(747,5,'2011-10-05 14:49:22','2011-10-05 14:49:22','A few years ago, after a presentation on learning outcomes, I decided to try to list the possible learning outcomes of Campus Ecology. It turned out to be much more extensive than I had originally intended, but wonderfully liberating to name some of the things that matter most to me. Students take this survey before the first day of class, and they tell us if they’re sure, or half-sure, or not sure at all that they know or understand the concepts. One side effect of this first survey is that they get excited to be in the course. They take the survey again at the end of the semester, and the difference is, of course, what they learned in the course--or at least what they think they\'ve learned.\n\n<strong>Introductions: Wild and Precious Life</strong>\n\nI can explain the meaning of “practical idealism”\n\nI can explain “the social construction of common sense”\n\nI can compare and contrast expressed and operative values\n\nI can describe and appraise my own environmental values\n\nI can explain the importance of stories in environmental education.\n\nI know why Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” is important for this course\n\n<strong>Writing Workshop</strong>\n\nI know how to write a good exploratory essay.\n\nI know how to use my connecting mind to develop an idea.\n\nI know some good questions to ask about the quality of essays, including my own.\n\n<strong>This Place on Earth</strong>\n\nI can describe the difference between land and landscape.\n\nI can explain what Paul Gruchow means by inhabiting a place.\n\nI can apply Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” to my place on earth, including St. Olaf.\n\nI understand the benefits of a cattail marsh.\n\nI can compare the sources of Paul Gruchow’s happiness to my own.\n\nI can define a “land pyramid.”\n\n<strong>Plotting Our Place on Earth</strong>\n\nI know how to know a place well.\n\nI know how to see like Annie Dillard.\n\nI can unpeach a peach and construct “the artificial obvious.”\n\nI can explain the importance of communities of memory and communities of hope.\n\nI know what Wallace Stegner meant by the “geography of hope.”\n\nI understand the difference between memory and nostalgia.\n\nI know what wonder is for.\n\n<strong>Valentine’s Day</strong>\n\nI know the assumptions of romantic love, and I know the other kinds of love in the world—eros, philia, agape and biophilia\n\n<strong>Real World</strong>\n\nI can distinguish local knowledge from “ignorant knowledge.”\n\nI understand the cultural construction of realism and idealism.\n\nI can distinguish the hidden curriculum from the official curriculum of the college.\n\nI understand David Orr’s critique of the social construction of success.\n\nI know how to practice empathy as a way of knowing.\n\nI can explain what Bill McKibben means by the “I-dolatrous way of life” in America.\n\nI can explain the difference between “voluntary simplicity” and “involuntary complexity.”\n\nI understand and can apply the concept of cultural work.\n\nI can explain the “cultural work” performed by concepts like “the real world” and “the St. Olaf bubble.”\n\nI know what it really means to “Get real!”\n\nI understand the meaning and implications of my ecological footprint.\n\nI know how to use Thoreau’s “Realometer” on my own life.\n\n<strong>Rethinking Education</strong>\n\nI know why the liberal arts are liberal.\n\nI know how the liberal arts are conservative.\n\nI can explain the dangers of “ignorant knowledge.”\n\nI understand why St. Olaf includes religion in the curriculum and extra-curriculum of the college.\n\nI can explain the importance of love to a liberal arts education.\n\nI know the difference between know-how and know-why.\n\nI can map out the concept of “moral ecology.”\n\nI can explain the difference between knowledge, understanding and wisdom.\n\nI understand the virtues necessary to a liberal education and a sustainable society.\n\nI can explain the practicality of a liberal arts education.\n\nI can compare and contrast my goals for education with St. Olaf’s goals.\n\nI know how to be a part of a genuine learning community.\n\n<strong>Educating for a Sustainable Future</strong>\n\nI can explain the costs and benefits of academic professionalization and  departmentalization.\n\nI know what a “designing mind” is, and how to use it.\n\nI understand the economic problems with ecological thinking and vice versa.\n\nI can explain why problem-solving is an important teaching tool.\n\nI know how to “go deep” with my environmental learning.\n\n<strong>The Nature of Our Rooms</strong>\n\nI can explain the concept of Zen affluence.\n\nI understand the meaning of just-in-case consumption.\n\nI can describe the social construction of necessity. [use Pew survey]\n\nI can describe the appeal of “delectable materialism”—to understand why we might have all this stuff.\n\nI can explain Michael Schudson’s critique of the critics of consumption.\n\nI understand the complexity of simplicity.\n\nI understand the environmental importance of limits and restraint.\n\n<strong>The Nature of Our Clothes</strong>\n\nI know why college students have so many clothes.\n\nI know why my clothes come from so many different countries.\n\nI understand how to use product chains to talk about the out-of-sight environmental impacts of clothes.\n\nI can describe the expressed and operative values of the clothes that collegians wear.\n\nI know how to think about the embodied energy in my clothes.\n\nI can describe the values implicit in the American system of fashion.\n\nI can apply the concept of “peer socialization” to my own life.\n\nI understand Erving Goffman’s concept of “the presentation of self in everyday life” well enough to apply it to my own life.\n\nI can describe the environmental costs and benefits of peer socialization.\n\nI know how to analyze a commercial catalogue for its values.\n\nI understand the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization in advertising.\n\nI can describe five different criticisms of the American fashion system.\n\nI understand the costs and benefits of outsourcing textile manufacturing.\n\nI know what it means to go sweatshopping.\n\nI could create a flow chart illustrating the product chain of a T-shirt or a pair of athletic shoes.\n\n<strong>The Environmentalist’s New Clothes</strong>\n\nI understand why clothes are important in human cultures.\n\nI could explain the extensive pleasures of clothes to my friends.\n\nI can explain to my friends what Juliet Schor means by “clean clothes.”\n\nI understand how more materialism could be a good thing.\n\nIf I chose to, I could apply Juliet Schor’s “new clothing ethic” to my own apparel shopping.\n\nWhen I go shopping for clothes, I know how to evaluate the ethical implications of my choices.\n\nI can explain the problems and the possibilities of peer pressure.\n\n<strong>Food</strong>\n\nI understand the social construction of “food.” [nature to culture to edibility]\n\nI can explain how the ideology of choice works in the cafeteria, and in other places on campus.\n\nI can explain the social values embodied in a college cafeteria.\n\nI understand the cafeteria’s connection to climate change.\n\nI understand what it means to say that eating is an agricultural act.\n\nI understand the main assumptions and practices of industrial agriculture.\n\nI know why most American farming is in monocultures, and why some critics find that problematic.\n\nI know what Vandana Shiva means by “monocultures of the mind.”\n\nI can explain the environmental thinking of locavores.\n\nI know the difference between vegetarianism and vergetarianism.\n\nI can explain compost as a form of food.\n\nI can describe why American foods are also “fossil foods.”\n\nWith the proper information, I could map out my foodshed.\n\nI know why stored sunshine is important to human beings.\n\nI can explain the food ethic of “Lily’s Chickens.”\n\nI understand the pleasures of feeling useful.\n\nI know how to estimate my ecological <em>foodprint. </em>\n\nI know what Wendell Berry means by the extensive pleasures of eating.\n\nI understand the poetry of “Rice” and “Oranges.”\n\nI know the difference between the price and cost of food.\n\nI can explain why local food makes sense to many critics of industrial agriculture.\n\nI understand why I eat dirt.\n\nI can create a flow chart of America’s food system.\n\nI know how American politics influences what I eat.\n\nI can trace five different connections between photosynthesis and my life.\n\nI understand the different dimensions of saying grace.\n\nI know how to bake bread.\n\nI know enough to eat well.\n\n<strong>The World(s) of Campus Ecology</strong>\n\nI understand how Jaime Lerner’s designing mind differs from most politicians’ planning processes.\n\nI understand the rhetorical strategies used by Jaime Lerner—and by Bill McKibben.\n\nI can compare and contrast the standard operating politics of Curitiba and most American cities.\n\nI can apply the strategies of Curitiba to environmental problems that I face in America.\n\n<strong>The Nature of Screens</strong>\n\nI understand what cultural critics mean when they describe America as a culture of distraction.\n\nI can describe the hidden curriculum of the screens in my life.\n\nI can explain the cultural work of television news and entertainment.\n\nI can explain the costs <em>and </em>benefits of the screens in my life.\n\nI can explain the anthropocentrism of Facebook.\n\nI can explain television as a system, not just a technology.\n\nI understand the environmental impacts of electronic waste.\n\nI know how to access some of the benefits of electronic environmentalism.\n\nI know how to evaluate the appropriateness of technologies in my life.\n\n<strong>Residence Life in the Biosphere</strong>\n\nI know the top 5 environmental impacts of people who live in the residence halls.\n\n(heat, electricity, water, waste and food)\n\nI can explain the hidden curriculum embedded in the standard operating procedures of the residence halls.\n\nI understand what St. Olaf is doing to make its residence halls more sustainable.\n\nI understand the trade-offs involved in those sustainability decisions.\n\nI can list ten concrete steps to make residence halls more sustainable.\n\nI can imagine the culture of a sustainable residence hall.\n\n<strong>Garbage In, Garbage Out</strong>\n\nI understand the concept of a “retroactive design assignment.”\n\nI can explain the aphorism “Waste is food.”\n\nI understand why college students (and other Americans) waste so much.\n\nI can explain the metaphor of “a boat for Thoreau.”\n\nI can explain how garbage is related to American materialism.\n\nI know why recycling is America’s number one solution for environmental problems, instead of something more substantial.\n\nI know precisely what can (and cannot) be recycled at St. Olaf.\n\nI can give five examples of ecological design reducing waste and garbage.\n\nI can explain extended producer liability laws, and I understand how they inspire designing minds to plan for pre-cycling.\n\nI know how waste is related to “the next industrial revolution.”\n\nI understand the power of secondary markets.\n\nI know the 5 R’s of responsible consumption. Reduce, re-use, refuse, recycle, rejoice.\n\nI know how to reduce my waste substantially (whether or not I do it).\n\n<strong>The Power of St. Olaf</strong>\n\nI can explain the environmental histories/sequences of fossil fuel.\n\nI can explain the different environmental impacts described in “Forecast 2035.”\n\nI can explain 5 different types of solar energy.\n\nI know (approximately) the size of my carbon consumption.\n\nI can compare and contrast American and European policy approaches to power generation.\n\nI can identify and explain 5 different public policy responses to promote more sustainable power.\n\nI know what “clean coal” means.\n\nI know how nuclear power relates to global climate change.\n\n<strong>A Sustainable Future of Power</strong>\n\nI can explain why compact fluorescent bulbs are more efficient than incandescent bulbs.\n\nI know why St. Olaf has a wind turbine.\n\nI know 10 different ways that I can generate negawatts of electricity in my everyday life.\n\nI can explain carbon offsets and carbon sequestration.\n\nI know how a cap and trade program in carbon emissions would work.\n\nI understand the concept of <em>phantom load</em>.\n\nI know how to reduce my carbon consumption two percent this year.\n\n<strong>Spring Break</strong>\n\nI know how to practice resurrection in my own life.\n\n<strong>American Values</strong>\n\nI know what’s good about “the good life” and what’s not-so-good.\n\nI understand why David Orr says that all values are environmental values.\n\nI can describe the costs and benefits of individualism.\n\nI can explain the environmental impacts of “familiarity.”\n\nI know why people don’t usually talk about their deepest values.\n\n<strong>American Environmental Values</strong>\n\nI can list 10 operative environmental values in America.\n\nI can compare and contrast America’s expressed and operative environmental values.\n\nI can explain how mainstream American values impact the environment.\n\nI can explain two different meanings of materialism.\n\nI could chart the operative environmental values of college students.\n\nI can compare and contrast materialist and post-materialist values.\n\nI know why “Yearning for Balance” says that America is “a society at odds with its values.”\n\nI know what it means to say, “The Joneses is killing me.”  Peer socialization\n\nI know how to be a responsible consumer.\n\n<strong>The Spirit of Sustainability</strong>\n\nI understand how most college students think about religion—and practice it.\n\nI know why many students say they’re spiritual, but not religious.\n\nI understand the etymology (and environmental implications) of the word “religion.”\n\nI can explain what major American religious denominations say about environmental issues.\n\nI can explain the religious tradition of sacramentalism.\n\nI can explain the environmental implications of sabbath.\n\nI understand the religious tradition of stewardship.\n\nI know how to think about consumption as vocation.\n\nI understand why asceticism is un-American.\n\nI know a few ways that the prophetic tradition is playing a part in modern environmentalism.\n\nI can explain the two major interpretations of the Genesis story, and their implications for religious values concerning nature in America.\n\nI can explain how religion animates (or not) my own environmental values.\n\n<strong>Cars, Colleges and Contentment</strong>\n\nI can explain why college students—and other Americans—drive so much.\n\nI know how the Federal CAFÉ standards work, and why some people don’t like them.\n\nI understand the environmental advantages—and disadvantages—of hybrid cars.\n\nI know how an internal combustion engine works within the earth’s carbon cycle.\n\nI understand how my driving causes global climate change.\n\nI can list ten important costs (not counting purchase and gas and insurance) of cars.\n\nI can explain why “America is addicted to oil.”\n\nI know how to use Mimi Sheller’s conceptual framework to explain my own attachment to cars\n\nI know how to use my knowledge of American automobility to analyze the appeals of a car ad.\n\nI know why SUV ads are often Romantic landscapes.\n\nI know enough to evaluate arguments for building more roads or building more mass transit in America’s metropolitan areas.\n\nI can diagram the different components of America’s car culture.\n\nI know enough to evaluate the costs and benefits of cars at St. Olaf.\n\n<strong>New Car Policies</strong>\n\nI can explain five important public policy proposals to reduce the environmental impacts of cars.\n\nI can list at least five ways that I can contribute to a world that’s driven less by cars.\n\nI can suggest three ways to improve St. Olaf’s car policy\n\nI understand the concept of full-cost accounting.\n\n<strong>Work and Play in College</strong>\n\nI know the difference between a job and a career and a vocation.\n\nI know how work is a collaboration with wildness.\n\nI know what work is for.\n\nI can evaluate the environmental impacts of work in America.\n\nI know some important environmental questions to ask about my workplace.\n\nI know five important skills that I can bring to the work of the world.\n\nI understand the appeal of parties to college students.\n\nI can explain the environmental impacts and cultural work of beer.\n\nI can explain the importance of fun-damentalism in college culture.\n\nI know “the great American interdenominational prayer.”\n\nI can explain the cultural work of the American weekend.\n\nI understand the moral ecology of Spring Break.\n\nI can give five examples of “tools for conviviality.”\n\n<strong>Love and Sex on Campus</strong>\n\nI can explain the common sense of love on a college campus.\n\nI can explain some of the most important ritualized scripts of romantic love.\n\nI know what Arlie Hochschild means by “the commercialization of intimate life.”\n\nI know some of the cultural work that romantic love performs in American culture.\n\nI could also explain some uncommon senses of love that are available to college students.\n\nI can explain college sex as an environmental issue.\n\nI can describe why John Ryan considers the condom one of the seven sustainable wonders of the world.\n\nI understand the pleasures of sex, including the extensive pleasures.\n\n<strong>Designing Minds: Architecture as Pedagogy</strong>\n\nI can list the lessons that St. Olaf’s buildings are teaching me.\n\nI can explain why architecture is especially important to sustainability.\n\nI understand the ecological designs of St. Olaf’s new Science Complex.\n\nI know how to use my designing mind.\n\nI know how to annotate the environmental implications of a place.\n\nI can explain William Stafford’s allegiances—and my own.\n\nI know how to express my spirituality in public.\n\n<strong>Designing Minds, Designing Cities</strong>\n\nI understand why the United States has become a suburban nation.\n\nI can explain the environmental costs and benefits of sprawl.\n\nI understand the main principles of New Urbanism.\n\nI can explain the policies that comprise smart growth.\n\n<strong>Designing Minds, Designing Our Lives</strong>\n\nI know how to think about beauty as resonance.\n\nI understand the beauty of what Buddhists call “right relation to the world.”\n\nI understand the difference between doing things right, and doing the right things.\n\nI can explain the relationship between the extravagant gesture and regenerative design.\n\nI know how to think about my life as a design, as a story that I get to shape.\n\n<strong>The Nature of Natural Lands</strong>\n\nI understand the difference between wildness and wilderness.\n\nI can explain why Scott Russell Sanders loves wildness.\n\nI know why college students talk about “getting back to nature.”\n\nI know what the prairie teaches us.\n\nI could give a decent tour of St. Olaf’s natural lands.\n\nIf I wanted to, I could explain the benefits of biodiversity to my parents.\n\nI understand some of the ecosystem services provided by St. Olaf’s natural lands.\n\nI can name ten native plants on the St. Olaf campus.\n\nI know how to think about landscaping as an aesthetic art and as an ethical art.\n\nI know how to make sense out of any plot of land I find.\n\n<strong>The Business of Environmentalism</strong>\n\nI can explain the environmental impacts of American business.\n\nI know why many American businesses have opposed environmental regulation.\n\nI can explain the tenets of free market environmentalism.\n\nI can describe the recent greening of American business.\n\nI know why several major corporations are asking for Congress to pass legislation with carbon caps.\n\nI know the history of incorporation and why that matters today.\n\nI understand the difference between a boycott and a buycott.\n\n<strong>The Politics of Everyday Life</strong>\n\nI can explain why so many college students aren’t involved in politics.\n\nI understand how politics impacts the everyday environmental life of college.\n\nI understand the difference between a political system and political culture.\n\nI can explain 5 reasons why many Americans say they’re not political.\n\nI understand the problem with “the perfect standard.”\n\nI’m embracing my “usable past,” my histories of hope.\n\nI can explain Michael Maniates’ critique of consumer environmentalism.\n\nI can explain the difference between citizenship and sitizenship.\n\nI know how to increase my repertoire of political activity.\n\nEven though it’s taboo, I know how to talk about values and politics.\n\n<strong>Environmental Politics</strong>\n\nI understand the perspectives that liberals and conservatives bring to environmental issues.\n\nI can explain the merits of a “green” tax shift.\n\nI can explain the costs and benefits of a carbon tax.\n\nI can explain the operation of a “cap and trade” system.\n\nI can list at least five “perverse subsidies” in American politics.\n\nI can list at least 5 environmental policy successes since the first Earth Day.\n\nI know how to evaluate the environmental positions of the 2008 Presidential candidates.\n\nI can sympathetically explain the Bush Administration’s environmental policy\n\nI can explain the politics of a fast-food hamburger.\n\n<strong>Getting Political: Getting Justice</strong>\n\nI can explain justice as an environmental issue and vice versa.\n\nI can explain the triple bottom line of environmentalism.\n\nI understand how politics helps citizens institutionalize their values.\n\nI understand some effective ways that I can help move the political process.\n\nI understand the disparities of environmental opportunity—why some people get the opportunity to live by the garbage dump, and others don’t.\n\nI understand how politics is the practice of loving all the children all the time.\n\nI could explain the precautionary principle to my friends.\n\nI see how “going green” can be as much about saving capitalism as saving the earth.\n\n<strong>St. Olaf and the New World</strong>\n\nI understand how local action changes the world.\n\nI understand “the tyranny of small decisions,” and the hope of small decisions.\n\nI can imagine the contours of a sustainable society—political, economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual.\n\nI understand the importance of “possidiction.”\n\nI know some good ways to get from this world to that new world.\n\nI understand the different rhetorical strategies of environmentalists, the ways that people use words to shape our worlds—past, present and future.\n\nI appreciate “the slow and difficulty trick of living,” and finding it where I am.\n\n<strong>Campus Ecology: Grounds for Hope</strong>\n\nI know the difference between hope and optimism.\n\nI know why Derrick Jensen wants to go “beyond hope.”\n\nI know what hope is good for.\n\nI know how to put hope to work.\n\nI have the skills to do a plot project anywhere.\n\nI know what David Orr means when he says that all education is environmental education.\n\nI know how to be a hoping mechanism for people in my life.\n\nIf I had time, I could name 50 things that make me environmentally hopeful.\n\nI understand that students are professors too.\n\nI know how to become native to a place.\n\nI know how to use my designing mind to change the world.\n\nI know, more or less, what I intend to do with my one wild and precious life.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;','Learning goals (hundreds): Knowledge, Wisdom, Skills from Campus Ecology','','inherit','open','open','','743-autosave','','','2011-10-05 14:49:22','2011-10-05 14:49:22','',743,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/743-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(748,5,'2011-10-05 14:47:01','2011-10-05 14:47:01','A few years ago, after a presentation on learning outcomes, I decided to try to list the possible learning outcomes of Campus Ecology. It turned out to be much more extensive than I had originally intended, but wonderfully liberating to name some of the things that matter most to me. Students take this survey before the first day of class, and they tell us if they’re sure, or half-sure, or not sure all that they know or understand the concepts. One side effect of this first survey is that they get excited to be in the course. They take the survey again at the end of the semester, and the difference is, of course, what they learned in the course--or at least what they think they\'ve learned.\r\n\r\n<strong>Introductions: Wild and Precious Life</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the meaning of “practical idealism”\r\n\r\nI can explain “the social construction of common sense”\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast expressed and operative values\r\n\r\nI can describe and appraise my own environmental values\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of stories in environmental education.\r\n\r\nI know why Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” is important for this course\r\n\r\n<strong>Writing Workshop</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to write a good exploratory essay.\r\n\r\nI know how to use my connecting mind to develop an idea.\r\n\r\nI know some good questions to ask about the quality of essays, including my own.\r\n\r\n<strong>This Place on Earth</strong>\r\n\r\nI can describe the difference between land and landscape.\r\n\r\nI can explain what Paul Gruchow means by inhabiting a place.\r\n\r\nI can apply Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” to my place on earth, including St. Olaf.\r\n\r\nI understand the benefits of a cattail marsh.\r\n\r\nI can compare the sources of Paul Gruchow’s happiness to my own.\r\n\r\nI can define a “land pyramid.”\r\n\r\n<strong>Plotting Our Place on Earth</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to know a place well.\r\n\r\nI know how to see like Annie Dillard.\r\n\r\nI can unpeach a peach and construct “the artificial obvious.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of communities of memory and communities of hope.\r\n\r\nI know what Wallace Stegner meant by the “geography of hope.”\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between memory and nostalgia.\r\n\r\nI know what wonder is for.\r\n\r\n<strong>Valentine’s Day</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the assumptions of romantic love, and I know the other kinds of love in the world—eros, philia, agape and biophilia\r\n\r\n<strong>Real World</strong>\r\n\r\nI can distinguish local knowledge from “ignorant knowledge.”\r\n\r\nI understand the cultural construction of realism and idealism.\r\n\r\nI can distinguish the hidden curriculum from the official curriculum of the college.\r\n\r\nI understand David Orr’s critique of the social construction of success.\r\n\r\nI know how to practice empathy as a way of knowing.\r\n\r\nI can explain what Bill McKibben means by the “I-dolatrous way of life” in America.\r\n\r\nI can explain the difference between “voluntary simplicity” and “involuntary complexity.”\r\n\r\nI understand and can apply the concept of cultural work.\r\n\r\nI can explain the “cultural work” performed by concepts like “the real world” and “the St. Olaf bubble.”\r\n\r\nI know what it really means to “Get real!”\r\n\r\nI understand the meaning and implications of my ecological footprint.\r\n\r\nI know how to use Thoreau’s “Realometer” on my own life.\r\n\r\n<strong>Rethinking Education</strong>\r\n\r\nI know why the liberal arts are liberal.\r\n\r\nI know how the liberal arts are conservative.\r\n\r\nI can explain the dangers of “ignorant knowledge.”\r\n\r\nI understand why St. Olaf includes religion in the curriculum and extra-curriculum of the college.\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of love to a liberal arts education.\r\n\r\nI know the difference between know-how and know-why.\r\n\r\nI can map out the concept of “moral ecology.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the difference between knowledge, understanding and wisdom.\r\n\r\nI understand the virtues necessary to a liberal education and a sustainable society.\r\n\r\nI can explain the practicality of a liberal arts education.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast my goals for education with St. Olaf’s goals.