gradually coated the tooth with layers of metals:  cobalt, copper, iron, manganese and nickel — with traces of lithium and rare-earth elements like yttrium.

The metals accumulated slowly, a few millimeters every million years.

The result was a potato-size lump known as a polymetallic nodule.

Today, billions of tons of these nodules cover wide swaths of the ocean floor, several miles below the surface.

One of the largest areas is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which covers 1.7 million miles of the Pacific seabed and holds vast fields of nodules.

Article continues at this Link 

Questions Aug 30

WB 38-80. Respond to any of these you like, and feel free to submit and reply to questions of your own. Remember, the exams come from our daily questions (which will be reconstructed as objective-format questions). Post your comments prior to class, preferably the day before.

1. Do you know anyone who lives on land occupied by their ancestors over two centuries ago? What do you think it does to a person's consciousness, to do that? 38

2. Is there particular significance in WB's move-in day? 39

3. Do you see an important connection between healthy land and healthy people? Do most people see it? Most Americans? 40

4. Do you hope someday to undertake a "reclamation project," if not on a farm then in some other way that you think might enhance your life, your family's, and your community's? 41-2

5. How do we get society to stop "subtracting" more than it adds to the land? 43

6. Do you personally feel a need to "affirm my own life as a thing decent in possibility"? 43

7. Do most of us live "superficially," not practically or responsibly, in relation to the places we call home? Is there a way to remedy that, short of taking up farming (or even gardening)? 44-5

8.  COMMENT?: "The experience of one generation is not adequate to inform and control its actions." 46

9. How do we motivate people to not steal health and goods from the unborn? 47

10. Do you see a connection or resemblance between the description of Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest (see below) and what WB says about the "shared cause" of the problems that generated the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, and the peace movement? 49

11. Do you agree about the difference between a mere crowd and a vital community? 51

12. Do most of us think about the weather in a way that participates in "public insanity"? 52

13. Do you agree about the power of a "good marriage"? 54 And about the importance of doing something directly about trash, driving less, turning off lights, not turning on the AC, etc.? 55

14. Have you gardened? Has it "enlarged for [you] the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating"? 56

15. Did Black Elk speak wisely? 58

(I invite you all to comment on the other essays in today's assignment as well, and suggest additional questions on them if you like.)

 

The Ministry for the Future

We'll conclude the semester with this.

Established in 2025, the purpose of the new organization was simple: To advocate for the world's future generations and to protect all living creatures, present and future. It soon became known as the Ministry for the Future, and this is its story.

From legendary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson comes a vision of climate change unlike any ever imagined.

Told entirely through fictional eyewitness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come.

Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

It is a novel both immediate and impactful, desperate and hopeful in equal measure, and it is one of the most powerful and original books on climate change ever written. g'r

'Nomad Century'

Gaia Vince's new book delivers a message that is clear, sharp and jolting. Large regions of the world are becoming unlivable, she says - lethal for 3 to 5 billion of us. We can survive, but to do so will require a planned and deliberate migration of the kind humanity has never before undertaken. Her new book, "Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World"... (Continues, NPR)

Lyceum!

 Our long-postponed Lyceum speaker (originally scheduled for March 2020), Professor Tadd Ruetenik of St. Ambrose University in Iowa, will deliver "Sports: The Flywheel of the Military Industrial Complex" on Friday September 16 in COE 164, at 5 pm (reception following). Professor Ruetenik, author of The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States, has subsequently published another book, Bodies and Battlefields: Abortion, War, and the Moral Sentiments of Sacrifice.

 What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?

BY PARAG KHANNA

 

AUGUST 15, 2022 7:55 AM EDT

Khanna is the founder of FutureMap and author of the new book MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us.

In 2021, global carbon dioxide emissions reached 36.3 billion tons, the highest volume ever recorded. This year, the number of international refugees will cross 30 million, also the highest figure ever. As sea levels and temperatures rise and geopolitical tensions flare, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity is veering towards systemic breakdown. The superpowers will be no salvation: Locked in a “new Cold War,’ the U.S. careens between populism and incompetence, while China remains locked down at home and alienates many nations abroad.