\r\n\r\nI know how to be a part of a genuine learning community.\r\n\r\n<strong>Educating for a Sustainable Future</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the costs and benefits of academic professionalization and  departmentalization.\r\n\r\nI know what a “designing mind” is, and how to use it.\r\n\r\nI understand the economic problems with ecological thinking and vice versa.\r\n\r\nI can explain why problem-solving is an important teaching tool.\r\n\r\nI know how to “go deep” with my environmental learning.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Our Rooms</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the concept of Zen affluence.\r\n\r\nI understand the meaning of just-in-case consumption.\r\n\r\nI can describe the social construction of necessity. [use Pew survey]\r\n\r\nI can describe the appeal of “delectable materialism”—to understand why we might have all this stuff.\r\n\r\nI can explain Michael Schudson’s critique of the critics of consumption.\r\n\r\nI understand the complexity of simplicity.\r\n\r\nI understand the environmental importance of limits and restraint.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Our Clothes</strong>\r\n\r\nI know why college students have so many clothes.\r\n\r\nI know why my clothes come from so many different countries.\r\n\r\nI understand how to use product chains to talk about the out-of-sight environmental impacts of clothes.\r\n\r\nI can describe the expressed and operative values of the clothes that collegians wear.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about the embodied energy in my clothes.\r\n\r\nI can describe the values implicit in the American system of fashion.\r\n\r\nI can apply the concept of “peer socialization” to my own life.\r\n\r\nI understand Erving Goffman’s concept of “the presentation of self in everyday life” well enough to apply it to my own life.\r\n\r\nI can describe the environmental costs and benefits of peer socialization.\r\n\r\nI know how to analyze a commercial catalogue for its values.\r\n\r\nI understand the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization in advertising.\r\n\r\nI can describe five different criticisms of the American fashion system.\r\n\r\nI understand the costs and benefits of outsourcing textile manufacturing.\r\n\r\nI know what it means to go sweatshopping.\r\n\r\nI could create a flow chart illustrating the product chain of a T-shirt or a pair of athletic shoes.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Environmentalist’s New Clothes</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand why clothes are important in human cultures.\r\n\r\nI could explain the extensive pleasures of clothes to my friends.\r\n\r\nI can explain to my friends what Juliet Schor means by “clean clothes.”\r\n\r\nI understand how more materialism could be a good thing.\r\n\r\nIf I chose to, I could apply Juliet Schor’s “new clothing ethic” to my own apparel shopping.\r\n\r\nWhen I go shopping for clothes, I know how to evaluate the ethical implications of my choices.\r\n\r\nI can explain the problems and the possibilities of peer pressure.\r\n\r\n<strong>Food</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the social construction of “food.” [nature to culture to edibility]\r\n\r\nI can explain how the ideology of choice works in the cafeteria, and in other places on campus.\r\n\r\nI can explain the social values embodied in a college cafeteria.\r\n\r\nI understand the cafeteria’s connection to climate change.\r\n\r\nI understand what it means to say that eating is an agricultural act.\r\n\r\nI understand the main assumptions and practices of industrial agriculture.\r\n\r\nI know why most American farming is in monocultures, and why some critics find that problematic.\r\n\r\nI know what Vandana Shiva means by “monocultures of the mind.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental thinking of locavores.\r\n\r\nI know the difference between vegetarianism and vergetarianism.\r\n\r\nI can explain compost as a form of food.\r\n\r\nI can describe why American foods are also “fossil foods.”\r\n\r\nWith the proper information, I could map out my foodshed.\r\n\r\nI know why stored sunshine is important to human beings.\r\n\r\nI can explain the food ethic of “Lily’s Chickens.”\r\n\r\nI understand the pleasures of feeling useful.\r\n\r\nI know how to estimate my ecological <em>foodprint. </em>\r\n\r\nI know what Wendell Berry means by the extensive pleasures of eating.\r\n\r\nI understand the poetry of “Rice” and “Oranges.”\r\n\r\nI know the difference between the price and cost of food.\r\n\r\nI can explain why local food makes sense to many critics of industrial agriculture.\r\n\r\nI understand why I eat dirt.\r\n\r\nI can create a flow chart of America’s food system.\r\n\r\nI know how American politics influences what I eat.\r\n\r\nI can trace five different connections between photosynthesis and my life.\r\n\r\nI understand the different dimensions of saying grace.\r\n\r\nI know how to bake bread.\r\n\r\nI know enough to eat well.\r\n\r\n<strong>The World(s) of Campus Ecology</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand how Jaime Lerner’s designing mind differs from most politicians’ planning processes.\r\n\r\nI understand the rhetorical strategies used by Jaime Lerner—and by Bill McKibben.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast the standard operating politics of Curitiba and most American cities.\r\n\r\nI can apply the strategies of Curitiba to environmental problems that I face in America.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Screens</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand what cultural critics mean when they describe America as a culture of distraction.\r\n\r\nI can describe the hidden curriculum of the screens in my life.\r\n\r\nI can explain the cultural work of television news and entertainment.\r\n\r\nI can explain the costs <em>and </em>benefits of the screens in my life.\r\n\r\nI can explain the anthropocentrism of Facebook.\r\n\r\nI can explain television as a system, not just a technology.\r\n\r\nI understand the environmental impacts of electronic waste.\r\n\r\nI know how to access some of the benefits of electronic environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI know how to evaluate the appropriateness of technologies in my life.\r\n\r\n<strong>Residence Life in the Biosphere</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the top 5 environmental impacts of people who live in the residence halls.\r\n\r\n(heat, electricity, water, waste and food)\r\n\r\nI can explain the hidden curriculum embedded in the standard operating procedures of the residence halls.\r\n\r\nI understand what St. Olaf is doing to make its residence halls more sustainable.\r\n\r\nI understand the trade-offs involved in those sustainability decisions.\r\n\r\nI can list ten concrete steps to make residence halls more sustainable.\r\n\r\nI can imagine the culture of a sustainable residence hall.\r\n\r\n<strong>Garbage In, Garbage Out</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the concept of a “retroactive design assignment.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the aphorism “Waste is food.”\r\n\r\nI understand why college students (and other Americans) waste so much.\r\n\r\nI can explain the metaphor of “a boat for Thoreau.”\r\n\r\nI can explain how garbage is related to American materialism.\r\n\r\nI know why recycling is America’s number one solution for environmental problems, instead of something more substantial.\r\n\r\nI know precisely what can (and cannot) be recycled at St. Olaf.\r\n\r\nI can give five examples of ecological design reducing waste and garbage.\r\n\r\nI can explain extended producer liability laws, and I understand how they inspire designing minds to plan for pre-cycling.\r\n\r\nI know how waste is related to “the next industrial revolution.”\r\n\r\nI understand the power of secondary markets.\r\n\r\nI know the 5 R’s of responsible consumption. Reduce, re-use, refuse, recycle, rejoice.\r\n\r\nI know how to reduce my waste substantially (whether or not I do it).\r\n\r\n<strong>The Power of St. Olaf</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental histories/sequences of fossil fuel.\r\n\r\nI can explain the different environmental impacts described in “Forecast 2035.”\r\n\r\nI can explain 5 different types of solar energy.\r\n\r\nI know (approximately) the size of my carbon consumption.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast American and European policy approaches to power generation.\r\n\r\nI can identify and explain 5 different public policy responses to promote more sustainable power.\r\n\r\nI know what “clean coal” means.\r\n\r\nI know how nuclear power relates to global climate change.\r\n\r\n<strong>A Sustainable Future of Power</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain why compact fluorescent bulbs are more efficient than incandescent bulbs.\r\n\r\nI know why St. Olaf has a wind turbine.\r\n\r\nI know 10 different ways that I can generate negawatts of electricity in my everyday life.\r\n\r\nI can explain carbon offsets and carbon sequestration.\r\n\r\nI know how a cap and trade program in carbon emissions would work.\r\n\r\nI understand the concept of <em>phantom load</em>.\r\n\r\nI know how to reduce my carbon consumption two percent this year.\r\n\r\n<strong>Spring Break</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to practice resurrection in my own life.\r\n\r\n<strong>American Values</strong>\r\n\r\nI know what’s good about “the good life” and what’s not-so-good.\r\n\r\nI understand why David Orr says that all values are environmental values.\r\n\r\nI can describe the costs and benefits of individualism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental impacts of “familiarity.”\r\n\r\nI know why people don’t usually talk about their deepest values.\r\n\r\n<strong>American Environmental Values</strong>\r\n\r\nI can list 10 operative environmental values in America.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast America’s expressed and operative environmental values.\r\n\r\nI can explain how mainstream American values impact the environment.\r\n\r\nI can explain two different meanings of materialism.\r\n\r\nI could chart the operative environmental values of college students.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast materialist and post-materialist values.\r\n\r\nI know why “Yearning for Balance” says that America is “a society at odds with its values.”\r\n\r\nI know what it means to say, “The Joneses is killing me.”  Peer socialization\r\n\r\nI know how to be a responsible consumer.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Spirit of Sustainability</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand how most college students think about religion—and practice it.\r\n\r\nI know why many students say they’re spiritual, but not religious.\r\n\r\nI understand the etymology (and environmental implications) of the word “religion.”\r\n\r\nI can explain what major American religious denominations say about environmental issues.\r\n\r\nI can explain the religious tradition of sacramentalism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental implications of sabbath.\r\n\r\nI understand the religious tradition of stewardship.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about consumption as vocation.\r\n\r\nI understand why asceticism is un-American.\r\n\r\nI know a few ways that the prophetic tradition is playing a part in modern environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the two major interpretations of the Genesis story, and their implications for religious values concerning nature in America.\r\n\r\nI can explain how religion animates (or not) my own environmental values.\r\n\r\n<strong>Cars, Colleges and Contentment</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain why college students—and other Americans—drive so much.\r\n\r\nI know how the Federal CAFÉ standards work, and why some people don’t like them.\r\n\r\nI understand the environmental advantages—and disadvantages—of hybrid cars.\r\n\r\nI know how an internal combustion engine works within the earth’s carbon cycle.\r\n\r\nI understand how my driving causes global climate change.\r\n\r\nI can list ten important costs (not counting purchase and gas and insurance) of cars.\r\n\r\nI can explain why “America is addicted to oil.”\r\n\r\nI know how to use Mimi Sheller’s conceptual framework to explain my own attachment to cars\r\n\r\nI know how to use my knowledge of American automobility to analyze the appeals of a car ad.\r\n\r\nI know why SUV ads are often Romantic landscapes.\r\n\r\nI know enough to evaluate arguments for building more roads or building more mass transit in America’s metropolitan areas.\r\n\r\nI can diagram the different components of America’s car culture.\r\n\r\nI know enough to evaluate the costs and benefits of cars at St. Olaf.\r\n\r\n<strong>New Car Policies</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain five important public policy proposals to reduce the environmental impacts of cars.\r\n\r\nI can list at least five ways that I can contribute to a world that’s driven less by cars.\r\n\r\nI can suggest three ways to improve St. Olaf’s car policy\r\n\r\nI understand the concept of full-cost accounting.\r\n\r\n<strong>Work and Play in College</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the difference between a job and a career and a vocation.\r\n\r\nI know how work is a collaboration with wildness.\r\n\r\nI know what work is for.\r\n\r\nI can evaluate the environmental impacts of work in America.\r\n\r\nI know some important environmental questions to ask about my workplace.\r\n\r\nI know five important skills that I can bring to the work of the world.\r\n\r\nI understand the appeal of parties to college students.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental impacts and cultural work of beer.\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of fun-damentalism in college culture.\r\n\r\nI know “the great American interdenominational prayer.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the cultural work of the American weekend.\r\n\r\nI understand the moral ecology of Spring Break.\r\n\r\nI can give five examples of “tools for conviviality.”\r\n\r\n<strong>Love and Sex on Campus</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the common sense of love on a college campus.\r\n\r\nI can explain some of the most important ritualized scripts of romantic love.\r\n\r\nI know what Arlie Hochschild means by “the commercialization of intimate life.”\r\n\r\nI know some of the cultural work that romantic love performs in American culture.\r\n\r\nI could also explain some uncommon senses of love that are available to college students.\r\n\r\nI can explain college sex as an environmental issue.\r\n\r\nI can describe why John Ryan considers the condom one of the seven sustainable wonders of the world.\r\n\r\nI understand the pleasures of sex, including the extensive pleasures.\r\n\r\n<strong>Designing Minds: Architecture as Pedagogy</strong>\r\n\r\nI can list the lessons that St. Olaf’s buildings are teaching me.\r\n\r\nI can explain why architecture is especially important to sustainability.\r\n\r\nI understand the ecological designs of St. Olaf’s new Science Complex.\r\n\r\nI know how to use my designing mind.\r\n\r\nI know how to annotate the environmental implications of a place.\r\n\r\nI can explain William Stafford’s allegiances—and my own.\r\n\r\nI know how to express my spirituality in public.\r\n\r\n<strong>Designing Minds, Designing Cities</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand why the United States has become a suburban nation.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental costs and benefits of sprawl.\r\n\r\nI understand the main principles of New Urbanism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the policies that comprise smart growth.\r\n\r\n<strong>Designing Minds, Designing Our Lives</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to think about beauty as resonance.\r\n\r\nI understand the beauty of what Buddhists call “right relation to the world.”\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between doing things right, and doing the right things.\r\n\r\nI can explain the relationship between the extravagant gesture and regenerative design.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about my life as a design, as a story that I get to shape.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Natural Lands</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between wildness and wilderness.\r\n\r\nI can explain why Scott Russell Sanders loves wildness.\r\n\r\nI know why college students talk about “getting back to nature.”\r\n\r\nI know what the prairie teaches us.\r\n\r\nI could give a decent tour of St. Olaf’s natural lands.\r\n\r\nIf I wanted to, I could explain the benefits of biodiversity to my parents.\r\n\r\nI understand some of the ecosystem services provided by St. Olaf’s natural lands.\r\n\r\nI can name ten native plants on the St. Olaf campus.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about landscaping as an aesthetic art and as an ethical art.\r\n\r\nI know how to make sense out of any plot of land I find.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Business of Environmentalism</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental impacts of American business.\r\n\r\nI know why many American businesses have opposed environmental regulation.\r\n\r\nI can explain the tenets of free market environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI can describe the recent greening of American business.\r\n\r\nI know why several major corporations are asking for Congress to pass legislation with carbon caps.\r\n\r\nI know the history of incorporation and why that matters today.\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between a boycott and a buycott.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Politics of Everyday Life</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain why so many college students aren’t involved in politics.\r\n\r\nI understand how politics impacts the everyday environmental life of college.\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between a political system and political culture.\r\n\r\nI can explain 5 reasons why many Americans say they’re not political.\r\n\r\nI understand the problem with “the perfect standard.”\r\n\r\nI’m embracing my “usable past,” my histories of hope.\r\n\r\nI can explain Michael Maniates’ critique of consumer environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the difference between citizenship and sitizenship.\r\n\r\nI know how to increase my repertoire of political activity.\r\n\r\nEven though it’s taboo, I know how to talk about values and politics.\r\n\r\n<strong>Environmental Politics</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the perspectives that liberals and conservatives bring to environmental issues.\r\n\r\nI can explain the merits of a “green” tax shift.\r\n\r\nI can explain the costs and benefits of a carbon tax.\r\n\r\nI can explain the operation of a “cap and trade” system.\r\n\r\nI can list at least five “perverse subsidies” in American politics.\r\n\r\nI can list at least 5 environmental policy successes since the first Earth Day.\r\n\r\nI know how to evaluate the environmental positions of the 2008 Presidential candidates.\r\n\r\nI can sympathetically explain the Bush Administration’s environmental policy\r\n\r\nI can explain the politics of a fast-food hamburger.\r\n\r\n<strong>Getting Political: Getting Justice</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain justice as an environmental issue and vice versa.\r\n\r\nI can explain the triple bottom line of environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI understand how politics helps citizens institutionalize their values.\r\n\r\nI understand some effective ways that I can help move the political process.\r\n\r\nI understand the disparities of environmental opportunity—why some people get the opportunity to live by the garbage dump, and others don’t.\r\n\r\nI understand how politics is the practice of loving all the children all the time.\r\n\r\nI could explain the precautionary principle to my friends.\r\n\r\nI see how “going green” can be as much about saving capitalism as saving the earth.\r\n\r\n<strong>St. Olaf and the New World</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand how local action changes the world.\r\n\r\nI understand “the tyranny of small decisions,” and the hope of small decisions.\r\n\r\nI can imagine the contours of a sustainable society—political, economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual.\r\n\r\nI understand the importance of “possidiction.”\r\n\r\nI know some good ways to get from this world to that new world.\r\n\r\nI understand the different rhetorical strategies of environmentalists, the ways that people use words to shape our worlds—past, present and future.\r\n\r\nI appreciate “the slow and difficulty trick of living,” and finding it where I am.\r\n\r\n<strong>Campus Ecology: Grounds for Hope</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the difference between hope and optimism.\r\n\r\nI know why Derrick Jensen wants to go “beyond hope.”\r\n\r\nI know what hope is good for.\r\n\r\nI know how to put hope to work.\r\n\r\nI have the skills to do a plot project anywhere.\r\n\r\nI know what David Orr means when he says that all education is environmental education.\r\n\r\nI know how to be a hoping mechanism for people in my life.\r\n\r\nIf I had time, I could name 50 things that make me environmentally hopeful.\r\n\r\nI understand that students are professors too.\r\n\r\nI know how to become native to a place.\r\n\r\nI know how to use my designing mind to change the world.\r\n\r\nI know, more or less, what I intend to do with my one wild and precious life.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Learning goals (hundreds): Knowledge, Wisdom, Skills from Campus Ecology','','inherit','open','open','','743-revision-4','','','2011-10-05 14:47:01','2011-10-05 14:47:01','',743,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/743-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(749,5,'2011-10-05 14:47:13','2011-10-05 14:47:13','A few years ago, after a presentation on learning outcomes, I decided to try to list the possible learning outcomes of Campus Ecology. It turned out to be much more extensive than I had originally intended, but wonderfully liberating to name some of the things that matter most to me. Students take this survey before the first day of class, and they tell us if they’re sure, or half-sure, or not sure all that they know or understand the concepts. One side effect of this first survey is that they get excited to be in the course. They take the survey again at the end of the semester, and the difference is, of course, what they learned in the course--or at least what they think they\'ve learned.\r\n\r\n<strong>Introductions: Wild and Precious Life</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the meaning of “practical idealism”\r\n\r\nI can explain “the social construction of common sense”\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast expressed and operative values\r\n\r\nI can describe and appraise my own environmental values\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of stories in environmental education.\r\n\r\nI know why Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” is important for this course\r\n\r\n<strong>Writing Workshop</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to write a good exploratory essay.\r\n\r\nI know how to use my connecting mind to develop an idea.\r\n\r\nI know some good questions to ask about the quality of essays, including my own.\r\n\r\n<strong>This Place on Earth</strong>\r\n\r\nI can describe the difference between land and landscape.\r\n\r\nI can explain what Paul Gruchow means by inhabiting a place.\r\n\r\nI can apply Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” to my place on earth, including St. Olaf.\r\n\r\nI understand the benefits of a cattail marsh.\r\n\r\nI can compare the sources of Paul Gruchow’s happiness to my own.\r\n\r\nI can define a “land pyramid.”\r\n\r\n<strong>Plotting Our Place on Earth</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to know a place well.\r\n\r\nI know how to see like Annie Dillard.\r\n\r\nI can unpeach a peach and construct “the artificial obvious.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of communities of memory and communities of hope.\r\n\r\nI know what Wallace Stegner meant by the “geography of hope.”\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between memory and nostalgia.\r\n\r\nI know what wonder is for.\r\n\r\n<strong>Valentine’s Day</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the assumptions of romantic love, and I know the other kinds of love in the world—eros, philia, agape and biophilia\r\n\r\n<strong>Real World</strong>\r\n\r\nI can distinguish local knowledge from “ignorant knowledge.”\r\n\r\nI understand the cultural construction of realism and idealism.\r\n\r\nI can distinguish the hidden curriculum from the official curriculum of the college.\r\n\r\nI understand David Orr’s critique of the social construction of success.\r\n\r\nI know how to practice empathy as a way of knowing.\r\n\r\nI can explain what Bill McKibben means by the “I-dolatrous way of life” in America.\r\n\r\nI can explain the difference between “voluntary simplicity” and “involuntary complexity.”\r\n\r\nI understand and can apply the concept of cultural work.\r\n\r\nI can explain the “cultural work” performed by concepts like “the real world” and “the St. Olaf bubble.”\r\n\r\nI know what it really means to “Get real!”\r\n\r\nI understand the meaning and implications of my ecological footprint.\r\n\r\nI know how to use Thoreau’s “Realometer” on my own life.\r\n\r\n<strong>Rethinking Education</strong>\r\n\r\nI know why the liberal arts are liberal.\r\n\r\nI know how the liberal arts are conservative.\r\n\r\nI can explain the dangers of “ignorant knowledge.”\r\n\r\nI understand why St. Olaf includes religion in the curriculum and extra-curriculum of the college.\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of love to a liberal arts education.\r\n\r\nI know the difference between know-how and know-why.\r\n\r\nI can map out the concept of “moral ecology.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the difference between knowledge, understanding and wisdom.\r\n\r\nI understand the virtues necessary to a liberal education and a sustainable society.\r\n\r\nI can explain the practicality of a liberal arts education.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast my goals for education with St. Olaf’s goals.\r\n\r\nI know how to be a part of a genuine learning community.\r\n\r\n<strong>Educating for a Sustainable Future</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the costs and benefits of academic professionalization and  departmentalization.\r\n\r\nI know what a “designing mind” is, and how to use it.\r\n\r\nI understand the economic problems with ecological thinking and vice versa.\r\n\r\nI can explain why problem-solving is an important teaching tool.\r\n\r\nI know how to “go deep” with my environmental learning.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Our Rooms</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the concept of Zen affluence.\r\n\r\nI understand the meaning of just-in-case consumption.\r\n\r\nI can describe the social construction of necessity. [use Pew survey]\r\n\r\nI can describe the appeal of “delectable materialism”—to understand why we might have all this stuff.\r\n\r\nI can explain Michael Schudson’s critique of the critics of consumption.\r\n\r\nI understand the complexity of simplicity.\r\n\r\nI understand the environmental importance of limits and restraint.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Our Clothes</strong>\r\n\r\nI know why college students have so many clothes.\r\n\r\nI know why my clothes come from so many different countries.\r\n\r\nI understand how to use product chains to talk about the out-of-sight environmental impacts of clothes.\r\n\r\nI can describe the expressed and operative values of the clothes that collegians wear.