We’re not very good at predicting the next five days, let alone five years. Our daily headlines underscore how we are overwhelmed by crises: COVID-19, natural disasters, ruptured supply chains, food shortages, international conflicts, spiking oil prices, failing states, refugee flows, and so forth. But these are not isolated incidents. They are manifestations of complexity—a global system in which the environment, economy, demographics, politics, and technology constantly collide in unpredictable ways. It was not a single event that caused the Roman and Mayan civilizations to collapse, but rather this complex collision of chain reactions.

Continues Here:  What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy? | Time

Link

 I like this idea:

Connect to God’s creation listening for moment’s song

Ray Waddle  Guest columnist

Tennessean (newsmemory.com)

When the world situation gets me jittery, and the phone is abuzz with hustle and doom, I step outside to catch a breeze. Even there, it’s a struggle.

The heat this summer feels punitive, a wounded response to human excess from the natural world. Politics makes even the weather an ideological battleground.

Nevertheless, a few minutes outdoors is always calming. Land and sky seem to have a mind and heart of their own and are ready to share them.

I picked up a new book recently, just in time: 'Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with Sacred Earth' by Randy Woodley, a Cherokee descendent, author, and wisdom-keeper.

Woodley’s common sense and gentle skepticism about modern habits are a refreshing departure from our tortured debates and methods of coping.

In these 100 short readings, his message is simple.

Our culture is on a destructive path, but we can change it. Indigenous wisdom is within reach … Speak from the heart. Balance work and rest. Laugh at yourself. Pray. Be generous and accountable. Watch and listen. People long for harmony, mutual respect, a feeling of awe. Deep inside, everyone wants 'Eloheh,' the Cherokee word for wholeness, peace, harmony.

'Begin working your way down the list and incorporating these Indigenous values into your own life,' writes Woodley, co-founder of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice in Oregon. 'Search for songs, ceremonies, and stories from your own ancestry. Look for friends who align with these values. Good medicine awaits us ...'

Woodley comes out of Christian experience. Living on the land alerts him daily to nature’s brute power but also sharpens his senses to the rain, sun, stars, red-tailed hawks, wind. Each tree, he notices, sings a different song as the wind blows through it. Each moment is unique.

'Savor the sacredness of these times. Allow them to flow freely.

Encourage people to share from their hearts.

We can’t control the outcome of any given situation but only respond to it. Let each moment sing its own song.'

I’m all for it. But it takes me time to get there, some detox time to root out the annoying second-hand opinions in my head, the aftershocks of living in the economy of anxiety.

The detox partly depends on being open to new images of daily experience. Woodley talks of becoming intimate with the land, treating the relationship like a courtship, a kind of marriage or partnership to cherish, not something superficial.

It’s peculiar that the current technological era considers itself superior to the ancestral past, he writes. Previous generations didn’t go around injuring 'the earth that feeds them and maintains their existence as a species.' If we’re so smart, why do we work against our own self-interest?

Despite our lethal contradictions, a connection to God’s creation can make the human community feel confident about the future. We can become adventurers together, learners, awakeners, deciding how to live out our spirituality each moment on the road to being better ancestors.

'After all, we have only today to be fully alive in this world – to be fully human,' Woodley writes. 'Our humanity is exercised one moment at a time, one day at a time. That includes today.'

Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean staffer.

 Woo...What do you think of this city dwellers radical idea?

Chicago-dwelling college teacher says people should not live in rural areas: 'The solution is to give them generous grants to relocate among other humans'

NEWS

ALEX NITZBERG

August 22, 2022

   

Adam Kotsko says people should not live in rural areas - TheBlaze

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Chicago-dweller Adam Kotsko, a faculty member at the Shimer Great Books School of North Central College, has publicly opined that individuals should not reside in rural settings.

"In discussions of reducing car dependency, one often hears, 'What about people in remote rural areas?' And my gut instinct is -- people shouldn't be living there in the first place. The solution is to give them generous grants to relocate among other humans," tweeted Kotsko, who is also the author of multiple books.

"'But what if they like living in remote rural areas?' Sorry, you can't always get what you want. A lot of people would like to live in dense, transit-rich settings but can't -- either because they can't afford it or it simply doesn't exist where they are," he tweeted. "And if this sounds harsh -- don't worry, it will never happen, because our governmental institutions are INSANELY biased in favor of rural areas. They'll be fine. I'm just a guy over here having an opinion," he added. He also wrote, "'Isn't it mean to imply that rural people's lifestyle is bad and wrong?' As someone who lives in Chicago, all I can say to that is: cry me a river."

Kotsko said that in his understanding, individuals living in sparsely populated areas are poverty stricken and "essentially trapped."

"My understanding is also that a lot of people in remote rural areas are desperately poor and essentially trapped there," Kotsko tweeted.

Kotsko also issued a series of tweets discussing ideas about such an urban-centric society.

"My ideal land use distribution (based heavily on KSR): all agricultural land is collectively owned and scientifically managed to balance quantity, quality, and variety of food against sustainability and ethical practices. No single-family or corporate for-profit farms," he declared. "Young adults have to do a period of public service, and one option would be a 'tour of duty' as a farm worker for a few years. Everyone would at least know someone who knows firsthand what goes into food production," Kotsko continued.

"The overwhelming majority of people live in a handful of ultradense urban cores, connected by high-speed rail. No car-based suburban communities exist. A handful of people stay in rural areas full-time to manage the work brigades or run wilderness retreats or whatever," he added. "The human footprint would be vastly less in this system -- all land not used for agriculture would be left wild. Another public service option would be dismantling the suburbs -- stripping copper wire and other useable resources, removing toxins, then leaving them to rot."

Begin

 We didn't do it on Opening Day, too much else was going on.

But on most days I like to begin class with a glance at history (especially literary history, the history of the best that's been thought and written) and maybe a poem; and then at the front page of our national "paper of record"-the New York Times. (As an MTSU student you are eligible for a free digital subscription to the Times. You should activate it. And read it.)

That's because philosophy, like everything else, has a context and a history. We need to be aware of where we've been and what's happening now, if we want to get something useful out of the old dead philosophers who only live on through our dialogue with them. In this course, of course, we're looking always for the environmental angle on news and history. But as we were saying, "environment" signifies not just "nature" in the abstract everywhere and every way we live. The social and media environment are obviously included in that.

For the history, a good source is On This Day. For the literary history and poetry, I like The Writers Almanac.

So please remind me, if I forget.

Also don't let me forget to put that recording microphone around my neck.

Bluegrass Socrates

 LISTEN. Are Socrates and Plato really Wendell Berry's spiritual ancestors? 

That may be a little glib. But Socrates the gadfly definitely modeled an aggressive and alienating version of Wendell's more reserved and honeyed way of persisting in the face of scorn and opposition to uphold what's right, and to insist on honesty in our mutual relations with people and places. He modeled strong loyalty to one's native grounds (see Plato's account of Socrates' rationale for accepting the state's ultimate injustice in Crito). Port Royal KY is Wendell's Athens. Fortunately no one will make the Mad Farmer drink hemlock... (continues)

"patron saint of farmers markets"

Environmental activist Bill McKibben sat down with Moyers & Company to talk about the lasting contributions of Wendell Berry to the environmental, sustainable agriculture and slow food movements. “He understood what was happening on this planet a long time before everybody else,” McKibben said. It was Berry’s foresight and activism that led local farmers to bring their produce directly to consumers in communities across the country. McKibben calls Berry the patron saint of farmers markets adding “almost by force of will and [the] beauty of his words he gave birth to a counterculture trend that … bears great promise.” More about Bill McKibben FROM THE SHOW Encore: Wendell Berry, Poet & Prophet... (NOTE the Bill McKibben "Crucial Years" feed in the sidebar, I encourage you to read him and comment.) ... Michael Pollan on food policy (before he told us how to change our minds)...

Wendell on hope, peace

 

It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old,
for hope must not depend on feeling good
and there’s the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight.
You also have withdrawn belief in the present reality
of the future, which surely will surprise us,
and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction
anymore than by wishing. But stop dithering.
The young ask the old to hope. What will you tell them?
Tell them at least what you say to yourself.

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields, eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains, overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it, as you care for no other place, this
knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth.
It will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask
for your faith, and to the wealthy when they ask for your land
and your work.  Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the stream banks and the trees and the open fields.

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
The world is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

–Wendell Berry

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press.

Source: Collected Poems 1957-1982 (Counterpoint Press, 1985)

Blessed Unrest

 The other Paul Hawken book I mentioned in class...

Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide...