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about the embodied energy in my clothes.\r\n\r\nI can describe the values implicit in the American system of fashion.\r\n\r\nI can apply the concept of “peer socialization” to my own life.\r\n\r\nI understand Erving Goffman’s concept of “the presentation of self in everyday life” well enough to apply it to my own life.\r\n\r\nI can describe the environmental costs and benefits of peer socialization.\r\n\r\nI know how to analyze a commercial catalogue for its values.\r\n\r\nI understand the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization in advertising.\r\n\r\nI can describe five different criticisms of the American fashion system.\r\n\r\nI understand the costs and benefits of outsourcing textile manufacturing.\r\n\r\nI know what it means to go sweatshopping.\r\n\r\nI could create a flow chart illustrating the product chain of a T-shirt or a pair of athletic shoes.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Environmentalist’s New Clothes</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand why clothes are important in human cultures.\r\n\r\nI could explain the extensive pleasures of clothes to my friends.\r\n\r\nI can explain to my friends what Juliet Schor means by “clean clothes.”\r\n\r\nI understand how more materialism could be a good thing.\r\n\r\nIf I chose to, I could apply Juliet Schor’s “new clothing ethic” to my own apparel shopping.\r\n\r\nWhen I go shopping for clothes, I know how to evaluate the ethical implications of my choices.\r\n\r\nI can explain the problems and the possibilities of peer pressure.\r\n\r\n<strong>Food</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the social construction of “food.” [nature to culture to edibility]\r\n\r\nI can explain how the ideology of choice works in the cafeteria, and in other places on campus.\r\n\r\nI can explain the social values embodied in a college cafeteria.\r\n\r\nI understand the cafeteria’s connection to climate change.\r\n\r\nI understand what it means to say that eating is an agricultural act.\r\n\r\nI understand the main assumptions and practices of industrial agriculture.\r\n\r\nI know why most American farming is in monocultures, and why some critics find that problematic.\r\n\r\nI know what Vandana Shiva means by “monocultures of the mind.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental thinking of locavores.\r\n\r\nI know the difference between vegetarianism and vergetarianism.\r\n\r\nI can explain compost as a form of food.\r\n\r\nI can describe why American foods are also “fossil foods.”\r\n\r\nWith the proper information, I could map out my foodshed.\r\n\r\nI know why stored sunshine is important to human beings.\r\n\r\nI can explain the food ethic of “Lily’s Chickens.”\r\n\r\nI understand the pleasures of feeling useful.\r\n\r\nI know how to estimate my ecological <em>foodprint. </em>\r\n\r\nI know what Wendell Berry means by the extensive pleasures of eating.\r\n\r\nI understand the poetry of “Rice” and “Oranges.”\r\n\r\nI know the difference between the price and cost of food.\r\n\r\nI can explain why local food makes sense to many critics of industrial agriculture.\r\n\r\nI understand why I eat dirt.\r\n\r\nI can create a flow chart of America’s food system.\r\n\r\nI know how American politics influences what I eat.\r\n\r\nI can trace five different connections between photosynthesis and my life.\r\n\r\nI understand the different dimensions of saying grace.\r\n\r\nI know how to bake bread.\r\n\r\nI know enough to eat well.\r\n\r\n<strong>The World(s) of Campus Ecology</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand how Jaime Lerner’s designing mind differs from most politicians’ planning processes.\r\n\r\nI understand the rhetorical strategies used by Jaime Lerner—and by Bill McKibben.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast the standard operating politics of Curitiba and most American cities.\r\n\r\nI can apply the strategies of Curitiba to environmental problems that I face in America.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Screens</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand what cultural critics mean when they describe America as a culture of distraction.\r\n\r\nI can describe the hidden curriculum of the screens in my life.\r\n\r\nI can explain the cultural work of television news and entertainment.\r\n\r\nI can explain the costs <em>and </em>benefits of the screens in my life.\r\n\r\nI can explain the anthropocentrism of Facebook.\r\n\r\nI can explain television as a system, not just a technology.\r\n\r\nI understand the environmental impacts of electronic waste.\r\n\r\nI know how to access some of the benefits of electronic environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI know how to evaluate the appropriateness of technologies in my life.\r\n\r\n<strong>Residence Life in the Biosphere</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the top 5 environmental impacts of people who live in the residence halls.\r\n\r\n(heat, electricity, water, waste and food)\r\n\r\nI can explain the hidden curriculum embedded in the standard operating procedures of the residence halls.\r\n\r\nI understand what St. Olaf is doing to make its residence halls more sustainable.\r\n\r\nI understand the trade-offs involved in those sustainability decisions.\r\n\r\nI can list ten concrete steps to make residence halls more sustainable.\r\n\r\nI can imagine the culture of a sustainable residence hall.\r\n\r\n<strong>Garbage In, Garbage Out</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the concept of a “retroactive design assignment.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the aphorism “Waste is food.”\r\n\r\nI understand why college students (and other Americans) waste so much.\r\n\r\nI can explain the metaphor of “a boat for Thoreau.”\r\n\r\nI can explain how garbage is related to American materialism.\r\n\r\nI know why recycling is America’s number one solution for environmental problems, instead of something more substantial.\r\n\r\nI know precisely what can (and cannot) be recycled at St. Olaf.\r\n\r\nI can give five examples of ecological design reducing waste and garbage.\r\n\r\nI can explain extended producer liability laws, and I understand how they inspire designing minds to plan for pre-cycling.\r\n\r\nI know how waste is related to “the next industrial revolution.”\r\n\r\nI understand the power of secondary markets.\r\n\r\nI know the 5 R’s of responsible consumption. Reduce, re-use, refuse, recycle, rejoice.\r\n\r\nI know how to reduce my waste substantially (whether or not I do it).\r\n\r\n<strong>The Power of St. Olaf</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental histories/sequences of fossil fuel.\r\n\r\nI can explain the different environmental impacts described in “Forecast 2035.”\r\n\r\nI can explain 5 different types of solar energy.\r\n\r\nI know (approximately) the size of my carbon consumption.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast American and European policy approaches to power generation.\r\n\r\nI can identify and explain 5 different public policy responses to promote more sustainable power.\r\n\r\nI know what “clean coal” means.\r\n\r\nI know how nuclear power relates to global climate change.\r\n\r\n<strong>A Sustainable Future of Power</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain why compact fluorescent bulbs are more efficient than incandescent bulbs.\r\n\r\nI know why St. Olaf has a wind turbine.\r\n\r\nI know 10 different ways that I can generate negawatts of electricity in my everyday life.\r\n\r\nI can explain carbon offsets and carbon sequestration.\r\n\r\nI know how a cap and trade program in carbon emissions would work.\r\n\r\nI understand the concept of <em>phantom load</em>.\r\n\r\nI know how to reduce my carbon consumption two percent this year.\r\n\r\n<strong>Spring Break</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to practice resurrection in my own life.\r\n\r\n<strong>American Values</strong>\r\n\r\nI know what’s good about “the good life” and what’s not-so-good.\r\n\r\nI understand why David Orr says that all values are environmental values.\r\n\r\nI can describe the costs and benefits of individualism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental impacts of “familiarity.”\r\n\r\nI know why people don’t usually talk about their deepest values.\r\n\r\n<strong>American Environmental Values</strong>\r\n\r\nI can list 10 operative environmental values in America.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast America’s expressed and operative environmental values.\r\n\r\nI can explain how mainstream American values impact the environment.\r\n\r\nI can explain two different meanings of materialism.\r\n\r\nI could chart the operative environmental values of college students.\r\n\r\nI can compare and contrast materialist and post-materialist values.\r\n\r\nI know why “Yearning for Balance” says that America is “a society at odds with its values.”\r\n\r\nI know what it means to say, “The Joneses is killing me.”  Peer socialization\r\n\r\nI know how to be a responsible consumer.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Spirit of Sustainability</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand how most college students think about religion—and practice it.\r\n\r\nI know why many students say they’re spiritual, but not religious.\r\n\r\nI understand the etymology (and environmental implications) of the word “religion.”\r\n\r\nI can explain what major American religious denominations say about environmental issues.\r\n\r\nI can explain the religious tradition of sacramentalism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental implications of sabbath.\r\n\r\nI understand the religious tradition of stewardship.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about consumption as vocation.\r\n\r\nI understand why asceticism is un-American.\r\n\r\nI know a few ways that the prophetic tradition is playing a part in modern environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the two major interpretations of the Genesis story, and their implications for religious values concerning nature in America.\r\n\r\nI can explain how religion animates (or not) my own environmental values.\r\n\r\n<strong>Cars, Colleges and Contentment</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain why college students—and other Americans—drive so much.\r\n\r\nI know how the Federal CAFÉ standards work, and why some people don’t like them.\r\n\r\nI understand the environmental advantages—and disadvantages—of hybrid cars.\r\n\r\nI know how an internal combustion engine works within the earth’s carbon cycle.\r\n\r\nI understand how my driving causes global climate change.\r\n\r\nI can list ten important costs (not counting purchase and gas and insurance) of cars.\r\n\r\nI can explain why “America is addicted to oil.”\r\n\r\nI know how to use Mimi Sheller’s conceptual framework to explain my own attachment to cars\r\n\r\nI know how to use my knowledge of American automobility to analyze the appeals of a car ad.\r\n\r\nI know why SUV ads are often Romantic landscapes.\r\n\r\nI know enough to evaluate arguments for building more roads or building more mass transit in America’s metropolitan areas.\r\n\r\nI can diagram the different components of America’s car culture.\r\n\r\nI know enough to evaluate the costs and benefits of cars at St. Olaf.\r\n\r\n<strong>New Car Policies</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain five important public policy proposals to reduce the environmental impacts of cars.\r\n\r\nI can list at least five ways that I can contribute to a world that’s driven less by cars.\r\n\r\nI can suggest three ways to improve St. Olaf’s car policy\r\n\r\nI understand the concept of full-cost accounting.\r\n\r\n<strong>Work and Play in College</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the difference between a job and a career and a vocation.\r\n\r\nI know how work is a collaboration with wildness.\r\n\r\nI know what work is for.\r\n\r\nI can evaluate the environmental impacts of work in America.\r\n\r\nI know some important environmental questions to ask about my workplace.\r\n\r\nI know five important skills that I can bring to the work of the world.\r\n\r\nI understand the appeal of parties to college students.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental impacts and cultural work of beer.\r\n\r\nI can explain the importance of fun-damentalism in college culture.\r\n\r\nI know “the great American interdenominational prayer.”\r\n\r\nI can explain the cultural work of the American weekend.\r\n\r\nI understand the moral ecology of Spring Break.\r\n\r\nI can give five examples of “tools for conviviality.”\r\n\r\n<strong>Love and Sex on Campus</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the common sense of love on a college campus.\r\n\r\nI can explain some of the most important ritualized scripts of romantic love.\r\n\r\nI know what Arlie Hochschild means by “the commercialization of intimate life.”\r\n\r\nI know some of the cultural work that romantic love performs in American culture.\r\n\r\nI could also explain some uncommon senses of love that are available to college students.\r\n\r\nI can explain college sex as an environmental issue.\r\n\r\nI can describe why John Ryan considers the condom one of the seven sustainable wonders of the world.\r\n\r\nI understand the pleasures of sex, including the extensive pleasures.\r\n\r\n<strong>Designing Minds: Architecture as Pedagogy</strong>\r\n\r\nI can list the lessons that St. Olaf’s buildings are teaching me.\r\n\r\nI can explain why architecture is especially important to sustainability.\r\n\r\nI understand the ecological designs of St. Olaf’s new Science Complex.\r\n\r\nI know how to use my designing mind.\r\n\r\nI know how to annotate the environmental implications of a place.\r\n\r\nI can explain William Stafford’s allegiances—and my own.\r\n\r\nI know how to express my spirituality in public.\r\n\r\n<strong>Designing Minds, Designing Cities</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand why the United States has become a suburban nation.\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental costs and benefits of sprawl.\r\n\r\nI understand the main principles of New Urbanism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the policies that comprise smart growth.\r\n\r\n<strong>Designing Minds, Designing Our Lives</strong>\r\n\r\nI know how to think about beauty as resonance.\r\n\r\nI understand the beauty of what Buddhists call “right relation to the world.”\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between doing things right, and doing the right things.\r\n\r\nI can explain the relationship between the extravagant gesture and regenerative design.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about my life as a design, as a story that I get to shape.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Nature of Natural Lands</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between wildness and wilderness.\r\n\r\nI can explain why Scott Russell Sanders loves wildness.\r\n\r\nI know why college students talk about “getting back to nature.”\r\n\r\nI know what the prairie teaches us.\r\n\r\nI could give a decent tour of St. Olaf’s natural lands.\r\n\r\nIf I wanted to, I could explain the benefits of biodiversity to my parents.\r\n\r\nI understand some of the ecosystem services provided by St. Olaf’s natural lands.\r\n\r\nI can name ten native plants on the St. Olaf campus.\r\n\r\nI know how to think about landscaping as an aesthetic art and as an ethical art.\r\n\r\nI know how to make sense out of any plot of land I find.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Business of Environmentalism</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain the environmental impacts of American business.\r\n\r\nI know why many American businesses have opposed environmental regulation.\r\n\r\nI can explain the tenets of free market environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI can describe the recent greening of American business.\r\n\r\nI know why several major corporations are asking for Congress to pass legislation with carbon caps.\r\n\r\nI know the history of incorporation and why that matters today.\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between a boycott and a buycott.\r\n\r\n<strong>The Politics of Everyday Life</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain why so many college students aren’t involved in politics.\r\n\r\nI understand how politics impacts the everyday environmental life of college.\r\n\r\nI understand the difference between a political system and political culture.\r\n\r\nI can explain 5 reasons why many Americans say they’re not political.\r\n\r\nI understand the problem with “the perfect standard.”\r\n\r\nI’m embracing my “usable past,” my histories of hope.\r\n\r\nI can explain Michael Maniates’ critique of consumer environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI can explain the difference between citizenship and sitizenship.\r\n\r\nI know how to increase my repertoire of political activity.\r\n\r\nEven though it’s taboo, I know how to talk about values and politics.\r\n\r\n<strong>Environmental Politics</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand the perspectives that liberals and conservatives bring to environmental issues.\r\n\r\nI can explain the merits of a “green” tax shift.\r\n\r\nI can explain the costs and benefits of a carbon tax.\r\n\r\nI can explain the operation of a “cap and trade” system.\r\n\r\nI can list at least five “perverse subsidies” in American politics.\r\n\r\nI can list at least 5 environmental policy successes since the first Earth Day.\r\n\r\nI know how to evaluate the environmental positions of the 2008 Presidential candidates.\r\n\r\nI can sympathetically explain the Bush Administration’s environmental policy\r\n\r\nI can explain the politics of a fast-food hamburger.\r\n\r\n<strong>Getting Political: Getting Justice</strong>\r\n\r\nI can explain justice as an environmental issue and vice versa.\r\n\r\nI can explain the triple bottom line of environmentalism.\r\n\r\nI understand how politics helps citizens institutionalize their values.\r\n\r\nI understand some effective ways that I can help move the political process.\r\n\r\nI understand the disparities of environmental opportunity—why some people get the opportunity to live by the garbage dump, and others don’t.\r\n\r\nI understand how politics is the practice of loving all the children all the time.\r\n\r\nI could explain the precautionary principle to my friends.\r\n\r\nI see how “going green” can be as much about saving capitalism as saving the earth.\r\n\r\n<strong>St. Olaf and the New World</strong>\r\n\r\nI understand how local action changes the world.\r\n\r\nI understand “the tyranny of small decisions,” and the hope of small decisions.\r\n\r\nI can imagine the contours of a sustainable society—political, economic, cultural, psychological and spiritual.\r\n\r\nI understand the importance of “possidiction.”\r\n\r\nI know some good ways to get from this world to that new world.\r\n\r\nI understand the different rhetorical strategies of environmentalists, the ways that people use words to shape our worlds—past, present and future.\r\n\r\nI appreciate “the slow and difficulty trick of living,” and finding it where I am.\r\n\r\n<strong>Campus Ecology: Grounds for Hope</strong>\r\n\r\nI know the difference between hope and optimism.\r\n\r\nI know why Derrick Jensen wants to go “beyond hope.”\r\n\r\nI know what hope is good for.\r\n\r\nI know how to put hope to work.\r\n\r\nI have the skills to do a plot project anywhere.\r\n\r\nI know what David Orr means when he says that all education is environmental education.\r\n\r\nI know how to be a hoping mechanism for people in my life.\r\n\r\nIf I had time, I could name 50 things that make me environmentally hopeful.\r\n\r\nI understand that students are professors too.\r\n\r\nI know how to become native to a place.\r\n\r\nI know how to use my designing mind to change the world.\r\n\r\nI know, more or less, what I intend to do with my one wild and precious life.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Learning goals (hundreds): Knowledge, Wisdom, Skills from Campus Ecology','','inherit','open','open','','743-revision-5','','','2011-10-05 14:47:13','2011-10-05 14:47:13','',743,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/743-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(750,5,'2011-10-05 14:51:22','2011-10-05 14:51:22','','Evaluations','','publish','closed','open','','evaluations','','','2018-07-09 14:32:21','2018-07-09 19:32:21','',720,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=750',0,'page','',0),(751,5,'2011-10-05 14:50:42','2011-10-05 14:50:42','','Evaluations','','inherit','open','open','','750-revision','','','2011-10-05 14:50:42','2011-10-05 14:50:42','',750,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/750-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(752,5,'2011-10-05 14:52:52','2011-10-05 14:52:52','<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">What We Learned in Campus Ecology</p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">Spring 2011</p>\r\n<em>Each semester, near the end of classes, I bring in a stack of index cards and distribute them to students. I ask them, simply, to write down the ten most important things they learned in the class. I emphasize that the list represents what they learned, not what I was teaching. The results are always delightful--here are the most recent revelations:\r\n</em>\r\n\r\n1.    Pay attention to details.\r\n\r\n2.    Nature can be closely related to religion.\r\n\r\n3.    Balancing economic development and environmental protection is really tough.\r\n\r\n4.    Why Americans do not adopt public transportation that often…\r\n\r\n5.    Pete Sandberg and Randy’s jobs really impressed me because of their hard work reducing waste and saving energy.\r\n\r\n6.    Dorm annotations—do we need that much stuff?\r\n\r\n7.    If people love their jobs they will definitely do them well.\r\n\r\n8.    American lifestyle is kind of wasteful for me.\r\n\r\n9.    Learn to love nature at an early age.\r\n\r\n10. Small changes can lead to big changes.\r\n\r\n11. I can use less than 10 minutes’ worth of water in the shower. I can use less than 5 minutes worth! I didn’t think it was possible.\r\n\r\n12. We are already suffering for our environmental sins in big ways.\r\n\r\n13. I could see environmental disaster in my lifetime.\r\n\r\n14. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be environmentally friendly.\r\n\r\n15. You can be environmentally-minded in <em>literally</em> every aspect of life; it’s not just one category of your day.\r\n\r\n16. Other people (lots of them!) enjoy nature. Huh!\r\n\r\n17. More is not always more—in schedules, in content of classes, in belongings, in variety of food, etc.\r\n\r\n18. It’s not that hard to reduce everyday impact.\r\n\r\n19. Feeling disgruntled about the future of the environment and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive.\r\n\r\n20. There is immeasurable energy in talking with other people about environmental hopes and ideas.\r\n\r\n21. Don’t ever, EVER give up on hope: sometimes it’s all you have in life.\r\n\r\n22. You can talk the talk, but if you don’t walk the walk, nothing is getting accomplished. Take initiative!\r\n\r\n23. Journaling is actually fun.\r\n\r\n24. Mary Oliver writes really good poems.\r\n\r\n25. Classes with less expectations/homework/tests actually make me want to work harder.\r\n\r\n26. 55 minutes 3 times a week is not enough time to discuss the issue of environmentalism.\r\n\r\n27. Driving your car less is more important than taking shorter showers.\r\n\r\n28. More people need to educate themselves on environmental topics; a small group of people can’t fix the world alone.\r\n\r\n29. I’m a really good listener. I may not talk much, but sometimes there are too many talkers in the world and not enough listeners to actually take the time to hear what they have to say.\r\n\r\n30. More treats in class.\r\n\r\n31. Hope—it is necessary for change and a good thing for life.\r\n\r\n32. Beauty—it’s all around us, we just need to <em>stop</em> and <em>look</em>.\r\n\r\n33. Politics—it can be difficult, but it’s important to get involved.\r\n\r\n34. Change—we need to work for it individually and as a group.\r\n\r\n35. Consumerism is a political act.\r\n\r\n36. Corporations have consumer power that can be used to incite change.\r\n\r\n37. Spending time on my plot in the natural lands helps with stress.\r\n\r\n38. Slow down—try not to rush through life, you may miss things.\r\n\r\n39. There are many environmental aspects to being a college student.\r\n\r\n40. Talk and listen to others—it’s amazing what you can learn.\r\n\r\n41. Hope is at the root of structural change.\r\n\r\n42. Parenting is political.\r\n\r\n43. I love Mary Oliver poetry—she gives a voice to feelings I didn’t know I had.\r\n\r\n44. Just sitting and observing for an hour can teach you more than 10 hours in the library.\r\n\r\n45. We are the stories we tell.\r\n\r\n46. Shopping is political (vote with your dollar).\r\n\r\n47. Showers should be shorter.\r\n\r\n48. Activism doesn’t have to be about carrying a sign and marching in the streets.\r\n\r\n49. We look at issues (environmental and otherwise) too simplistically in many cases. We need to realize how complex our interactions with the earth and one another really are. We need to <em>connect</em> and use “designing minds.”\r\n\r\n50. We can design buildings like trees. We can make them <em>breathe</em> (I loved seeing this when we toured Regents especially).\r\n\r\n51. What counts as natural and unnatural in nature.\r\n\r\n52. What nature means to me in my life.\r\n\r\n53. How St. Olaf is a part of natural systems.\r\n\r\n54. How my operative and expressed values affect the world and global “weirding.”\r\n\r\n55. Small actions make a difference.\r\n\r\n56. Communication can cause change.\r\n\r\n57. I learned to not be afraid to express my love for nature; I learned that telling people that I care can make them care.\r\n\r\n58. Environmentalism can be cool.\r\n\r\n59. Politics affects everything.\r\n\r\n60. There is hope in the world. We can change.\r\n\r\n61. Communicating values.\r\n\r\n62. To really observe.\r\n\r\n63. Taking time to reflect on my thoughts.\r\n\r\n64. Portrayal of nature in our surroundings.\r\n\r\n65. How influential consumerist society is on our daily lives.\r\n\r\n66. Importance of activism (I’m still working on that).\r\n\r\n67. Figuring out what hope is.\r\n\r\n68. Having meaningful relationships with people and our environment.\r\n\r\n69. Puns and plays on words make essays more fun to read.\r\n\r\n70. Thinking about what I’m going to do to create a better place for myself and for the future.\r\n\r\n71. Community is critical for social change.\r\n\r\n72. There is hope.\r\n\r\n73. GDP doesn’t measure wealth.\r\n\r\n74. Our operative and expressed values aren’t both present in our culture.\r\n\r\n75. There is a way to be environmentally religious.\r\n\r\n76. We need to change society to be more environmental.\r\n\r\n77. Politics is not, but should be, a part of our everyday lives.\r\n\r\n78. You need passion to make change.\r\n\r\n79. It’s important to learn the names of places and things.\r\n\r\n80. Always question what you are told.\r\n\r\n81. Systems.\r\n\r\n82. People have different ideals.\r\n\r\n83. Hope.\r\n\r\n84. Patience.\r\n\r\n85. I learned about myself.\r\n\r\n86. I learned to listen.\r\n\r\n87. That so many things are interconnected.\r\n\r\n88. Being an Environmental Studies major is cool.\r\n\r\n89. There is always a political side.\r\n\r\n90. St. Olaf is actually not that sustainable in the curriculum.\r\n\r\n91. Conversation is the single most effective way to learn.\r\n\r\n92. Sometimes/most of the time you need to plan time to do nothing—it stimulates thought.\r\n\r\n93. Community is extremely important.\r\n\r\n94. Doing individual acts, such as showering less or recycling, isn’t going to ‘save the world’—there needs to be a paradigm shift from industrial to ecological.\r\n\r\n95. You don’t need to take a test to show how much you’ve learned.\r\n\r\n96. To slow down.\r\n\r\n97. We need to love.\r\n\r\n98. My party affiliation does not align with my environmental views.\r\n\r\n99. Social injustice is key to our environmental problems.\r\n\r\n100.      Creating relationships is what makes the world go around.\r\n\r\n101.      Connecting to your place is important and fun.\r\n\r\n102.      Exploring can be fun alone, but is sometimes even better with a friend.\r\n\r\n103.      It’s hard to separate classes with similar content.\r\n\r\n104.      Don’t always judge a book by its cover.\r\n\r\n105.      I have hope that humans can have a net positive impact on the earth.\r\n\r\n106.      The most important conversations happen over and over again\r\n\r\n107.      It’s easy to think that everyone thinks similarly to you—this is not always true.\r\n\r\n108.      I’m glad to get to know Northfield, but I’m sad I’m leaving so soon.\r\n\r\n109.      Tracks in the snow.\r\n\r\n110.      Live intentionally.\r\n\r\n111.      You don’t have to know everything or be perfect.\r\n\r\n112.      That I <em>can</em> make a difference.\r\n\r\n113.      That spending time to convene with nature (particularly alone or just with my journal, cameral, and an open mind) is one of the best things I can do with my time.\r\n\r\n114.      That we can use everyday conversations, as well as deeper conversations, to instigate social change.\r\n\r\n115.      To think about things deeply and not just take them as they come.\r\n\r\n116.      That our culture promotes hookup relationships with nature, but I want to have and have started cultivating a long-term committed relationship based on love, effort, and gratitude.\r\n\r\n117.      That the Natural Lands haven’t always been there…thank GOD they are!\r\n\r\n118.      That Mary Coulson and Jim Farrell are AWESOME people, teachers, and role models.\r\n\r\n119.      That baking bread is really fun and <em>I </em>can even do it (I can’t cook).\r\n\r\n120.      That there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">IS</span> hope and that there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ARE</span> people in this world who care about things the way I do; that movements for social and environmental justice are both ideals and realities.\r\n\r\n121.      That EVERYONE should get to take Campus Ecology!\r\n\r\n122.      Higher education does not always equal greater life knowledge; sometimes more education makes us blind to simple solutions.\r\n\r\n123.      Hope is one of the most important things we can hold onto, despite Jennings, because it stimulates changes (or ideals) into action.\r\n\r\n124.      America’s highly individualized and competitive society is actually what is hurting us internationally.\r\n\r\n125.      St. Olaf’s Bon Appetit program is incredible! I want every freshman to get a tour of the caf during Week One.\r\n\r\n126.      Most of the stuff we buy ends up costing the environment farm more than the money we put in.\r\n\r\n127.      In order to implement change, you need to get involved in politics and ignore the sleazy politicians.\r\n\r\n128.      Think global, act local; focus on local projects and then more people will be affected.\r\n\r\n129.      It is okay to call yourself an environmentalist and do sustainable things, but not be perfect at it.\r\n\r\n130.      “Conserve” is in the world “conservative,” so maybe Republicans can be shown that environmental conservation is part of their definition.\r\n\r\n131.      We should work <em>with</em> big business to affect change, not against (don’t destroy companies/cities, but green them up).\r\n\r\n132.      Paradox of American individualist interests.\r\n\r\n133.      How to sit and think deeply about a plot.\r\n\r\n134.      Problem of environmentalism is a design problem.\r\n\r\n135.      Professor Farrell loves goodwill sweaters.\r\n\r\n136.      Importance of education to change.\r\n\r\n137.      How great Bon Appetit is.\r\n\r\n138.      Effective energy system we have at school.\r\n\r\n139.      Hope.\r\n\r\n140.      Conversation is a great way to learn.\r\n\r\n141.      Passion in every aspect of life.\r\n\r\n142.      How to think beyond what is said.\r\n\r\n143.      Local versus global; individual versus community.\r\n\r\n144.      I learned how to think while I read.\r\n\r\n145.      There is beauty everywhere and in everything.\r\n\r\n146.      Everything has an environmental impact.\r\n\r\n147.      To appreciate—to slow down.\r\n\r\n148.       Love everything.\r\n\r\n149.      The environment must be taken into consideration in everything we do, and being aware of this is part of living the good life.\r\n\r\n150.      We can learn from assignments in school but what we really learn from is <em>people</em>.\r\n\r\n151.      Sometimes the most valuable experiences have no ‘value’ in our socially constructed world.\r\n\r\n152.      Being politically active and aware is <em>important</em>.\r\n\r\n153.      Living simply really is better!\r\n\r\n154.      If you have free time, read or write, always!\r\n\r\n155.      Having hope is better than arguing if we should even have it at all.\r\n\r\n156.      Relishing small moments is more fulfilling than anticipating large ones.\r\n\r\n157.      Everyone should grow their own food and we should be a part of a society that allows time to do so.\r\n\r\n158.      The importance of stories—life is made of stories.\r\n\r\n159.      How to talk to people who disagree.\r\n\r\n160.      How to read for pleasure even if what is written is not a pleasing idea.\r\n\r\n161.      How to write between the lines (not intro/body/conclusion, but rather a discovery while you’re writing).\r\n\r\n162.      How Bon Appetit operates.\r\n\r\n163.      How culture creates us (media, education, parenting).\r\n\r\n164.      How to ask questions.\r\n\r\n165.      How to have a relationship with nature.\r\n\r\n166.      What is hope.\r\n\r\n167.      Through the anger and frustration I have felt in this class, I have learned that I am truly passionate about the Earth.\r\n\r\n168.      I learned that the place I’m living in is my responsibility.\r\n\r\n169.      I learned that where I’m from matters.\r\n\r\n170.      I learned that other people (many others) share my values.\r\n\r\n171.      I learned that if people don’t change, the world will.\r\n\r\n172.      I learned that if people do change, the world still will.\r\n\r\n173.      I learned about blue jeans.\r\n\r\n174.      I learned about energy on St. Olaf campus.\r\n\r\n175.      I learned things about St. Olaf I didn’t know before.\r\n\r\n176.      I learned that learned behavior is hard to change.\r\n\r\n177.      I learned that change starts with me.\r\n\r\n178.      Be appreciative towards all that surrounds you.\r\n\r\n179.      Be politically active.\r\n\r\n180.      Class can be just as educational without tests.\r\n\r\n181.      I can be afraid to take action if I expect to see change.\r\n\r\n182.      I learned just how much I value nature.\r\n\r\n183.      I learned that, while much more needs to be done for the earth, some actions have been taken.\r\n\r\n184.      I am guilty of, to quote Jim, “bitching” a lot.\r\n\r\n185.      Learning about myself is the greatest form of education.\r\n\r\n186.      Jo and Joe College are not real (kidding, of course).\r\n\r\n187.      I have learned that I am pretty normal. Now it is time for me to go out and make an effort to be unique by changing my habits and, through them, the world.\r\n\r\n188.      Overconsumption is the number one environmental killer.\r\n\r\n189.      The small things in nature are just as awe-inspiring as the grandiose things.\r\n\r\n190.      Our operative values don’t often correspond to our expressed values when it comes to environmentalism.\r\n\r\n191.      Having the variety of two instructors provides a nice change of pace.\r\n\r\n192.      Change needs to start on small levels so it can snowball to larger scales.\r\n\r\n193.      My plot is beautiful!\r\n\r\n194.      Many of my choices in life are unsustainable (i.e. a large consumption of beef) and I need to make some sacrifices in order to improve.\r\n\r\n195.      St. Olaf does a pretty good job at being eco-friendly.\r\n\r\n196.      In order to save nature, we need to love nature.\r\n\r\n197.      Economists are viewed in a negative light in much of environmental literature, and there’s some truth to that, but I intend to prove otherwise.\r\n\r\n198.      What I might want to do for graduate school.\r\n\r\n199.      That I think I want to be an environmental consultant for corporate businesses as my career.\r\n\r\n200.      That there is hope for change in our society (kind of cheesy).\r\n\r\n201.      That tofu has a large carbon footprint.\r\n\r\n202.      That I don’t need a stressful workload and big exams in order to learn a lot in a class.\r\n\r\n203.      That actually <em>being</em> in nature is just as important as working to preserve/restore/protect it.\r\n\r\n204.      We need to change our political system, education system, religious views, and corporate businesses. It’s not just small-scale changes (although those are good too).\r\n\r\n205.      Environmental studies should not be limited to one major or department.\r\n\r\n206.      Each individual’s actions can make a difference as it can lead to a movement and then cultural change.\r\n\r\n207.      CONSUMERISM IS BAD!\r\n\r\n208.      I learned how to look for hope.\r\n\r\n209.      I learned how to be more conscientious of my surroundings.\r\n\r\n210.      I learned how to relax in my writing and just write.\r\n\r\n211.      I learned about the intricacies of our facilities buildings.\r\n\r\n212.      From the STARS project, I found out that St. Olaf is pretty good at coordination and planning but could do better.\r\n\r\n213.      I learned a lot about a college student’s impact on the environment.\r\n\r\n214.      I learned that classes can have really good conversations.\r\n\r\n215.      I learned about place, and appreciating it.\r\n\r\n216.      I learned about Northfield, the town I’ve lived in for four years.\r\n\r\n217.      I learned that having a passionate and involved professor makes classes a lot better (NOT sucking up, it’s true!)\r\n\r\n218.      How to slow down and appreciate the world around me.\r\n\r\n219.      The importance of civic engagement, not civic resignation.\r\n\r\n220.      How strongly politics influences our lives and some ways we can influence them.\r\n\r\n221.      How nature is deeply affected and shaped by human culture.\r\n\r\n222.      A more concrete idea of my standards of “sustainability” and what the means.\r\n\r\n223.      Anger is a virtue.\r\n\r\n224.      That the antonym of “bitching” is “hoping,” which has altered my conversations with friends (in a good way).\r\n\r\n225.      Meals are one of the best times to share ideas, especially in college.\r\n\r\n226.      Food is important.\r\n\r\n227.      How colleges are harbors of change.\r\n\r\n228.      I get more out of conversations where no one’s trying to “win” or make the best point.\r\n\r\n229.      Parents are teachers.\r\n\r\n230.      We have a political, not an ecological problem (the symptoms are ecological).\r\n\r\n231.      Thinking economically is useful, though I don’t like to do it.\r\n\r\n232.      Buildings breathe.\r\n\r\n233.      Freshmen are really smart and cool.\r\n\r\n234.      St. Olaf is part of Northfield is part of Minnesota. I live all of those places.\r\n\r\n235.      It’s important and meaningful for everyone to know everyone else’s name.\r\n\r\n236.      Death and Earth are intimately linked.\r\n\r\n237.      We are not helpless or without agency. In fact, there are more things to be done to better our world and environment than can be fit into ten lifetimes. So many we have to <em>choose</em>!\r\n\r\n238.      School and learning are still the most fun things <em>ever</em>.\r\n\r\n239.      I learned some things that bring me joy.\r\n\r\n240.      I learned what hope is for (and wonder).\r\n\r\n241.      The importance of practice.\r\n\r\n242.      What “work” is.\r\n\r\n243.      Pete Sandberg is awesome.\r\n\r\n244.      Why shorter showers <em>do</em> matter.\r\n\r\n245.      About embodied energy.\r\n\r\n246.      Jim likes wordplay.\r\n\r\n247.      The triple bottom line.\r\n\r\n248.      Why growth is bad.\r\n\r\n249.      Why growth is good.\r\n\r\n250.      Why I love JRR Tolkien.\r\n\r\n251.      How to listen.\r\n\r\n252.      Class can be different (radical, student-led, outside).\r\n\r\n253.      Our current systems aren’t sustainable (politically, culturally, socially, etc).\r\n\r\n254.      Small changes are happening (ex. St. Olaf energy systems, Regents, STARS).\r\n\r\n255.      More needs to happen!!!\r\n\r\n256.      Many have hope (in us, kids, futures).\r\n\r\n257.      Many don’t.\r\n\r\n258.      Getting to know nature deeply is important beyond confines.\r\n\r\n259.      Poetry is beautiful. And powerful.\r\n\r\n260.      We need liberal radicals!\r\n\r\n261.      Olaf needs more radical dudes like Jim. We need to break the status quo more—that’s my hope/vision for St. Olaf.\r\n\r\n262.      Be curious and inquisitive.\r\n\r\n263.      Go outside and use my senses.\r\n\r\n264.      Individual behavior change is key—that should come first.\r\n\r\n265.      Creating a culture that displays its values outwardly should come next or simultaneously.\r\n\r\n266.      Political change should follow from cultural change because people will be actively engaged in the community’s well-being.\r\n\r\n267.      Environmental education and awareness are needed now!\r\n\r\n268.      Our current system cannot hold up much longer.\r\n\r\n269.      Act, communicate, teach and learn from others.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[10 Most important things I learned from teaching Campus Ecology (by Mary)]:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n1. I process information best when it comes full-circle in my life.\r\n\r\n2. I’ve changed a lot since I was a freshman.\r\n\r\n3. Every person is complex, and a classroom where students are allowed to be complex people is more interesting.\r\n\r\n4. Teaching is really about listening.\r\n\r\n5. There is not one over-arching solution to the environmental crisis, but may creative, place-specific solutions (thought up and implemented by many creative, place-loving people).\r\n\r\n6. St. Olaf students love deadlines, page limits, and clear directions.\r\n\r\n7. Mary Oliver is more complex than people let her be by just reading <em>The Summer Day</em>. She expresses through poetry what I’ve never found a way to express.\r\n\r\n8. The St. Olaf landscape, birds, sunshine, buildings, teachers, students, custodians, friends, sky, ponds, maple trees—will always be in my heart.\r\n\r\n9. I like being a leader. I also like being the center of attention. I also love people.\r\n\r\n10.  Everything goes back to love. And to politics. Love and politics.','What We Learned 2011','','publish','closed','open','','what-we-learned-2011','','','2018-07-09 14:32:21','2018-07-09 19:32:21','',720,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=752',0,'page','',0),(753,5,'2011-10-05 14:52:33','2011-10-05 14:52:33','<p align=\"center\">What We Learned in Campus Ecology</p>\n<p align=\"center\">Spring 2011</p>\n&nbsp;\n\n1.    Pay attention to details.\n\n2.    Nature can be closely related to religion.\n\n3.    Balancing economic development and environmental protection is really tough.\n\n4.    Why Americans do not adopt public transportation that often…\n\n5.    Pete Sandberg and Randy’s jobs really impressed me because of their hard work reducing waste and saving energy.\n\n6.    Dorm annotations—do we need that much stuff?\n\n7.    If people love their jobs they will definitely do them well.\n\n8.    American lifestyle is kind of wasteful for me.\n\n9.    Learn to love nature at an early age.\n\n10. Small changes can lead to big changes.\n\n11. I can use less than 10 minutes’ worth of water in the shower. I can use less than 5 minutes worth! I didn’t think it was possible.\n\n12. We are already suffering for our environmental sins in big ways.\n\n13. I could see environmental disaster in my lifetime.\n\n14. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be environmentally friendly.\n\n15. You can be environmentally-minded in <em>literally</em> every aspect of life; it’s not just one category of your day.\n\n16. Other people (lots of them!) enjoy nature. Huh!\n\n17. More is not always more—in schedules, in content of classes, in belongings, in variety of food, etc.\n\n18. It’s not that hard to reduce everyday impact.\n\n19. Feeling disgruntled about the future of the environment and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive.\n\n20. There is immeasurable energy in talking with other people about environmental hopes and ideas.\n\n21. Don’t ever, EVER give up on hope: sometimes it’s all you have in life.\n\n22. You can talk the talk, but if you don’t walk the walk, nothing is getting accomplished. Take initiative!\n\n23. Journaling is actually fun.\n\n24. Mary Oliver writes really good poems.\n\n25. Classes with less expectations/homework/tests actually make me want to work harder.\n\n26. 55 minutes 3 times a week is not enough time to discuss the issue of environmentalism.\n\n27. Driving your car less is more important than taking shorter showers.\n\n28. More people need to educate themselves on environmental topics; a small group of people can’t fix the world alone.\n\n29. I’m a really good listener. I may not talk much, but sometimes there are too many talkers in the world and not enough listeners to actually take the time to hear what they have to say.\n\n30. More treats in class.\n\n31. Hope—it is necessary for change and a good thing for life.\n\n32. Beauty—it’s all around us, we just need to <em>stop</em> and <em>look</em>.\n\n33. Politics—it can be difficult, but it’s important to get involved.\n\n34. Change—we need to work for it individually and as a group.\n\n35. Consumerism is a political act.\n\n36. Corporations have consumer power that can be used to incite change.\n\n37. Spending time on my plot in the natural lands helps with stress.\n\n38. Slow down—try not to rush through life, you may miss things.\n\n39. There are many environmental aspects to being a college student.\n\n40. Talk and listen to others—it’s amazing what you can learn.\n\n41. Hope is at the root of structural change.\n\n42. Parenting is political.\n\n43. I love Mary Oliver poetry—she gives a voice to feelings I didn’t know I had.\n\n44. Just sitting and observing for an hour can teach you more than 10 hours in the library.\n\n45. We are the stories we tell.\n\n46. Shopping is political (vote with your dollar).\n\n47. Showers should be shorter.\n\n48. Activism doesn’t have to be about carrying a sign and marching in the streets.\n\n49. We look at issues (environmental and otherwise) too simplistically in many cases. We need to realize how complex our interactions with the earth and one another really are. We need to <em>connect</em> and use “designing minds.”\n\n50. We can design buildings like trees. We can make them <em>breathe</em> (I loved seeing this when we toured Regents especially).\n\n51. What counts as natural and unnatural in nature.\n\n52. What nature means to me in my life.\n\n53. How St. Olaf is a part of natural systems.\n\n54. How my operative and expressed values affect the world and global “weirding.”\n\n55. Small actions make a difference.\n\n56. Communication can cause change.\n\n57. I learned to not be afraid to express my love for nature; I learned that telling people that I care can make them care.\n\n58. Environmentalism can be cool.\n\n59. Politics affects everything.\n\n60. There is hope in the world. We can change.\n\n61. Communicating values.\n\n62. To really observe.\n\n63. Taking time to reflect on my thoughts.\n\n64. Portrayal of nature in our surroundings.\n\n65. How influential consumerist society is on our daily lives.\n\n66. Importance of activism (I’m still working on that).\n\n67. Figuring out what hope is.\n\n68. Having meaningful relationships with people and our environment.\n\n69. Puns and plays on words make essays more fun to read.\n\n70. Thinking about what I’m going to do to create a better place for myself and for the future.\n\n71. Community is critical for social change.\n\n72. There is hope.\n\n73. GDP doesn’t measure wealth.\n\n74. Our operative and expressed values aren’t both present in our culture.\n\n75. There is a way to be environmentally religious.\n\n76. We need to change society to be more environmental.\n\n77. Politics is not, but should be, a part of our everyday lives.\n\n78. You need passion to make change.\n\n79. It’s important to learn the names of places and things.\n\n80. Always question what you are told.\n\n81. Systems.\n\n82. People have different ideals.\n\n83. Hope.\n\n84. Patience.\n\n85. I learned about myself.\n\n86. I learned to listen.\n\n87. That so many things are interconnected.\n\n88. Being an Environmental Studies major is cool.\n\n89. There is always a political side.\n\n90. St. Olaf is actually not that sustainable in the curriculum.\n\n91. Conversation is the single most effective way to learn.\n\n92. Sometimes/most of the time you need to plan time to do nothing—it stimulates thought.\n\n93. Community is extremely important.\n\n94. Doing individual acts, such as showering less or recycling, isn’t going to ‘save the world’—there needs to be a paradigm shift from industrial to ecological.\n\n95. You don’t need to take a test to show how much you’ve learned.\n\n96. To slow down.\n\n97. We need to love.\n\n98. My party affiliation does not align with my environmental views.\n\n99. Social injustice is key to our environmental problems.\n\n100.      Creating relationships is what makes the world go around.\n\n101.      Connecting to your place is important and fun.\n\n102.      Exploring can be fun alone, but is sometimes even better with a friend.\n\n103.      It’s hard to separate classes with similar content.\n\n104.      Don’t always judge a book by its cover.\n\n105.      I have hope that humans can have a net positive impact on the earth.\n\n106.      The most important conversations happen over and over again\n\n107.      It’s easy to think that everyone thinks similarly to you—this is not always true.\n\n108.      I’m glad to get to know Northfield, but I’m sad I’m leaving so soon.\n\n109.      Tracks in the snow.\n\n110.      Live intentionally.\n\n111.      You don’t have to know everything or be perfect.\n\n112.      That I <em>can</em> make a difference.\n\n113.      That spending time to convene with nature (particularly alone or just with my journal, cameral, and an open mind) is one of the best things I can do with my time.\n\n114.      That we can use everyday conversations, as well as deeper conversations, to instigate social change.\n\n115.      To think about things deeply and not just take them as they come.\n\n116.      That our culture promotes hookup relationships with nature, but I want to have and have started cultivating a long-term committed relationship based on love, effort, and gratitude.\n\n117.      That the Natural Lands haven’t always been there…thank GOD they are!\n\n118.      That Mary Coulson and Jim Farrell are AWESOME people, teachers, and role models.\n\n119.      That baking bread is really fun and <em>I </em>can even do it (I can’t cook).\n\n120.      That there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">IS</span> hope and that there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ARE</span> people in this world who care about things the way I do; that movements for social and environmental justice are both ideals and realities.\n\n121.      That EVERYONE should get to take Campus Ecology!\n\n122.      Higher education does not always equal greater life knowledge; sometimes more education makes us blind to simple solutions.\n\n123.      Hope is one of the most important things we can hold onto, despite Jennings, because it stimulates changes (or ideals) into action.\n\n124.      America’s highly individualized and competitive society is actually what is hurting us internationally.\n\n125.      St. Olaf’s Bon Appetit program is incredible! I want every freshman to get a tour of the caf during Week One.\n\n126.      Most of the stuff we buy ends up costing the environment farm more than the money we put in.\n\n127.      In order to implement change, you need to get involved in politics and ignore the sleazy politicians.\n\n128.      Think global, act local; focus on local projects and then more people will be affected.\n\n129.      It is okay to call yourself an environmentalist and do sustainable things, but not be perfect at it.\n\n130.      “Conserve” is in the world “conservative,” so maybe Republicans can be shown that environmental conservation is part of their definition.\n\n131.      We should work <em>with</em> big business to affect change, not against (don’t destroy companies/cities, but green them up).\n\n132.      Paradox of American individualist interests.\n\n133.      How to sit and think deeply about a plot.\n\n134.      Problem of environmentalism is a design problem.\n\n135.      Professor Farrell loves goodwill sweaters.\n\n136.      Importance of education to change.\n\n137.      How great Bon Appetit is.\n\n138.      Effective energy system we have at school.\n\n139.      Hope.\n\n140.      Conversation is a great way to learn.\n\n141.      Passion in every aspect of life.\n\n142.      How to think beyond what is said.\n\n143.      Local versus global; individual versus community.\n\n144.      I learned how to think while I read.\n\n145.      There is beauty everywhere and in everything.\n\n146.      Everything has an environmental impact.\n\n147.      To appreciate—to slow down.\n\n148.       Love everything.\n\n149.      The environment must be taken into consideration in everything we do, and being aware of this is part of living the good life.\n\n150.      We can learn from assignments in school but what we really learn from is <em>people</em>.\n\n151.      Sometimes the most valuable experiences have no ‘value’ in our socially constructed world.\n\n152.      Being politically active and aware is <em>important</em>.\n\n153.      Living simply really is better!\n\n154.      If you have free time, read or write, always!\n\n155.      Having hope is better than arguing if we should even have it at all.\n\n156.      Relishing small moments is more fulfilling than anticipating large ones.\n\n157.      Everyone should grow their own food and we should be a part of a society that allows time to do so.\n\n158.      The importance of stories—life is made of stories.\n\n159.      How to talk to people who disagree.\n\n160.      How to read for pleasure even if what is written is not a pleasing idea.\n\n161.      How to write between the lines (not intro/body/conclusion, but rather a discovery while you’re writing).\n\n162.      How Bon Appetit operates.\n\n163.      How culture creates us (media, education, parenting).\n\n164.      How to ask questions.\n\n165.      How to have a relationship with nature.\n\n166.      What is hope.\n\n167.      Through the anger and frustration I have felt in this class, I have learned that I am truly passionate about the Earth.\n\n168.      I learned that the place I’m living in is my responsibility.\n\n169.      I learned that where I’m from matters.\n\n170.      I learned that other people (many others) share my values.\n\n171.      I learned that if people don’t change, the world will.\n\n172.      I learned that if people do change, the world still will.\n\n173.      I learned about blue jeans.\n\n174.      I learned about energy on St. Olaf campus.\n\n175.      I learned things about St. Olaf I didn’t know before.\n\n176.      I learned that learned behavior is hard to change.\n\n177.      I learned that change starts with me.\n\n178.      Be appreciative towards all that surrounds you.\n\n179.      Be politically active.\n\n180.      Class can be just as educational without tests.\n\n181.      I can be afraid to take action if I expect to see change.\n\n182.      I learned just how much I value nature.\n\n183.      I learned that, while much more needs to be done for the earth, some actions have been taken.\n\n184.      I am guilty of, to quote Jim, “bitching” a lot.\n\n185.      Learning about myself is the greatest form of education.\n\n186.      