“The world simply appears out of control. Too often, however, such problems seem insoluble because of how they are managed -- with ideological, top-down, oligarchic, militaristic management styles. If we tried to consciously control our bodies, we would die, just as the planet is dying. We don't manage our bodies because we cannot. We can, however, protect, nurture, listen to, and tend to them with food, sleep, prayer, friendship, laughter, and exercise. And that is all the planet asks from us: allies, rest, nurturance, respect, celebration, collaboration, and engagement.”

“If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data. If you meet people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.”
― Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

Reef recovery

	Climate Reality ⁦‪@ClimateReality‬⁩ It's fantastic news! Time to #ActOnClimate and give this global treasure a chance. cnbc.com/2022/08/04/gre…   8/24/22, 6:49 AM

“WALK: Slow Down, Wake Up”-another peripatetic travelogue

A new book in the spirit of "Walking to Listen"—

A transformative collection of essays on the power of walking to connect with ourselves, each other, and nature itself.

In 2010, Jonathon Stalls and his blue-heeler husky mix began their 242-day walk across the United States, depending upon each other and the kindness of strangers along the way. In this collection of essays, Stalls explores walking as waking up: how a cross-country journey through the family farms of West Virginia, the deep freedom of Nevada's High desert, and everywhere in between unlocked connections to his deepest aches and dreams--and opened new avenues for renewal, connection, and change…

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60124521-walk

Questions Aug 25

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire (WB) -37 (Intro, A Native Hill). Respond to any of these you'd care to, in the comments space below... or to questions posed by your classmates or yourself. Claim a base on the scorecard for each separate comment. 

1. What do you think of WB's remark to Gary Snyder? viii

2. Are you a Boomer or a Sticker? What do you think of WB's formula? x

3. Do you agree that the best way to conceive the world (or nature, or the universe) as a whole is by embracing a particular place? 5

4. Is any particular world (eg, WB's literary world) more important to you than the world? 7

5. Is human history "the progress of doom"? 9

6. When will we "arrive" in America? 13

7. Are paths better than roads? 14-17

8. COMMENT? "I have been taught what was here to be lost by the loss of it." 24

9. Do you have answers to WB's questions? 26-7

10. Do you ever share WB's feeling, when walking in the woods? 31

Opening Day!

 LISTEN. A new dawn is breaking on us CoPhilosophers, and I've finally arranged a Fall schedule stacked entirely on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

"Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers, I feel impelled, per fas aut nefas, to try to impart to you some news of the situation." Pragmatism 1 (Students who've looked at the syllabus know that this is one of our recommended texts, today and forever.)

Three CoPhi classes beginning early, interrupted by a Farmer's Market lunchtime break (and Office Hours) at noon, capped late in the afternoon with Environmental Ethics. An intense teaching schedule is worth half as many I-24 commutes, for reasons ecological as well as emotional. Happiness studies do consistently report a strong correlation between life satisfaction and (less) time behind the wheel. Plus, I can defer that gas money to fluids more gratifying and less guilt-inducing than fossil fuels... (continues)

Introductions

Looking forward to seeing you all on August 23, in JUB 202 at 4:20 pm!

(If you've tried and failed to post your introduction in Comments, please try again.) 

Since we'll be spending time with Wendell Berry this semester, I'll probably say a bit on Opening Day about the quote in the sidebar under "First things first-a proper education"...

And since it's also Opening Day for my Intro to Philosophy classes, I'll probably tell you then why I prefer to call it CoPhilosophy, why I call myself (and encourage you all to become) Peripatetic, and why I sometimes introduce the semester with references to Monty Python's Argument Clinic, Brian Cohen, and Douglas Adams's whale, POV gun, and answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. Extra (moral) credit to anyone who can translate and explain the philosophical significance of the Latin phrases Solvitur Ambulando and Sapere Aude, and who can find first base on a baseball scorecard (or diamond).

We mostly will NOT use D2L for online discussion and course support. We WILL use this site... where you'll find the syllabus, texts (required and recommended), and other information and resources.

Before first coming to class, click on "comments" below to share your own. Tell us who you are, why you're here (in class, at school, on planet earth...), what you consider to be your environment and how it relates to nature, the climate, and society. Do you think most college-age students are concerned about the present and future condition of the environment? Are you optimistic about the future?

That'll get us started, before we dive into Wendell Berry's World-Ending Fire.

Enjoy the remainder of your summer, and get ready for some important and exciting conversations.

jpo

(Dr. Oliver)

phil.oliver@mtsu.edu