Jo and Joe College are not real (kidding, of course).\n\n187.      I have learned that I am pretty normal. Now it is time for me to go out and make an effort to be unique by changing my habits and, through them, the world.\n\n188.      Overconsumption is the number one environmental killer.\n\n189.      The small things in nature are just as awe-inspiring as the grandiose things.\n\n190.      Our operative values don’t often correspond to our expressed values when it comes to environmentalism.\n\n191.      Having the variety of two instructors provides a nice change of pace.\n\n192.      Change needs to start on small levels so it can snowball to larger scales.\n\n193.      My plot is beautiful!\n\n194.      Many of my choices in life are unsustainable (i.e. a large consumption of beef) and I need to make some sacrifices in order to improve.\n\n195.      St. Olaf does a pretty good job at being eco-friendly.\n\n196.      In order to save nature, we need to love nature.\n\n197.      Economists are viewed in a negative light in much of environmental literature, and there’s some truth to that, but I intend to prove otherwise.\n\n198.      What I might want to do for graduate school.\n\n199.      That I think I want to be an environmental consultant for corporate businesses as my career.\n\n200.      That there is hope for change in our society (kind of cheesy).\n\n201.      That tofu has a large carbon footprint.\n\n202.      That I don’t need a stressful workload and big exams in order to learn a lot in a class.\n\n203.      That actually <em>being</em> in nature is just as important as working to preserve/restore/protect it.\n\n204.      We need to change our political system, education system, religious views, and corporate businesses. It’s not just small-scale changes (although those are good too).\n\n205.      Environmental studies should not be limited to one major or department.\n\n206.      Each individual’s actions can make a difference as it can lead to a movement and then cultural change.\n\n207.      CONSUMERISM IS BAD!\n\n208.      I learned how to look for hope.\n\n209.      I learned how to be more conscientious of my surroundings.\n\n210.      I learned how to relax in my writing and just write.\n\n211.      I learned about the intricacies of our facilities buildings.\n\n212.      From the STARS project, I found out that St. Olaf is pretty good at coordination and planning but could do better.\n\n213.      I learned a lot about a college student’s impact on the environment.\n\n214.      I learned that classes can have really good conversations.\n\n215.      I learned about place, and appreciating it.\n\n216.      I learned about Northfield, the town I’ve lived in for four years.\n\n217.      I learned that having a passionate and involved professor makes classes a lot better (NOT sucking up, it’s true!)\n\n218.      How to slow down and appreciate the world around me.\n\n219.      The importance of civic engagement, not civic resignation.\n\n220.      How strongly politics influences our lives and some ways we can influence them.\n\n221.      How nature is deeply affected and shaped by human culture.\n\n222.      A more concrete idea of my standards of “sustainability” and what the means.\n\n223.      Anger is a virtue.\n\n224.      That the antonym of “bitching” is “hoping,” which has altered my conversations with friends (in a good way).\n\n225.      Meals are one of the best times to share ideas, especially in college.\n\n226.      Food is important.\n\n227.      How colleges are harbors of change.\n\n228.      I get more out of conversations where no one’s trying to “win” or make the best point.\n\n229.      Parents are teachers.\n\n230.      We have a political, not an ecological problem (the symptoms are ecological).\n\n231.      Thinking economically is useful, though I don’t like to do it.\n\n232.      Buildings breathe.\n\n233.      Freshmen are really smart and cool.\n\n234.      St. Olaf is part of Northfield is part of Minnesota. I live all of those places.\n\n235.      It’s important and meaningful for everyone to know everyone else’s name.\n\n236.      Death and Earth are intimately linked.\n\n237.      We are not helpless or without agency. In fact, there are more things to be done to better our world and environment than can be fit into ten lifetimes. So many we have to <em>choose</em>!\n\n238.      School and learning are still the most fun things <em>ever</em>.\n\n239.      I learned some things that bring me joy.\n\n240.      I learned what hope is for (and wonder).\n\n241.      The importance of practice.\n\n242.      What “work” is.\n\n243.      Pete Sandberg is awesome.\n\n244.      Why shorter showers <em>do</em> matter.\n\n245.      About embodied energy.\n\n246.      Jim likes wordplay.\n\n247.      The triple bottom line.\n\n248.      Why growth is bad.\n\n249.      Why growth is good.\n\n250.      Why I love JRR Tolkien.\n\n251.      How to listen.\n\n252.      Class can be different (radical, student-led, outside).\n\n253.      Our current systems aren’t sustainable (politically, culturally, socially, etc).\n\n254.      Small changes are happening (ex. St. Olaf energy systems, Regents, STARS).\n\n255.      More needs to happen!!!\n\n256.      Many have hope (in us, kids, futures).\n\n257.      Many don’t.\n\n258.      Getting to know nature deeply is important beyond confines.\n\n259.      Poetry is beautiful. And powerful.\n\n260.      We need liberal radicals!\n\n261.      Olaf needs more radical dudes like Jim. We need to break the status quo more—that’s my hope/vision for St. Olaf.\n\n262.      Be curious and inquisitive.\n\n263.      Go outside and use my senses.\n\n264.      Individual behavior change is key—that should come first.\n\n265.      Creating a culture that displays its values outwardly should come next or simultaneously.\n\n266.      Political change should follow from cultural change because people will be actively engaged in the community’s well-being.\n\n267.      Environmental education and awareness are needed now!\n\n268.      Our current system cannot hold up much longer.\n\n269.      Act, communicate, teach and learn from others.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n[10 Most important things I learned from teaching Campus Ecology (by Mary)]:\n\n&nbsp;\n\n1. I process information best when it comes full-circle in my life.\n\n2. I’ve changed a lot since I was a freshman.\n\n3. Every person is complex, and a classroom where students are allowed to be complex people is more interesting.\n\n4. Teaching is really about listening.\n\n5. There is not one over-arching solution to the environmental crisis, but may creative, place-specific solutions (thought up and implemented by many creative, place-loving people).\n\n6. St. Olaf students love deadlines, page limits, and clear directions.\n\n7. Mary Oliver is more complex than people let her be by just reading <em>The Summer Day</em>. She expresses through poetry what I’ve never found a way to express.\n\n8. The St. Olaf landscape, birds, sunshine, buildings, teachers, students, custodians, friends, sky, ponds, maple trees—will always be in my heart.\n\n9. I like being a leader. I also like being the center of attention. I also love people.\n\n10.  Everything goes back to love. And to politics. Love and politics.]','What We Learned 2011','','inherit','open','open','','752-revision','','','2011-10-05 14:52:33','2011-10-05 14:52:33','',752,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/752-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(754,5,'2011-10-18 01:20:01','2011-10-18 01:20:01','<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">What We Learned in Campus Ecology</p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" align=\"center\">Spring 2011</p>\n<em>Each semester, near the end of classes, I bring in a stack of index cards and distribute them to students. I ask them, simply, to write down the ten most important things they learned in the class. I emphasize that the list represents what they learned, not what I was teaching. The results are always delightful--here are the most recent revelations:\n</em>\n\n1.    Pay attention to details.\n\n2.    Nature can be closely related to religion.\n\n3.    Balancing economic development and environmental protection is really tough.\n\n4.    Why Americans do not adopt public transportation that often…\n\n5.    Pete Sandberg and Randy’s jobs really impressed me because of their hard work reducing waste and saving energy.\n\n6.    Dorm annotations—do we need that much stuff?\n\n7.    If people love their jobs they will definitely do them well.\n\n8.    American lifestyle is kind of wasteful for me.\n\n9.    Learn to love nature at an early age.\n\n10. Small changes can lead to big changes.\n\n11. I can use less than 10 minutes’ worth of water in the shower. I can use less than 5 minutes worth! I didn’t think it was possible.\n\n12. We are already suffering for our environmental sins in big ways.\n\n13. I could see environmental disaster in my lifetime.\n\n14. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be environmentally friendly.\n\n15. You can be environmentally-minded in <em>literally</em> every aspect of life; it’s not just one category of your day.\n\n16. Other people (lots of them!) enjoy nature. Huh!\n\n17. More is not always more—in schedules, in content of classes, in belongings, in variety of food, etc.\n\n18. It’s not that hard to reduce everyday impact.\n\n19. Feeling disgruntled about the future of the environment and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive.\n\n20. There is immeasurable energy in talking with other people about environmental hopes and ideas.\n\n21. Don’t ever, EVER give up on hope: sometimes it’s all you have in life.\n\n22. You can talk the talk, but if you don’t walk the walk, nothing is getting accomplished. Take initiative!\n\n23. Journaling is actually fun.\n\n24. Mary Oliver writes really good poems.\n\n25. Classes with less expectations/homework/tests actually make me want to work harder.\n\n26. 55 minutes 3 times a week is not enough time to discuss the issue of environmentalism.\n\n27. Driving your car less is more important than taking shorter showers.\n\n28. More people need to educate themselves on environmental topics; a small group of people can’t fix the world alone.\n\n29. I’m a really good listener. I may not talk much, but sometimes there are too many talkers in the world and not enough listeners to actually take the time to hear what they have to say.\n\n30. More treats in class.\n\n31. Hope—it is necessary for change and a good thing for life.\n\n32. Beauty—it’s all around us, we just need to <em>stop</em> and <em>look</em>.\n\n33. Politics—it can be difficult, but it’s important to get involved.\n\n34. Change—we need to work for it individually and as a group.\n\n35. Consumerism is a political act.\n\n36. Corporations have consumer power that can be used to incite change.\n\n37. Spending time on my plot in the natural lands helps with stress.\n\n38. Slow down—try not to rush through life, you may miss things.\n\n39. There are many environmental aspects to being a college student.\n\n40. Talk and listen to others—it’s amazing what you can learn.\n\n41. Hope is at the root of structural change.\n\n42. Parenting is political.\n\n43. I love Mary Oliver poetry—she gives a voice to feelings I didn’t know I had.\n\n44. Just sitting and observing for an hour can teach you more than 10 hours in the library.\n\n45. We are the stories we tell.\n\n46. Shopping is political (vote with your dollar).\n\n47. Showers should be shorter.\n\n48. Activism doesn’t have to be about carrying a sign and marching in the streets.\n\n49. We look at issues (environmental and otherwise) too simplistically in many cases. We need to realize how complex our interactions with the earth and one another really are. We need to <em>connect</em> and use “designing minds.”\n\n50. We can design buildings like trees. We can make them <em>breathe</em> (I loved seeing this when we toured Regents especially).\n\n51. What counts as natural and unnatural in nature.\n\n52. What nature means to me in my life.\n\n53. How St. Olaf is a part of natural systems.\n\n54. How my operative and expressed values affect the world and global “weirding.”\n\n55. Small actions make a difference.\n\n56. Communication can cause change.\n\n57. I learned to not be afraid to express my love for nature; I learned that telling people that I care can make them care.\n\n58. Environmentalism can be cool.\n\n59. Politics affects everything.\n\n60. There is hope in the world. We can change.\n\n61. Communicating values.\n\n62. To really observe.\n\n63. Taking time to reflect on my thoughts.\n\n64. Portrayal of nature in our surroundings.\n\n65. How influential consumerist society is on our daily lives.\n\n66. Importance of activism (I’m still working on that).\n\n67. Figuring out what hope is.\n\n68. Having meaningful relationships with people and our environment.\n\n69. Puns and plays on words make essays more fun to read.\n\n70. Thinking about what I’m going to do to create a better place for myself and for the future.\n\n71. Community is critical for social change.\n\n72. There is hope.\n\n73. GDP doesn’t measure wealth.\n\n74. Our operative and expressed values aren’t both present in our culture.\n\n75. There is a way to be environmentally religious.\n\n76. We need to change society to be more environmental.\n\n77. Politics is not, but should be, a part of our everyday lives.\n\n78. You need passion to make change.\n\n79. It’s important to learn the names of places and things.\n\n80. Always question what you are told.\n\n81. Systems.\n\n82. People have different ideals.\n\n83. Hope.\n\n84. Patience.\n\n85. I learned about myself.\n\n86. I learned to listen.\n\n87. That so many things are interconnected.\n\n88. Being an Environmental Studies major is cool.\n\n89. There is always a political side.\n\n90. St. Olaf is actually not that sustainable in the curriculum.\n\n91. Conversation is the single most effective way to learn.\n\n92. Sometimes/most of the time you need to plan time to do nothing—it stimulates thought.\n\n93. Community is extremely important.\n\n94. Doing individual acts, such as showering less or recycling, isn’t going to ‘save the world’—there needs to be a paradigm shift from industrial to ecological.\n\n95. You don’t need to take a test to show how much you’ve learned.\n\n96. To slow down.\n\n97. We need to love.\n\n98. My party affiliation does not align with my environmental views.\n\n99. Social injustice is key to our environmental problems.\n\n100.      Creating relationships is what makes the world go around.\n\n101.      Connecting to your place is important and fun.\n\n102.      Exploring can be fun alone, but is sometimes even better with a friend.\n\n103.      It’s hard to separate classes with similar content.\n\n104.      Don’t always judge a book by its cover.\n\n105.      I have hope that humans can have a net positive impact on the earth.\n\n106.      The most important conversations happen over and over again\n\n107.      It’s easy to think that everyone thinks similarly to you—this is not always true.\n\n108.      I’m glad to get to know Northfield, but I’m sad I’m leaving so soon.\n\n109.      Tracks in the snow.\n\n110.      Live intentionally.\n\n111.      You don’t have to know everything or be perfect.\n\n112.      That I <em>can</em> make a difference.\n\n113.      That spending time to convene with nature (particularly alone or just with my journal, cameral, and an open mind) is one of the best things I can do with my time.\n\n114.      That we can use everyday conversations, as well as deeper conversations, to instigate social change.\n\n115.      To think about things deeply and not just take them as they come.\n\n116.      That our culture promotes hookup relationships with nature, but I want to have and have started cultivating a long-term committed relationship based on love, effort, and gratitude.\n\n117.      That the Natural Lands haven’t always been there…thank GOD they are!\n\n118.      That Mary Coulson and Jim Farrell are AWESOME people, teachers, and role models.\n\n119.      That baking bread is really fun and <em>I </em>can even do it (I can’t cook).\n\n120.      That there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">IS</span> hope and that there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ARE</span> people in this world who care about things the way I do; that movements for social and environmental justice are both ideals and realities.\n\n121.      That EVERYONE should get to take Campus Ecology!\n\n122.      Higher education does not always equal greater life knowledge; sometimes more education makes us blind to simple solutions.\n\n123.      Hope is one of the most important things we can hold onto, despite Jennings, because it stimulates changes (or ideals) into action.\n\n124.      America’s highly individualized and competitive society is actually what is hurting us internationally.\n\n125.      St. Olaf’s Bon Appetit program is incredible! I want every freshman to get a tour of the caf during Week One.\n\n126.      Most of the stuff we buy ends up costing the environment farm more than the money we put in.\n\n127.      In order to implement change, you need to get involved in politics and ignore the sleazy politicians.\n\n128.      Think global, act local; focus on local projects and then more people will be affected.\n\n129.      It is okay to call yourself an environmentalist and do sustainable things, but not be perfect at it.\n\n130.      “Conserve” is in the world “conservative,” so maybe Republicans can be shown that environmental conservation is part of their definition.\n\n131.      We should work <em>with</em> big business to affect change, not against (don’t destroy companies/cities, but green them up).\n\n132.      Paradox of American individualist interests.\n\n133.      How to sit and think deeply about a plot.\n\n134.      Problem of environmentalism is a design problem.\n\n135.      Professor Farrell loves goodwill sweaters.\n\n136.      Importance of education to change.\n\n137.      How great Bon Appetit is.\n\n138.      Effective energy system we have at school.\n\n139.      Hope.\n\n140.      Conversation is a great way to learn.\n\n141.      Passion in every aspect of life.\n\n142.      How to think beyond what is said.\n\n143.      Local versus global; individual versus community.\n\n144.      I learned how to think while I read.\n\n145.      There is beauty everywhere and in everything.\n\n146.      Everything has an environmental impact.\n\n147.      To appreciate—to slow down.\n\n148.       Love everything.\n\n149.      The environment must be taken into consideration in everything we do, and being aware of this is part of living the good life.\n\n150.      We can learn from assignments in school but what we really learn from is <em>people</em>.\n\n151.      Sometimes the most valuable experiences have no ‘value’ in our socially constructed world.\n\n152.      Being politically active and aware is <em>important</em>.\n\n153.      Living simply really is better!\n\n154.      If you have free time, read or write, always!\n\n155.      Having hope is better than arguing if we should even have it at all.\n\n156.      Relishing small moments is more fulfilling than anticipating large ones.\n\n157.      Everyone should grow their own food and we should be a part of a society that allows time to do so.\n\n158.      The importance of stories—life is made of stories.\n\n159.      How to talk to people who disagree.\n\n160.      How to read for pleasure even if what is written is not a pleasing idea.\n\n161.      How to write between the lines (not intro/body/conclusion, but rather a discovery while you’re writing).\n\n162.      How Bon Appetit operates.\n\n163.      How culture creates us (media, education, parenting).\n\n164.      How to ask questions.\n\n165.      How to have a relationship with nature.\n\n166.      What is hope.\n\n167.      Through the anger and frustration I have felt in this class, I have learned that I am truly passionate about the Earth.\n\n168.      I learned that the place I’m living in is my responsibility.\n\n169.      I learned that where I’m from matters.\n\n170.      I learned that other people (many others) share my values.\n\n171.      I learned that if people don’t change, the world will.\n\n172.      I learned that if people do change, the world still will.\n\n173.      I learned about blue jeans.\n\n174.      I learned about energy on St. Olaf campus.\n\n175.      I learned things about St. Olaf I didn’t know before.\n\n176.      I learned that learned behavior is hard to change.\n\n177.      I learned that change starts with me.\n\n178.      Be appreciative towards all that surrounds you.\n\n179.      Be politically active.\n\n180.      Class can be just as educational without tests.\n\n181.      I can be afraid to take action if I expect to see change.\n\n182.      I learned just how much I value nature.\n\n183.      I learned that, while much more needs to be done for the earth, some actions have been taken.\n\n184.      I am guilty of, to quote Jim, “bitching” a lot.\n\n185.      Learning about myself is the greatest form of education.\n\n186.      Jo and Joe College are not real (kidding, of course).\n\n187.      I have learned that I am pretty normal. Now it is time for me to go out and make an effort to be unique by changing my habits and, through them, the world.\n\n188.      Overconsumption is the number one environmental killer.\n\n189.      The small things in nature are just as awe-inspiring as the grandiose things.\n\n190.      Our operative values don’t often correspond to our expressed values when it comes to environmentalism.\n\n191.      Having the variety of two instructors provides a nice change of pace.\n\n192.      Change needs to start on small levels so it can snowball to larger scales.\n\n193.      My plot is beautiful!\n\n194.      Many of my choices in life are unsustainable (i.e. a large consumption of beef) and I need to make some sacrifices in order to improve.\n\n195.      St. Olaf does a pretty good job at being eco-friendly.\n\n196.      In order to save nature, we need to love nature.\n\n197.      Economists are viewed in a negative light in much of environmental literature, and there’s some truth to that, but I intend to prove otherwise.\n\n198.      What I might want to do for graduate school.\n\n199.      That I think I want to be an environmental consultant for corporate businesses as my career.\n\n200.      That there is hope for change in our society (kind of cheesy).\n\n201.      That tofu has a large carbon footprint.\n\n202.      That I don’t need a stressful workload and big exams in order to learn a lot in a class.\n\n203.      That actually <em>being</em> in nature is just as important as working to preserve/restore/protect it.\n\n204.      We need to change our political system, education system, religious views, and corporate businesses. It’s not just small-scale changes (although those are good too).\n\n205.      Environmental studies should not be limited to one major or department.\n\n206.      Each individual’s actions can make a difference as it can lead to a movement and then cultural change.\n\n207.      CONSUMERISM IS BAD!\n\n208.      I learned how to look for hope.\n\n209.      I learned how to be more conscientious of my surroundings.\n\n210.      I learned how to relax in my writing and just write.\n\n211.      I learned about the intricacies of our facilities buildings.\n\n212.      From the STARS project, I found out that St. Olaf is pretty good at coordination and planning but could do better.\n\n213.      I learned a lot about a college student’s impact on the environment.\n\n214.      I learned that classes can have really good conversations.\n\n215.      I learned about place, and appreciating it.\n\n216.      I learned about Northfield, the town I’ve lived in for four years.\n\n217.      I learned that having a passionate and involved professor makes classes a lot better (NOT sucking up, it’s true!)\n\n218.      How to slow down and appreciate the world around me.\n\n219.      The importance of civic engagement, not civic resignation.\n\n220.      How strongly politics influences our lives and some ways we can influence them.\n\n221.      How nature is deeply affected and shaped by human culture.\n\n222.      A more concrete idea of my standards of “sustainability” and what the means.\n\n223.      Anger is a virtue.\n\n224.      That the antonym of “bitching” is “hoping,” which has altered my conversations with friends (in a good way).\n\n225.      Meals are one of the best times to share ideas, especially in college.\n\n226.      Food is important.\n\n227.      How colleges are harbors of change.\n\n228.      I get more out of conversations where no one’s trying to “win” or make the best point.\n\n229.      Parents are teachers.\n\n230.      We have a political, not an ecological problem (the symptoms are ecological).\n\n231.      Thinking economically is useful, though I don’t like to do it.\n\n232.      Buildings breathe.\n\n233.      Freshmen are really smart and cool.\n\n234.      St. Olaf is part of Northfield is part of Minnesota. I live all of those places.\n\n235.      It’s important and meaningful for everyone to know everyone else’s name.\n\n236.      Death and Earth are intimately linked.\n\n237.      We are not helpless or without agency. In fact, there are more things to be done to better our world and environment than can be fit into ten lifetimes. So many we have to <em>choose</em>!\n\n238.      School and learning are still the most fun things <em>ever</em>.\n\n239.      I learned some things that bring me joy.\n\n240.      I learned what hope is for (and wonder).\n\n241.      The importance of practice.\n\n242.      What “work” is.\n\n243.      Pete Sandberg is awesome.\n\n244.      Why shorter showers <em>do</em> matter.\n\n245.      About embodied energy.\n\n246.      Jim likes wordplay.\n\n247.      The triple bottom line.\n\n248.      Why growth is bad.\n\n249.      Why growth is good.\n\n250.      Why I love JRR Tolkien.\n\n251.      How to listen.\n\n252.      Class can be different (radical, student-led, outside).\n\n253.      Our current systems aren’t sustainable (politically, culturally, socially, etc).\n\n254.      Small changes are happening (ex. St. Olaf energy systems, Regents, STARS).\n\n255.      More needs to happen!!!\n\n256.      Many have hope (in us, kids, futures).\n\n257.      Many don’t.\n\n258.      Getting to know nature deeply is important beyond confines.\n\n259.      Poetry is beautiful. And powerful.\n\n260.      We need liberal radicals!\n\n261.      Olaf needs more radical dudes like Jim. We need to break the status quo more—that’s my hope/vision for St. Olaf.\n\n262.      Be curious and inquisitive.\n\n263.      Go outside and use my senses.\n\n264.      Individual behavior change is key—that should come first.\n\n265.      Creating a culture that displays its values outwardly should come next or simultaneously.\n\n266.      Political change should follow from cultural change because people will be actively engaged in the community’s well-being.\n\n267.      Environmental education and awareness are needed now!\n\n268.      Our current system cannot hold up much longer.\n\n269.      Act, communicate, teach and learn from others.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n[10 Most important things I learned from teaching Campus Ecology (by Mary)]:\n\n&nbsp;\n\n1. I process information best when it comes full-circle in my life.\n\n2. I’ve changed a lot since I was a freshman.\n\n3. Every person is complex, and a classroom where students are allowed to be complex people is more interesting.\n\n4. Teaching is really about listening.\n\n5. There is not one over-arching solution to the environmental crisis, but may creative, place-specific solutions (thought up and implemented by many creative, place-loving people).\n\n6. St. Olaf students love deadlines, page limits, and clear directions.\n\n7. Mary Oliver is more complex than people let her be by just reading <em>The Summer Day</em>. She expresses through poetry what I’ve never found a way to express.\n\n8. The St. Olaf landscape, birds, sunshine, buildings, teachers, students, custodians, friends, sky, ponds, maple trees—will always be in my heart.\n\n9. I like being a leader. I also like being the center of attention. I also love people.\n\n10.  Everything goes back to love. And to politics. Love and politics.','What We Learned 2011','','inherit','open','open','','752-autosave','','','2011-10-18 01:20:01','2011-10-18 01:20:01','',752,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/752-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(825,5,'2012-06-30 14:39:00','2012-06-30 14:39:00','One of the most creative projects to come out of Campus Ecology was a series of posters designed by Britta Schroeter. Here they are:\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-826\" title=\"Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-830\" title=\"Food\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food-630x406.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"406\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-831\" title=\"Treehuggers\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-832\" title=\"Conservation\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-834\" title=\"leaves\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-833\" title=\"Church\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-835\" title=\"Plants\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>','Sustainability is not just . . .','','publish','closed','open','','sustainability-isnt-just-for','','','2018-07-09 14:32:20','2018-07-09 19:32:20','',838,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=825',0,'page','',0),(802,5,'2012-04-10 15:40:11','2012-04-10 15:40:11','<strong><em></em></strong>With all the environmental problems facing Americans—including global weirding, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, resource depletion, soil erosion, etc.—it’s time for the college curriculum to signal students that environmental issues are essential to their future. And students want such engagement. At St. Olaf, for example, 76 percent of our entering students consider themselves environmentalists. Eighty-five percent of first-year Oles think that environmental literacy is an important part of a college education, and 58 percent support a general education requirement for environmental literacy.  And their interest isn’t just informational or theoretical. Almost 71 percent of our students say that “one of the things I expect to learn in college is how to live an environmentally responsible life.” Your students are probably similar—they know that, for them, sustainability isn’t an abstract word. It’s their life—or not.\n\nSo plan to be a part of a workshop on Sustainability across the Curriculum to be held at St. Olaf College June 13-14 this year. Modeled on the faculty leadership workshops of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) and of the Upper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability (UMACS), the gathering at St. Olaf will provide chances for individual faculty to re-think courses to see where the big ideas of their disciplines might intersect profitably with the big ideas of sustainability. And it will also provide suggestions for ways that faculty might be more involved in the sustainability initiatives on their diverse campuses.\n\nThe workshop will be facilitated by Jim Farrell and Jon Jensen from Luther College. Jon teaches courses in Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Luther College, where he’s been a leader in sustainability initiatives. Both Jon and Jim were invited to attend the AASHE curriculum workshop in San Diego in 2010, which resulted in the publication called <a href=\"http://www.campusresponsables.com/sites/default/files/RecommandationsDDdanscurriculum-AASHE.pdf\"><em>Sustainability Curriculum in Higher Education: A Call to Action</em></a>. Jon is also a board member of AASHE <em>and </em>UMACS, so he has finger firmly on the pulse of sustainability efforts in higher education.\n\nJim teaches courses in History, American Studies, and Environmental Studies at St. Olaf, including Environmental History, The Culture of Nature, Campus Ecology, and Imagining Environmentalism.  He’s  a member of the Sustainability Task Force at St. Olaf, and  the author of <a href=\"../\"><em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World</em></a><em> </em>(Milkweed Editions, 2010), which explores the intersections of college culture, consumer culture and the environment.\n\nFor more on the workshop, click <a href=\"http://www.stolaf.edu/conferences/\">here</a>.\n\nPlease join us.\n\n&nbsp;','Sustainability Across the Curriculum Workshop--St. Olaf College, June 13-14','','inherit','open','open','','800-autosave','','','2012-04-10 15:40:11','2012-04-10 15:40:11','',800,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/04/800-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(826,5,'2012-06-30 14:30:13','2012-06-30 14:30:13','','Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .','','inherit','open','open','','artmajor','','','2012-06-30 14:30:13','2012-06-30 14:30:13','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(827,5,'2012-06-30 14:34:22','2012-06-30 14:34:22','','ArtMajor','','inherit','open','open','','artmajor-2','','','2012-06-30 14:34:22','2012-06-30 14:34:22','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor1.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(763,5,'2011-10-07 00:46:23','2011-10-07 00:46:23','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763/ikea-logo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\r\n\r\n1. Less material\r\n2. Renewable materials\r\n3. Recycled materials\r\n4. Environmentally better materials\r\n5. Separable and recyclable\r\n6. Quality\r\n7. Transport efficient\r\n8. Energy-efficient production\r\n9. Renewable energy in production\r\n10. Raw material\r\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\r\n\r\nFor more on Ikea\'s environmental commitments, click <a href=\"http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/about_ikea/pdf/ikea_ser_2010.pdf\">here</a>. As more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable. And that\'s a good deal.','Change Begins in the Dorm Room!','','publish','closed','closed','','763','','','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=763',0,'post','',0),(764,5,'2011-10-07 00:40:27','2011-10-07 00:40:27','','images','','inherit','open','open','','images-5','','','2011-10-07 00:40:27','2011-10-07 00:40:27','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/images4.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(766,5,'2011-10-07 00:46:13','2011-10-07 00:46:13','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/?attachment_id=765\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\n\n1. Less material\n2. Renewable materials\n3. Recycled materials\n4. Environmentally better materials\n5. Separable and recyclable\n6. Quality\n7. Transport efficient\n8. Energy-efficient production\n9. Renewable energy in production\n10. Raw material\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\n\nAs more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable.','','','inherit','open','open','','763-revision','','','2011-10-07 00:46:13','2011-10-07 00:46:13','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(767,5,'2011-10-07 00:46:23','2011-10-07 00:46:23','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/?attachment_id=765\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\r\n\r\n1. Less material\r\n2. Renewable materials\r\n3. Recycled materials\r\n4. Environmentally better materials\r\n5. Separable and recyclable\r\n6. Quality\r\n7. Transport efficient\r\n8. Energy-efficient production\r\n9. Renewable energy in production\r\n10. Raw material\r\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\r\n\r\nAs more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable. And that\'s a good deal.','','','inherit','open','open','','763-revision-2','','','2011-10-07 00:46:23','2011-10-07 00:46:23','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(769,5,'2011-10-07 00:46:23','2011-10-07 00:46:23','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763/ikea-logo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\r\n\r\n1. Less material\r\n2. Renewable materials\r\n3. Recycled materials\r\n4. Environmentally better materials\r\n5. Separable and recyclable\r\n6. Quality\r\n7. Transport efficient\r\n8. Energy-efficient production\r\n9. Renewable energy in production\r\n10. Raw material\r\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\r\n\r\nAs more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable. And that\'s a good deal.','','','inherit','open','open','','763-revision-3','','','2011-10-07 00:46:23','2011-10-07 00:46:23','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(770,5,'2011-10-07 00:48:50','2011-10-07 00:48:50','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763/ikea-logo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\r\n\r\n1. Less material\r\n2. Renewable materials\r\n3. Recycled materials\r\n4. Environmentally better materials\r\n5. Separable and recyclable\r\n6. Quality\r\n7. Transport efficient\r\n8. Energy-efficient production\r\n9. Renewable energy in production\r\n10. Raw material\r\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\r\n\r\nFor more on Ikea\'s environmental commitments, click <a href=\"http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/about_ikea/pdf/ikea_ser_2010.pdf\">here</a>. As more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable. And that\'s a good deal.','','','inherit','open','open','','763-revision-4','','','2011-10-07 00:48:50','2011-10-07 00:48:50','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(772,5,'2011-10-14 22:36:33','2011-10-14 22:36:33','<em>This talk at the AASHE conference in 2011 is a condensed version of an essay on \"The Moral Ecology of Everyday Life\" that will appear in a volume called <strong>Higher Education for Sustainability: Cases, Challenges and Opportunities from Across the Curriculum. </strong>Edited by Lucas Johnston, it will be published by Routledge in August 2012.</em>\n\n* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *\n\n<strong><em>Campus Ecology and The Nature of College</em></strong>\n\n<em>To prepare for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, American college students need to know more than the traditional disciplines can teach them. They need to understand the moral ecology of everyday life in America, and the daily practices that reinforce or resist the common sense of an unsustainable society. The Campus Ecology class at St. Olaf College does just that. Created by a senior student in 2004, the class helps students see the ethical and aesthetic (and practical) connections between their daily lives and the environmental crises of the planet. It’s also resulted in a book, </em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World<em> (Milkweed Editions, 2010), which traces the environmental impacts of Jo and Joe College as they perform the routines of everyday life, from the dorm room to the bathroom, from the clothes closet to the cafeteria, from the parking lots to the party house.  This essay, therefore, considers the advantages of connecting sustainability issues to the everyday lives of students, and shares the kinds of learning goals, readings, assignments, and practices (individual and collective) that can make sustainability not just an academic subject for students, but a normal part of their daily lives.</em>\n<p align=\"center\">* * * * * * * * * * * *</p>\nIn a beautiful essay called “Doing Good Work Together,” William Kittredge writes that “We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.”\n\nRight now, Americans—and American college students—live in a set of stories that are increasingly unworkable.  We structure our lives around stories, explicit and implicit, that threaten the lives of more-than-human others who share the planet with us, and increasingly, the lives of people who are more susceptible to global weirding, climate change, rising oceans, freshwater shortages, soil depletion, deforestation, toxic pollution, and biodiversity loss.  In Environmental Studies, we often teach classes about these topics, but we don’t generally root them in the cultural patterns of college culture. St. Olaf’s Campus Ecology class does just that.\n\nThis story began in the Spring of 2001 when I taught a course called “The Culture of Nature.” In an attempt to show students a few local examples of the culture of nature, I invited Gene Bakko, our curator of natural lands, and Pete Sandberg, our facilities director, to talk about their environmental work on campus. That week, on our course website, an enthusiastic first-year student named Elise Braaten wrote about how amazing those stories were, and how you could teach a whole course on that.\n\nTwo years later, Elise declared an independent major called “Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an Ethic of Sustainability.” The title came from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” which asks us all, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In the fall of her senior year, as part of her senior project, she designed a course called Campus Ecology, and in the Spring she team-taught the course with me as an American Studies seminar.  The following year, I team-taught the course with another student, and the year after that, it moved into the Environmental Studies department <em>and</em> into the college catalogue. I love the idea that a course designed by a student is in the college catalogue\n\nBecause it’s a combination of American Studies and Environmental Studies, Campus Ecology is a strange amalgam of academic and personal approaches to ecology, education and sustainability. At St. Olaf, our American Studies program focuses on what I call “the moral ecology of everyday life,” the ideas and institutions that shape the common sense of our culture.  In <em>Habits of the Heart</em>, Robert Bellah defines moral ecology as \"the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community.\" In its Campus Ecology variation, moral ecology also includes the web of social values that tie people and nature together. It’s the stories we live in.\n\nThe main question of the class, as far as I can figure it out, is this: What are the cultural patterns on this college campus that reflect and affect the natural patterns of this place and the planet?  We answer these questions by contemplating a day in the life of a college student—waking up and using the bathroom, surveying the stuff in a dorm room, getting dressed, eating in the cafeteria, driving a car, going to a “wild party,” hooking up sexually, and framing life in religious and political terms. Such topics allow us to consider larger issues like comfort and convenience, materialism and time poverty, work and alienation, automobility and  tele-visions, Facebook and placebooks, play and <em>fun</em>damentalism, sex and love and biophilia, religion and spirituality, sitizenship and public policy. They let us see the ordinary consumption and assumptions of American college students, and the extraordinary problems that flow from our everyday lives. Environmentally speaking, a college campus is an organic machine for converting natural energy to human thoughtfulness. And Campus Ecology helps us see that firsthand.\n\nWhen we designed the course, Elise and I had several things in mind.  We wanted students to confront what Robert Bellah calls “the problem of invisible complexity,” the ways in which our visible lives depend so much on things we can’t see, on people and cultural patterns we don’t understand, and on natural processes that we take for granted.    Even fun, for example, is invisibly complex. We wanted students to think the unthinkable—or at least the unthought—and to confront their complicity in their culture, including its consuming culture of nature.  We wanted them to notice the tensions between the Romantic conceptions of nature that we routinely express, and the resourcist conceptions that configure so much of our lives.\n\nFrom the beginning, we planned the course to create “a space where imagination can happen,” so we invited students to combine the personal and the academic.  We required journals, where students could take ideas personally and look for cultural patterns in their own idiosyncratic experiences.    We asked students to “go deep,” thinking not just analytically but introspectively about their lives and their culture.  We wanted students to ask “What are people for?”  What is education for?”  “What are my deepest values?”  “What are my operative values?”  “What’s my real relationship with nature?”  And “How can I change my life (and my institutions) so that they reflect my deepest values?”\n\nIn doing this, we hoped to break down the mental barriers between college and the so-called “real world.”  We wanted to teach students that a college campus is as real as any other place, and that environmental experiments enacted on college campuses can be models for the so-called “real world.\n\nWe also wanted to provide a space where students could act on their thinking, a place for what we came to call “practical idealism.”  We wanted to help students apply their ideas and ideals to the “real world” of college, to learn how to research problems, organize ideas, propose solutions, work collaboratively, and accomplish some good work <em>before</em> they graduate.\n\nWe created some unconventional assignments in this class, because we believe that education is more about what students <em>do</em> than about what they read or hear in class.     For example, we assigned students to audit their dorm rooms, making an inventory of all the stuff they found there, and trying to assess what it all means.  Here are a few excerpts that suggest the kind of deep learning that can happen in such an open-ended assignment:\n\n<em>All of the stuff in my dorm room tells a story. The story is about a group of people who call themselves Americans. By carefully reading the story that my dorm room tells, it is possible to learn who Americans are, how they live their lives, and how they feel about the world around them. So although a dorm room may be a very small space, it can and does say very big things about Americans and their values. </em>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *<em>\n</em></p>\n<em>Now, as I’ve listed off my possessions, I’m feeling a bit guilty, like I do indeed have lots of useless crap. In all honesty, I think more of my things collect dust than get used. </em>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\n<em>Whenever I pay for a piece of clothing, it sends a message to the entire commodity chain from the advertisers to the retailers to the transporters to the dyers to the factory owners to the farmers of the material (or chemists if it’s synthetic).  This message is “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing.  It works.”  </em>\n\nAnother time, we assigned students to read a J. Crew catalogue.  We asked them to think about the catalogue as an artifact advertising not just clothes but American values, including American environmental values.  We asked them to consider the <em>nature </em>of consumer culture revealed in the catalogue—Romantic representations of nature in the background of photographs, the natural resources woven into the clothes, and the catalogue itself—made at that time of 100 percent virgin paper, with no recycled content.  Students generally think of themselves as savvy consumers, but I think every one of them got wiser in the course of this exercise.\n\nFor class another day, students used Mapquest to calculate the mileage of one round trip for each member of the faculty and staff listed in the college directory.  We were able to calculate mileage for 763 people.  While our calculations aren’t exact, our mileage figure offers a (very) rough estimate of our automotive environmental impact.   Each day, we discovered, the St. Olaf community is responsible for 19,788 miles of driving, almost enough to circumnavigate the earth.  It’s a small college, but that’s no small environmental impact.\n\nOur class takes “field trips” on campus to learn how our small city works. We tour the college cafeteria with the food service director, and learn how carefully he thinks about the environmental impacts of our meals.   We tour the power plant with the Director of Facilities, who has installed a wind turbine that generates almost a third of our electricity on campus land.   We tour our LEED Platinum science building to see how architects do ecological design. We tour prairie and forest restoration projects with our curator of natural lands, who helps us understand how the college is trying to make its land more sustainable, with wetlands and prairies and forests. Off campus, we’ve toured a home remodeled by a local nonprofit to provide green living for low-income families. These trips make our readings real, and they introduce students to people who teach them about the possibilities of social change. “I love the field trips,” said one student, “because we are using and appreciating our human resources to a greater extent.”\n\nIn Campus Ecology, we try to imagine our place in the world, so we always ask students to study the place that is St. Olaf. In the first year, we asked students to write an essay about campus from the perspective of a non-human organism, which was amazing. In the last few years, we’ve done what we call plot projects instead, asking students to pay attention to a particular place over the course of the semester, and to express the place in words and images that make it come alive as a connected part of an ecological community. Students <em>describe </em>their plot, of course, but they also <em>analyze </em>it ecologically, researching inhabitants and their habits, plotting resource flows, and exploring the aesthetics of functionality. Sometimes they invite other authors into the project, with poems or quotations or songs. Sometimes they take photographs, but other times they produce sketches or paintings or color maps or collages. Usually, the projects look like scrapbooks, but sometimes they’re mobiles or sculptures or webpages. Almost always, they’re inventive and imaginative—and emotional, as students develop affection for the places they’ve come to know so well.\n\nThe main assignment for the class, though, usually involves research on resource flows at the college and explanations of the environmental impacts of our everyday lives.  Students have produced reports for the college’s Sustainability Task Force, while they learn about the environmental implications of cars, the curriculum, architecture, energy, food, purchasing (including paper), water, waste and the landscape, both on the campus proper and on our prairie and forest restorations.\n\nDuring Earth Week, we share information with the college community.   The class composes and presents a chapel service, exploring the theme of caring for creation in its campus context.     On Earth Day itself, we annotate the campus, posting hundreds of small signs on walls and in halls to reveal the invisible complexity of the campus environment.   Here are a few samples of the annotations:\n\n<em>Going Up?  While this elevator gets you from floor to floor, it is designed to move slowly and thus encourage people to use their own energy to walk up stairs.  </em>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\n<em>The Peace Coffee brewed in the Cage and the cafeteria makes good things happen because it’s fair-trade, shade-grown coffee, supporting workers and the environment in countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica.</em>\n\nThe annotations have been so successful that we’ve been asked to prepare permanent plaques so that this kind of on-site and ongoing environmental education will be a regular part of our campus life.\n\nWe can’t say with absolute certainty what the outcomes of this class will finally be for students.  But we already have a pretty good idea of some of its intellectual and environmental impacts.  We know, for example, that students are enthused if not exuberant about applying ideas to their own lives and circumstances.  “In this class,” said one of our students, “I am able to study and observe what goes on around me daily and question and wonder why everything happens the way it does and for once it isn\'t considered daydreaming in class.  And the ideas from this class have affected me a lot.”\n\nWe know that students enjoy the opportunity to integrate the personal and the academic. We know that students like the idea of seeing how ideas work out in real life. One of the students said, “I am learning that a class where you DO a lot is the most effective kind, and is really the only kind of sustainable education.  It seems ironic that we are sitting here, paying $40,000 to be passive, as if it will be a sustainable experience.  I am learning to demand more from life and my education, which is almost unheard of in American education.”  Another student added, “DOING something about our conversations is a great way to run this class.  In my water report, I feel like I am making changes.  I love it that this is demanded of me.”\n\nWe know that this isn’t just a classroom course.  We know that students talk about it all the time, and we’re delighted that the course isn’t merely an academic question—which is to say, a question that only a dork could care about.  “To be honest,” said one student, “I think that my friends and family are getting tired of me mentioning everything that I am learning and thinking about from this class.  Instead of saying \"This one time, at band camp...\", I say, \"Today, in Campus Ecology...\"  Another student says that “Campus Ecology is a class that I look forward to everyday and talk about all the time outside of class. I never dread doing homework and reading for it, because it is so interesting.” Another student adds, “For me the most important part of the class is that it teaches about where we are and what we can do as a part of our environment, but it also incorporates a philosophy that requires mindfulness anywhere. You don’t have to be living on a hill on the outskirts of a small town to understand [David] Orr, but rather it calls you whoever you are, wherever you are.”\n\nWe’ve discovered how valuable a student professor can be.  Students like the <em>idea </em>of a student-professor, and they loved Elise’s embodiment of that role. They loved her enthusiasm and engagement, and her sense of identification with them.  And she was a wonderful role model of practical idealism, especially for the younger students.  “When she gets excited,” said one student, “I do too because I respect her hopes and dreams for the class and the school.”  The only difficulty with Elise was that she set such a high standard.  But six other students have, in successive years, also brought their own personal and academic skills to professing, showing that academic thoughtfulness isn’t restricted to older people with degrees.\n\nWe know that some of the success of Campus Ecology comes not from us, or from the syllabus, but from the students who constitute this learning community.  One of the essential things that students get from the course is the knowledge that there are other students who care—and who care deeply—about things that really matter.  As one student said, “This course has the most genuinely passionate people in it out of any class I\'ve taken at St. Olaf.  The class (and my classmates) inspires me every day, and I rarely get that from my other classes.”\n\nWe also think that students are developing what I would call “carryover skills,” skills that they can take with them into the so-called “real world,” where they can be environmentally active in their own homes and businesses and communities.  By the end of the semester, we think they’ll know how to do effective research, and how to shape that research into proposals for institutional change.  We talk a lot about rhetoric, and the art of persuasion, so we think they’ll be able to advocate ideas without alienating an audience.  We think they’ll know how to look at an organization to determine who has the capacity to change things, and to find ways to work with those people to make it easier for them to move in environmental directions.  And we think they’ll have some examples of constructive failure.\n\nIn Campus Ecology, I think, students transmute knowledge into wisdom, individually and collectively. Because Campus Ecology students engage so fully in making sense of their lives, they also engage fully in making sense of the relationships in their lives, including relationships to nature.  They learn a lot about the cultural stories they live in, and how the moral ecology of their own lives affects the ecology of the planet. It’s a model that could be replicated in American Studies, Environmental Studies, sociology, anthropology, and a number of other disciplines. At St. Olaf, it fulfills a credit in the Arts and Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major, but it could be adapted to other general education requirements as well.\n\nBy combining learning and doing like this, we think we’re involved in a tradition of American education that dates back to one of its founders, Thomas Jefferson.  As he thought about the necessity of public education in the United States, Jefferson said that he wanted people educated \"so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world, and to keep their part of it going on right: for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.\"    We’re also in the tradition of Emerson, who said in “The American Scholar” that action was the completion and fulfillment of scholarship.\n\nLast—but definitely not least—we’re teaching students the practice of hope.  By design, this course is an exploration of hope.These days, American college culture is not generally hopeful.    These students have watched too much news and too much late-night TV to be naïve about their world.  They’ve grown up with the Simpsons and South Park and MTV and acquired the skepticism that Michael Moffat calls “Undergraduate Cynical.”  They’ve watched enough reality TV to wonder about the intelligence of the average human being.  And they’ve grown up with each other, teaching each other that bitching and cynicism are signs of maturity.\n\nThe truth is that things are in bad shape, and we need to be clear about the state of the world.  But if that’s the only truth we tell our students, things will get even worse.  We also need to tell the truth about people who have changed the world, about traditions of care and collaboration, about institutions with resources to conserve our resources, about real people engaged in the work of creating a culture of permanence on this planet.\n\nIn Campus Ecology, our reading helps us with what we might call histories of hope. The central reading of the class is David Orr’s <em>Earth in Mind</em>, which offers hope of re-thinking higher education for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. We read Paul Gruchow’s <em>Grass Roots  </em>for its Midwestern landscapes, including the landscapes of mindfulness. We read Scott Russell Sanders’ <em>Hunting for Hope</em>, in which he finds hope in simple, everyday virtues like wildness, embodiment, family, fidelity, skill, simplicity, beauty, and the spirit. We connect our campus hopes to the outside world by reading a book called <em>Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, </em>which offers hope that we can become responsible for our consuming lives if we understand the full cost of it.  And we read a lot of poetry about nature and everyday life. In all of this reading, we’re examining how our words construct our worlds—including the world of the self.\n\n&nbsp;\n\nWe’ve also <em>written</em> a book in this class. As it turns out, even though college faculty interact with college students all the time, we don’t write much about them—or more precisely, we don’t write much that college students would want to read. Over the years, I started writing essays on the moral ecology of college culture, and <em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World </em>is the result.  Exploring college culture, consumer culture and the environment by analyzing the everyday lives of college students, the book probes why college students act the way they do, and why it matters ecologically.  Even though they think they’re charting their own way in the independence of college culture, students are still subject to American culture’s powerful stories, including its consumerism and its consumer forgetfulness.   The book examines the everyday activity of Joe College and his sister Jo, focusing first on the common sense of college culture, and then on the culture of nature on campus. After considering the environmental impacts of Joe and Jo College, each chapter concludes with suggestions for students interested in exploring more sustainable college cultures.\n\n&nbsp;\n\nThe book itself has been a collaborative effort with my students, as they teach me about the real life of college culture. Students in the class have been teaching me about college culture and commenting on the essays for years—how else would I know anything about wild parties? They love correcting my essays as I do theirs, marking “CBS” (clever but stupid) in the margins and pointing out where the prose is obscure. One student wrote the first draft of the Facebook section, and another helped significantly with the religion chapter. A 2003 St. Olaf graduate is my editor at Milkweed Editions (At one point, I told him that the manuscript was perfect, and he said he was hoping to make it “perfecter”); a 2010 grad drew most of the illustrations; and a 2008 grad has designed the website. Together, we’ve explored the common sense of college culture and some uncommon alternatives that might lead to a new “commons sense”—a set of beliefs and practices that might accustom us to our creative and conserving role in the global commons. We think we got it right—David Orr says that “This should be the first book that any college student reads.” And Peggy Barlett says, “This lively and insightful guide raises profound issues with a light touch—and speaks to the college student in all of us. I highly recommend it.”\n\n&nbsp;\n\nI have a few copies of the book you can look at here, and it’s available in the AASHE bookstore too. There’s also a website with additional materials at <strong>natureofcollege.org.</strong>\n\n&nbsp;\n\nIn American culture, most of us learn a number of coping mechanisms to deal with the stress and the strain of daily life.  In Campus Ecology and on the St. Olaf campus, we’re trying to develop hoping mechanisms (including our class) that allow us to transform the system instead of simply conforming to it.\n\n&nbsp;\n\nIn Daniel Quinn\'s novel <em>Ishmael</em>, a character contends that \"you can\'t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.\"  Having learned the dominant stories of American culture by finding them in their own lives, Campus Ecology students know that they need to imagine another story to be in. They know that we need to start imagining it now. And because of the structure of the class, they have some experience of living in that new story. It’s ecology; it’s ethics; it’s education; it’s hope.  It’s not yet sustainable, but it’s a way to imagine new stories in a culture that desperately needs them.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','inherit','open','open','','771-revision','','','2011-10-14 22:36:33','2011-10-14 22:36:33','',771,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/771-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(773,5,'2011-10-14 22:40:13','2011-10-14 22:40:13','<em>This talk at the AASHE conference in 2011 is a condensed version of an essay on \"The Moral Ecology of Everyday Life\" that will appear in a volume called <strong>Higher Education for Sustainability: Cases, Challenges and Opportunities from Across the Curriculum. </strong>Edited by Lucas Johnston, it will be published by Routledge in August 2012.</em>\n\n* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *\n\n<strong><em>Campus Ecology and The Nature of College</em></strong>\n\n<em>To prepare for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, American college students need to know more than the traditional disciplines can teach them. They need to understand the moral ecology of everyday life in America, and the daily practices that reinforce or resist the common sense of an unsustainable society. The Campus Ecology class at St. Olaf College does just that. Created by a senior student in 2004, the class helps students see the ethical and aesthetic (and practical) connections between their daily lives and the environmental crises of the planet. It’s also resulted in a book, </em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World<em> (Milkweed Editions, 2010), which traces the environmental impacts of Jo and Joe College as they perform the routines of everyday life, from the dorm room to the bathroom, from the clothes closet to the cafeteria, from the parking lots to the party house.  This essay, therefore, considers the advantages of connecting sustainability issues to the everyday lives of students, and shares the kinds of learning goals, readings, assignments, and practices (individual and collective) that can make sustainability not just an academic subject for students, but a normal part of their daily lives.</em>\n<p align=\"center\">* * * * * * * * * * * *</p>\nIn a beautiful essay called “Doing Good Work Together,” William Kittredge writes that “We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.”\n\nRight now, Americans—and American college students—live in a set of stories that are increasingly unworkable.  We structure our lives around stories, explicit and implicit, that threaten the lives of more-than-human others who share the planet with us, and increasingly, the lives of people who are more susceptible to global weirding, climate change, rising oceans, freshwater shortages, soil depletion, deforestation, toxic pollution, and biodiversity loss.  In Environmental Studies, we often teach classes about these topics, but we don’t generally root them in the cultural patterns of college culture. St. Olaf’s Campus Ecology class does just that.\n\nThis story began in the Spring of 2001 when I taught a course called “The Culture of Nature.” In an attempt to show students a few local examples of the culture of nature, I invited Gene Bakko, our curator of natural lands, and Pete Sandberg, our facilities director, to talk about their environmental work on campus. That week, on our course website, an enthusiastic first-year student named Elise Braaten wrote about how amazing those stories were, and how you could teach a whole course on that.\n\nTwo years later, Elise declared an independent major called “Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an Ethic of Sustainability.” The title came from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” which asks us all, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In the fall of her senior year, as part of her senior project, she designed a course called Campus Ecology, and in the Spring she team-taught the course with me as an American Studies seminar.  The following year, I team-taught the course with another student, and the year after that, it moved into the Environmental Studies department <em>and</em> into the college catalogue. I love the idea that a course designed by a student is in the college catalogue\n\nBecause it’s a combination of American Studies and Environmental Studies, Campus Ecology is a strange amalgam of academic and personal approaches to ecology, education and sustainability. At St. Olaf, our American Studies program focuses on what I call “the moral ecology of everyday life,” the ideas and institutions that shape the common sense of our culture.  In <em>Habits of the Heart</em>, Robert Bellah defines moral ecology as \"the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community.\" In its Campus Ecology variation, moral ecology also includes the web of social values that tie people and nature together. It’s the stories we live in.\n\nThe main question of the class, as far as I can figure it out, is this: What are the cultural patterns on this college campus that reflect and affect the natural patterns of this place and the planet?  We answer these questions by contemplating a day in the life of a college student—waking up and using the bathroom, surveying the stuff in a dorm room, getting dressed, eating in the cafeteria, driving a car, going to a “wild party,” hooking up sexually, and framing life in religious and political terms. Such topics allow us to consider larger issues like comfort and convenience, materialism and time poverty, work and alienation, automobility and  tele-visions, Facebook and placebooks, play and <em>fun</em>damentalism, sex and love and biophilia, religion and spirituality, sitizenship and public policy. They let us see the ordinary consumption and assumptions of American college students, and the extraordinary problems that flow from our everyday lives. Environmentally speaking, a college campus is an organic machine for converting natural energy to human thoughtfulness. And Campus Ecology helps us see that firsthand.\n\nWhen we designed the course, Elise and I had several things in mind.  We wanted students to confront what Robert Bellah calls “the problem of invisible complexity,” the ways in which our visible lives depend so much on things we can’t see, on people and cultural patterns we don’t understand, and on natural processes that we take for granted.    Even fun, for example, is invisibly complex. We wanted students to think the unthinkable—or at least the unthought—and to confront their complicity in their culture, including its consuming culture of nature.  We wanted them to notice the tensions between the Romantic conceptions of nature that we routinely express, and the resourcist conceptions that configure so much of our lives.\n\nFrom the beginning, we planned the course to create “a space where imagination can happen,” so we invited students to combine the personal and the academic.  We required journals, where students could take ideas personally and look for cultural patterns in their own idiosyncratic experiences.    We asked students to “go deep,” thinking not just analytically but introspectively about their lives and their culture.  We wanted students to ask “What are people for?”  What is education for?”  “What are my deepest values?”  “What are my operative values?”  “What’s my real relationship with nature?”  And “How can I change my life (and my institutions) so that they reflect my deepest values?”\n\nIn doing this, we hoped to break down the mental barriers between college and the so-called “real world.”  We wanted to teach students that a college campus is as real as any other place, and that environmental experiments enacted on college campuses can be models for the so-called “real world.\n\nWe also wanted to provide a space where students could act on their thinking, a place for what we came to call “practical idealism.”  We wanted to help students apply their ideas and ideals to the “real world” of college, to learn how to research problems, organize ideas, propose solutions, work collaboratively, and accomplish some good work <em>before</em> they graduate.\n\nWe created some unconventional assignments in this class, because we believe that education is more about what students <em>do</em> than about what they read or hear in class.     For example, we assigned students to audit their dorm rooms, making an inventory of all the stuff they found there, and trying to assess what it all means.  Here are a few excerpts that suggest the kind of deep learning that can happen in such an open-ended assignment:\n\n<em>All of the stuff in my dorm room tells a story. The story is about a group of people who call themselves Americans. By carefully reading the story that my dorm room tells, it is possible to learn who Americans are, how they live their lives, and how they feel about the world around them. So although a dorm room may be a very small space, it can and does say very big things about Americans and their values. </em>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *<em>\n</em></p>\n<em>Now, as I’ve listed off my possessions, I’m feeling a bit guilty, like I do indeed have lots of useless crap. In all honesty, I think more of my things collect dust than get used. </em>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\n<em>Whenever I pay for a piece of clothing, it sends a message to the entire commodity chain from the advertisers to the retailers to the transporters to the dyers to the factory owners to the farmers of the material (or chemists if it’s synthetic).  This message is “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing.  It works.”  </em>\n\nAnother time, we assigned students to read a J. Crew catalogue.  We asked them to think about the catalogue as an artifact advertising not just clothes but American values, including American environmental values.  We asked them to consider the <em>nature </em>of consumer culture revealed in the catalogue—Romantic representations of nature in the background of photographs, the natural resources woven into the clothes, and the catalogue itself—made at that time of 100 percent virgin paper, with no recycled content.  Students generally think of themselves as savvy consumers, but I think every one of them got wiser in the course of this exercise.\n\nFor class another day, students used Mapquest to calculate the mileage of one round trip for each member of the faculty and staff listed in the college directory.  We were able to calculate mileage for 763 people.  While our calculations aren’t exact, our mileage figure offers a (very) rough estimate of our automotive environmental impact.   Each day, we discovered, the St. Olaf community is responsible for 19,788 miles of driving, almost enough to circumnavigate the earth.  It’s a small college, but that’s no small environmental impact.\n\nOur class takes “field trips” on campus to learn how our small city works. We tour the college cafeteria with the food service director, and learn how carefully he thinks about the environmental impacts of our meals.   We tour the power plant with the Director of Facilities, who has installed a wind turbine that generates almost a third of our electricity on campus land.   We tour our LEED Platinum science building to see how architects do ecological design. We tour prairie and forest restoration projects with our curator of natural lands, who helps us understand how the college is trying to make its land more sustainable, with wetlands and prairies and forests. Off campus, we’ve toured a home remodeled by a local nonprofit to provide green living for low-income families. These trips make our readings real, and they introduce students to people who teach them about the possibilities of social change. “I love the field trips,” said one student, “because we are using and appreciating our human resources to a greater extent.”\n\nIn Campus Ecology, we try to imagine our place in the world, so we always ask students to study the place that is St. Olaf. In the first year, we asked students to write an essay about campus from the perspective of a non-human organism, which was amazing. In the last few years, we’ve done what we call plot projects instead, asking students to pay attention to a particular place over the course of the semester, and to express the place in words and images that make it come alive as a connected part of an ecological community. Students <em>describe </em>their plot, of course, but they also <em>analyze </em>it ecologically, researching inhabitants and their habits, plotting resource flows, and exploring the aesthetics of functionality. Sometimes they invite other authors into the project, with poems or quotations or songs. Sometimes they take photographs, but other times they produce sketches or paintings or color maps or collages. Usually, the projects look like scrapbooks, but sometimes they’re mobiles or sculptures or webpages. Almost always, they’re inventive and imaginative—and emotional, as students develop affection for the places they’ve come to know so well.\n\nThe main assignment for the class, though, usually involves research on resource flows at the college and explanations of the environmental impacts of our everyday lives.  Students have produced reports for the college’s Sustainability Task Force, while they learn about the environmental implications of cars, the curriculum, architecture, energy, food, purchasing (including paper), water, waste and the landscape, both on the campus proper and on our prairie and forest restorations.\n\nDuring Earth Week, we share information with the college community.   The class composes and presents a chapel service, exploring the theme of caring for creation in its campus context.     On Earth Day itself, we annotate the campus, posting hundreds of small signs on walls and in halls to reveal the invisible complexity of the campus environment.   Here are a few samples of the annotations:\n\n<em>Going Up?  While this elevator gets you from floor to floor, it is designed to move slowly and thus encourage people to use their own energy to walk up stairs.  </em>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\n<em>The Peace Coffee brewed in the Cage and the cafeteria makes good things happen because it’s fair-trade, shade-grown coffee, supporting workers and the environment in countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica.</em>\n\nThe annotations have been so successful that we’ve been asked to prepare permanent plaques so that this kind of on-site and ongoing environmental education will be a regular part of our campus life.\n\nWe can’t say with absolute certainty what the outcomes of this class will finally be for students.  But we already have a pretty good idea of some of its intellectual and environmental impacts.  We know, for example, that students are enthused if not exuberant about applying ideas to their own lives and circumstances.  “In this class,” said one of our students, “I am able to study and observe what goes on around me daily and question and wonder why everything happens the way it does and for once it isn\'t considered daydreaming in class.  And the ideas from this class have affected me a lot.”\n\nWe know that students enjoy the opportunity to integrate the personal and the academic. We know that students like the idea of seeing how ideas work out in real life. One of the students said, “I am learning that a class where you DO a lot is the most effective kind, and is really the only kind of sustainable education.  It seems ironic that we are sitting here, paying $40,000 to be passive, as if it will be a sustainable experience.  I am learning to demand more from life and my education, which is almost unheard of in American education.”  Another student added, “DOING something about our conversations is a great way to run this class.  In my water report, I feel like I am making changes.  I love it that this is demanded of me.”\n\nWe know that this isn’t just a classroom course.  We know that students talk about it all the time, and we’re delighted that the course isn’t merely an academic question—which is to say, a question that only a dork could care about.  “To be honest,” said one student, “I think that my friends and family are getting tired of me mentioning everything that I am learning and thinking about from this class.  Instead of saying \"This one time, at band camp...\", I say, \"Today, in Campus Ecology...\"  Another student says that “Campus Ecology is a class that I look forward to everyday and talk about all the time outside of class. I never dread doing homework and reading for it, because it is so interesting.” Another student adds, “For me the most important part of the class is that it teaches about where we are and what we can do as a part of our environment, but it also incorporates a philosophy that requires mindfulness anywhere. You don’t have to be living on a hill on the outskirts of a small town to understand [David] Orr, but rather it calls you whoever you are, wherever you are.”\n\nWe’ve discovered how valuable a student professor can be.  Students like the <em>idea </em>of a student-professor, and they loved Elise’s embodiment of that role. They loved her enthusiasm and engagement, and her sense of identification with them.  And she was a wonderful role model of practical idealism, especially for the younger students.  “When she gets excited,” said one student, “I do too because I respect her hopes and dreams for the class and the school.”  The only difficulty with Elise was that she set such a high standard.  But six other students have, in successive years, also brought their own personal and academic skills to professing, showing that academic thoughtfulness isn’t restricted to older people with degrees.\n\nWe know that some of the success of Campus Ecology comes not from us, or from the syllabus, but from the students who constitute this learning community.  One of the essential things that students get from the course is the knowledge that there are other students who care—and who care deeply—about things that really matter.  As one student said, “This course has the most genuinely passionate people in it out of any class I\'ve taken at St. Olaf.  The class (and my classmates) inspires me every day, and I rarely get that from my other classes.”\n\nWe also think that students are developing what I would call “carryover skills,” skills that they can take with them into the so-called “real world,” where they can be environmentally active in their own homes and businesses and communities.  By the end of the semester, we think they’ll know how to do effective research, and how to shape that research into proposals for institutional change.  We talk a lot about rhetoric, and the art of persuasion, so we think they’ll be able to advocate ideas without alienating an audience.  We think they’ll know how to look at an organization to determine who has the capacity to change things, and to find ways to work with those people to make it easier for them to move in environmental directions.  And we think they’ll have some examples of constructive failure.\n\nIn Campus Ecology, I think, students transmute knowledge into wisdom, individually and collectively. Because Campus Ecology students engage so fully in making sense of their lives, they also engage fully in making sense of the relationships in their lives, including relationships to nature.  They learn a lot about the cultural stories they live in, and how the moral ecology of their own lives affects the ecology of the planet. It’s a model that could be replicated in American Studies, Environmental Studies, sociology, anthropology, and a number of other disciplines. At St. Olaf, it fulfills a credit in the Arts and Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major, but it could be adapted to other general education requirements as well.\n\nBy combining learning and doing like this, we think we’re involved in a tradition of American education that dates back to one of its founders, Thomas Jefferson.  As he thought about the necessity of public education in the United States, Jefferson said that he wanted people educated \"so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world, and to keep their part of it going on right: for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.\"    We’re also in the tradition of Emerson, who said in “The American Scholar” that action was the completion and fulfillment of scholarship.\n\nLast—but definitely not least—we’re teaching students the practice of hope.  By design, this course is an exploration of hope.These days, American college culture is not generally hopeful.    These students have watched too much news and too much late-night TV to be naïve about their world.  They’ve grown up with the Simpsons and South Park and MTV and acquired the skepticism that Michael Moffat calls “Undergraduate Cynical.”  They’ve watched enough reality TV to wonder about the intelligence of the average human being.  And they’ve grown up with each other, teaching each other that bitching and cynicism are signs of maturity.\n\nThe truth is that things are in bad shape, and we need to be clear about the state of the world.  But if that’s the only truth we tell our students, things will get even worse.  We also need to tell the truth about people who have changed the world, about traditions of care and collaboration, about institutions with resources to conserve our resources, about real people engaged in the work of creating a culture of permanence on this planet.\n\nIn Campus Ecology, our reading helps us with what we might call histories of hope. The central reading of the class is David Orr’s <em>Earth in Mind</em>, which offers hope of re-thinking higher education for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. We read Paul Gruchow’s <em>Grass Roots  </em>for its Midwestern landscapes, including the landscapes of mindfulness. We read Scott Russell Sanders’ <em>Hunting for Hope</em>, in which he finds hope in simple, everyday virtues like wildness, embodiment, family, fidelity, skill, simplicity, beauty, and the spirit. We connect our campus hopes to the outside world by reading a book called <em>Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, </em>which offers hope that we can become responsible for our consuming lives if we understand the full cost of it.  And we read a lot of poetry about nature and everyday life. In all of this reading, we’re examining how our words construct our worlds—including the world of the self.\n\nWe’ve also <em>written</em> a book in this class. As it turns out, even though college faculty interact with college students all the time, we don’t write much about them—or more precisely, we don’t write much that college students would want to read. Over the years, I started writing essays on the moral ecology of college culture, and <em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World </em>is the result.  Exploring college culture, consumer culture and the environment by analyzing the everyday lives of college students, the book probes why college students act the way they do, and why it matters ecologically.  Even though they think they’re charting their own way in the independence of college culture, students are still subject to American culture’s powerful stories, including its consumerism and its consumer forgetfulness.   The book examines the everyday activity of Joe College and his sister Jo, focusing first on the common sense of college culture, and then on the culture of nature on campus. After considering the environmental impacts of Joe and Jo College, each chapter concludes with suggestions for students interested in exploring more sustainable college cultures.\n\nThe book itself has been a collaborative effort with my students, as they teach me about the real life of college culture. Students in the class have been teaching me about college culture and commenting on the essays for years—how else would I know anything about wild parties? They love correcting my essays as I do theirs, marking “CBS” (clever but stupid) in the margins and pointing out where the prose is obscure. One student wrote the first draft of the Facebook section, and another helped significantly with the religion chapter. A 2003 St. Olaf graduate is my editor at Milkweed Editions (At one point, I told him that the manuscript was perfect, and he said he was hoping to make it “perfecter”); a 2010 grad drew most of the illustrations; and a 2008 grad has designed the website. Together, we’ve explored the common sense of college culture and some uncommon alternatives that might lead to a new “commons sense”—a set of beliefs and practices that might accustom us to our creative and conserving role in the global commons. We think we got it right—David Orr says that “This should be the first book that any college student reads.” And Peggy Barlett says, “This lively and insightful guide raises profound issues with a light touch—and speaks to the college student in all of us. I highly recommend it.”\n\nI have a few copies of the book you can look at here, and it’s available in the AASHE bookstore too. There’s also a website with additional materials at <strong>natureofcollege.org.</strong>\n\nIn American culture, most of us learn a number of coping mechanisms to deal with the stress and the strain of daily life.  In Campus Ecology and on the St. Olaf campus, we’re trying to develop hoping mechanisms (including our class) that allow us to transform the system instead of simply conforming to it.\n\nIn Daniel Quinn\'s novel <em>Ishmael</em>, a character contends that \"you can\'t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.\"  Having learned the dominant stories of American culture by finding them in their own lives, Campus Ecology students know that they need to imagine another story to be in. They know that we need to start imagining it now. And because of the structure of the class, they have some experience of living in that new story. It’s ecology; it’s ethics; it’s education; it’s hope.  It’s not yet sustainable, but it’s a way to imagine new stories in a culture that desperately needs them.\n\n&nbsp;','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','inherit','open','open','','771-autosave','','','2011-10-14 22:40:13','2011-10-14 22:40:13','',771,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/771-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(774,5,'2011-10-14 22:37:17','2011-10-14 22:37:17','<em>This talk at the AASHE conference in 2011 is a condensed version of an essay on \"The Moral Ecology of Everyday Life\" that will appear in a volume called <strong>Higher Education for Sustainability: Cases, Challenges and Opportunities from Across the Curriculum. </strong>Edited by Lucas Johnston, it will be published by Routledge in August 2012.</em>\r\n\r\n* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *\r\n\r\n<strong><em>Campus Ecology and The Nature of College</em></strong>\r\n\r\n<em>To prepare for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, American college students need to know more than the traditional disciplines can teach them. They need to understand the moral ecology of everyday life in America, and the daily practices that reinforce or resist the common sense of an unsustainable society. The Campus Ecology class at St. Olaf College does just that. Created by a senior student in 2004, the class helps students see the ethical and aesthetic (and practical) connections between their daily lives and the environmental crises of the planet. It’s also resulted in a book, </em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World<em> (Milkweed Editions, 2010), which traces the environmental impacts of Jo and Joe College as they perform the routines of everyday life, from the dorm room to the bathroom, from the clothes closet to the cafeteria, from the parking lots to the party house.  This essay, therefore, considers the advantages of connecting sustainability issues to the everyday lives of students, and shares the kinds of learning goals, readings, assignments, and practices (individual and collective) that can make sustainability not just an academic subject for students, but a normal part of their daily lives.</em>\r\n<p align=\"center\">* * * * * * * * * * * *</p>\r\nIn a beautiful essay called “Doing Good Work Together,” William Kittredge writes that “We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.”\r\n\r\nRight now, Americans—and American college students—live in a set of stories that are increasingly unworkable.  We structure our lives around stories, explicit and implicit, that threaten the lives of more-than-human others who share the planet with us, and increasingly, the lives of people who are more susceptible to global weirding, climate change, rising oceans, freshwater shortages, soil depletion, deforestation, toxic pollution, and biodiversity loss.  In Environmental Studies, we often teach classes about these topics, but we don’t generally root them in the cultural patterns of college culture. St. Olaf’s Campus Ecology class does just that.\r\n\r\nThis story began in the Spring of 2001 when I taught a course called “The Culture of Nature.” In an attempt to show students a few local examples of the culture of nature, I invited Gene Bakko, our curator of natural lands, and Pete Sandberg, our facilities director, to talk about their environmental work on campus. That week, on our course website, an enthusiastic first-year student named Elise Braaten wrote about how amazing those stories were, and how you could teach a whole course on that.\r\n\r\nTwo years later, Elise declared an independent major called “Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an Ethic of Sustainability.” The title came from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” which asks us all, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In the fall of her senior year, as part of her senior project, she designed a course called Campus Ecology, and in the Spring she team-taught the course with me as an American Studies seminar.  The following year, I team-taught the course with another student, and the year after that, it moved into the Environmental Studies department <em>and</em> into the college catalogue. I love the idea that a course designed by a student is in the college catalogue\r\n\r\nBecause it’s a combination of American Studies and Environmental Studies, Campus Ecology is a strange amalgam of academic and personal approaches to ecology, education and sustainability. At St. Olaf, our American Studies program focuses on what I call “the moral ecology of everyday life,” the ideas and institutions that shape the common sense of our culture.  In <em>Habits of the Heart</em>, Robert Bellah defines moral ecology as \"the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community.\" In its Campus Ecology variation, moral ecology also includes the web of social values that tie people and nature together. It’s the stories we live in.\r\n\r\nThe main question of the class, as far as I can figure it out, is this: What are the cultural patterns on this college campus that reflect and affect the natural patterns of this place and the planet?  We answer these questions by contemplating a day in the life of a college student—waking up and using the bathroom, surveying the stuff in a dorm room, getting dressed, eating in the cafeteria, driving a car, going to a “wild party,” hooking up sexually, and framing life in religious and political terms. Such topics allow us to consider larger issues like comfort and convenience, materialism and time poverty, work and alienation, automobility and  tele-visions, Facebook and placebooks, play and <em>fun</em>damentalism, sex and love and biophilia, religion and spirituality, sitizenship and public policy. They let us see the ordinary consumption and assumptions of American college students, and the extraordinary problems that flow from our everyday lives. Environmentally speaking, a college campus is an organic machine for converting natural energy to human thoughtfulness. And Campus Ecology helps us see that firsthand.\r\n\r\nWhen we designed the course, Elise and I had several things in mind.  We wanted students to confront what Robert Bellah calls “the problem of invisible complexity,” the ways in which our visible lives depend so much on things we can’t see, on people and cultural patterns we don’t understand, and on natural processes that we take for granted.    Even fun, for example, is invisibly complex. We wanted students to think the unthinkable—or at least the unthought—and to confront their complicity in their culture, including its consuming culture of nature.  We wanted them to notice the tensions between the Romantic conceptions of nature that we routinely express, and the resourcist conceptions that configure so much of our lives.\r\n\r\nFrom the beginning, we planned the course to create “a space where imagination can happen,” so we invited students to combine the personal and the academic.  We required journals, where students could take ideas personally and look for cultural patterns in their own idiosyncratic experiences.    We asked students to “go deep,” thinking not just analytically but introspectively about their lives and their culture.  We wanted students to ask “What are people for?”  What is education for?”  “What are my deepest values?”  “What are my operative values?”  “What’s my real relationship with nature?”  And “How can I change my life (and my institutions) so that they reflect my deepest values?”\r\n\r\nIn doing this, we hoped to break down the mental barriers between college and the so-called “real world.”  We wanted to teach students that a college campus is as real as any other place, and that environmental experiments enacted on college campuses can be models for the so-called “real world.\r\n\r\nWe also wanted to provide a space where students could act on their thinking, a place for what we came to call “practical idealism.”  We wanted to help students apply their ideas and ideals to the “real world” of college, to learn how to research problems, organize ideas, propose solutions, work collaboratively, and accomplish some good work <em>before</em> they graduate.\r\n\r\nWe created some unconventional assignments in this class, because we believe that education is more about what students <em>do</em> than about what they read or hear in class.     For example, we assigned students to audit their dorm rooms, making an inventory of all the stuff they found there, and trying to assess what it all means.  Here are a few excerpts that suggest the kind of deep learning that can happen in such an open-ended assignment:\r\n\r\n<em>All of the stuff in my dorm room tells a story. The story is about a group of people who call themselves Americans. By carefully reading the story that my dorm room tells, it is possible to learn who Americans are, how they live their lives, and how they feel about the world around them. So although a dorm room may be a very small space, it can and does say very big things about Americans and their values. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *<em>\r\n</em></p>\r\n<em>Now, as I’ve listed off my possessions, I’m feeling a bit guilty, like I do indeed have lots of useless crap. In all honesty, I think more of my things collect dust than get used. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\r\n<em>Whenever I pay for a piece of clothing, it sends a message to the entire commodity chain from the advertisers to the retailers to the transporters to the dyers to the factory owners to the farmers of the material (or chemists if it’s synthetic).  This message is “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing.  It works.”  </em>\r\n\r\nAnother time, we assigned students to read a J. Crew catalogue.  We asked them to think about the catalogue as an artifact advertising not just clothes but American values, including American environmental values.  We asked them to consider the <em>nature </em>of consumer culture revealed in the catalogue—Romantic representations of nature in the background of photographs, the natural resources woven into the clothes, and the catalogue itself—made at that time of 100 percent virgin paper, with no recycled content.  Students generally think of themselves as savvy consumers, but I think every one of them got wiser in the course of this exercise.\r\n\r\nFor class another day, students used Mapquest to calculate the mileage of one round trip for each member of the faculty and staff listed in the college directory.  We were able to calculate mileage for 763 people.  While our calculations aren’t exact, our mileage figure offers a (very) rough estimate of our automotive environmental impact.   Each day, we discovered, the St. Olaf community is responsible for 19,788 miles of driving, almost enough to circumnavigate the earth.  It’s a small college, but that’s no small environmental impact.\r\n\r\nOur class takes “field trips” on campus to learn how our small city works. We tour the college cafeteria with the food service director, and learn how carefully he thinks about the environmental impacts of our meals.   We tour the power plant with the Director of Facilities, who has installed a wind turbine that generates almost a third of our electricity on campus land.   We tour our LEED Platinum science building to see how architects do ecological design. We tour prairie and forest restoration projects with our curator of natural lands, who helps us understand how the college is trying to make its land more sustainable, with wetlands and prairies and forests. Off campus, we’ve toured a home remodeled by a local nonprofit to provide green living for low-income families. These trips make our readings real, and they introduce students to people who teach them about the possibilities of social change. “I love the field trips,” said one student, “because we are using and appreciating our human resources to a greater extent.”\r\n\r\nIn Campus Ecology, we try to imagine our place in the world, so we always ask students to study the place that is St. Olaf. In the first year, we asked students to write an essay about campus from the perspective of a non-human organism, which was amazing. In the last few years, we’ve done what we call plot projects instead, asking students to pay attention to a particular place over the course of the semester, and to express the place in words and images that make it come alive as a connected part of an ecological community. Students <em>describe </em>their plot, of course, but they also <em>analyze </em>it ecologically, researching inhabitants and their habits, plotting resource flows, and exploring the aesthetics of functionality. Sometimes they invite other authors into the project, with poems or quotations or songs. Sometimes they take photographs, but other times they produce sketches or paintings or color maps or collages. Usually, the projects look like scrapbooks, but sometimes they’re mobiles or sculptures or webpages. Almost always, they’re inventive and imaginative—and emotional, as students develop affection for the places they’ve come to know so well.\r\n\r\nThe main assignment for the class, though, usually involves research on resource flows at the college and explanations of the environmental impacts of our everyday lives.  Students have produced reports for the college’s Sustainability Task Force, while they learn about the environmental implications of cars, the curriculum, architecture, energy, food, purchasing (including paper), water, waste and the landscape, both on the campus proper and on our prairie and forest restorations.\r\n\r\nDuring Earth Week, we share information with the college community.   The class composes and presents a chapel service, exploring the theme of caring for creation in its campus context.     On Earth Day itself, we annotate the campus, posting hundreds of small signs on walls and in halls to reveal the invisible complexity of the campus environment.   Here are a few samples of the annotations:\r\n\r\n<em>Going Up?  While this elevator gets you from floor to floor, it is designed to move slowly and thus encourage people to use their own energy to walk up stairs.  </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\r\n<em>The Peace Coffee brewed in the Cage and the cafeteria makes good things happen because it’s fair-trade, shade-grown coffee, supporting workers and the environment in countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica.</em>\r\n\r\nThe annotations have been so successful that we’ve been asked to prepare permanent plaques so that this kind of on-site and ongoing environmental education will be a regular part of our campus life.\r\n\r\nWe can’t say with absolute certainty what the outcomes of this class will finally be for students.  But we already have a pretty good idea of some of its intellectual and environmental impacts.  We know, for example, that students are enthused if not exuberant about applying ideas to their own lives and circumstances.  “In this class,” said one of our students, “I am able to study and observe what goes on around me daily and question and wonder why everything happens the way it does and for once it isn\'t considered daydreaming in class.  And the ideas from this class have affected me a lot.”\r\n\r\nWe know that students enjoy the opportunity to integrate the personal and the academic. We know that students like the idea of seeing how ideas work out in real life. One of the students said, “I am learning that a class where you DO a lot is the most effective kind, and is really the only kind of sustainable education.  It seems ironic that we are sitting here, paying $40,000 to be passive, as if it will be a sustainable experience.  I am learning to demand more from life and my education, which is almost unheard of in American education.”  Another student added, “DOING something about our conversations is a great way to run this class.  In my water report, I feel like I am making changes.  I love it that this is demanded of me.”\r\n\r\nWe know that this isn’t just a classroom course.  We know that students talk about it all the time, and we’re delighted that the course isn’t merely an academic question—which is to say, a question that only a dork could care about.  “To be honest,” said one student, “I think that my friends and family are getting tired of me mentioning everything that I am learning and thinking about from this class.  Instead of saying \"This one time, at band camp...\", I say, \"Today, in Campus Ecology...\"  Another student says that “Campus Ecology is a class that I look forward to everyday and talk about all the time outside of class. I never dread doing homework and reading for it, because it is so interesting.” Another student adds, “For me the most important part of the class is that it teaches about where we are and what we can do as a part of our environment, but it also incorporates a philosophy that requires mindfulness anywhere. You don’t have to be living on a hill on the outskirts of a small town to understand [David] Orr, but rather it calls you whoever you are, wherever you are.”\r\n\r\nWe’ve discovered how valuable a student professor can be.  Students like the <em>idea </em>of a student-professor, and they loved Elise’s embodiment of that role. They loved her enthusiasm and engagement, and her sense of identification with them.  And she was a wonderful role model of practical idealism, especially for the younger students.  “When she gets excited,” said one student, “I do too because I respect her hopes and dreams for the class and the school.”  The only difficulty with Elise was that she set such a high standard.  But six other students have, in successive years, also brought their own personal and academic skills to professing, showing that academic thoughtfulness isn’t restricted to older people with degrees.\r\n\r\nWe know that some of the success of Campus Ecology comes not from us, or from the syllabus, but from the students who constitute this learning community.  One of the essential things that students get from the course is the knowledge that there are other students who care—and who care deeply—about things that really matter.  As one student said, “This course has the most genuinely passionate people in it out of any class I\'ve taken at St. Olaf.  The class (and my classmates) inspires me every day, and I rarely get that from my other classes.”\r\n\r\nWe also think that students are developing what I would call “carryover skills,” skills that they can take with them into the so-called “real world,” where they can be environmentally active in their own homes and businesses and communities.  By the end of the semester, we think they’ll know how to do effective research, and how to shape that research into proposals for institutional change.  We talk a lot about rhetoric, and the art of persuasion, so we think they’ll be able to advocate ideas without alienating an audience.  We think they’ll know how to look at an organization to determine who has the capacity to change things, and to find ways to work with those people to make it easier for them to move in environmental directions.  And we think they’ll have some examples of constructive failure.\r\n\r\nIn Campus Ecology, I think, students transmute knowledge into wisdom, individually and collectively. Because Campus Ecology students engage so fully in making sense of their lives, they also engage fully in making sense of the relationships in their lives, including relationships to nature.  They learn a lot about the cultural stories they live in, and how the moral ecology of their own lives affects the ecology of the planet. It’s a model that could be replicated in American Studies, Environmental Studies, sociology, anthropology, and a number of other disciplines. At St. Olaf, it fulfills a credit in the Arts and Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major, but it could be adapted to other general education requirements as well.\r\n\r\nBy combining learning and doing like this, we think we’re involved in a tradition of American education that dates back to one of its founders, Thomas Jefferson.  As he thought about the necessity of public education in the United States, Jefferson said that he wanted people educated \"so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world, and to keep their part of it going on right: for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.\"    We’re also in the tradition of Emerson, who said in “The American Scholar” that action was the completion and fulfillment of scholarship.\r\n\r\nLast—but definitely not least—we’re teaching students the practice of hope.  By design, this course is an exploration of hope.These days, American college culture is not generally hopeful.    These students have watched too much news and too much late-night TV to be naïve about their world.  They’ve grown up with the Simpsons and South Park and MTV and acquired the skepticism that Michael Moffat calls “Undergraduate Cynical.”  They’ve watched enough reality TV to wonder about the intelligence of the average human being.  And they’ve grown up with each other, teaching each other that bitching and cynicism are signs of maturity.\r\n\r\nThe truth is that things are in bad shape, and we need to be clear about the state of the world.  But if that’s the only truth we tell our students, things will get even worse.  We also need to tell the truth about people who have changed the world, about traditions of care and collaboration, about institutions with resources to conserve our resources, about real people engaged in the work of creating a culture of permanence on this planet.\r\n\r\nIn Campus Ecology, our reading helps us with what we might call histories of hope. The central reading of the class is David Orr’s <em>Earth in Mind</em>, which offers hope of re-thinking higher education for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. We read Paul Gruchow’s <em>Grass Roots  </em>for its Midwestern landscapes, including the landscapes of mindfulness. We read Scott Russell Sanders’ <em>Hunting for Hope</em>, in which he finds hope in simple, everyday virtues like wildness, embodiment, family, fidelity, skill, simplicity, beauty, and the spirit. We connect our campus hopes to the outside world by reading a book called <em>Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, </em>which offers hope that we can become responsible for our consuming lives if we understand the full cost of it.  And we read a lot of poetry about nature and everyday life. In all of this reading, we’re examining how our words construct our worlds—including the world of the self.\r\n\r\nWe’ve also <em>written</em> a book in this class. As it turns out, even though college faculty interact with college students all the time, we don’t write much about them—or more precisely, we don’t write much that college students would want to read. Over the years, I started writing essays on the moral ecology of college culture, and <em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World </em>is the result.  Exploring college culture, consumer culture and the environment by analyzing the everyday lives of college students, the book probes why college students act the way they do, and why it matters ecologically.  Even though they think they’re charting their own way in the independence of college culture, students are still subject to American culture’s powerful stories, including its consumerism and its consumer forgetfulness.   The book examines the everyday activity of Joe College and his sister Jo, focusing first on the common sense of college culture, and then on the culture of nature on campus. After considering the environmental impacts of Joe and Jo College, each chapter concludes with suggestions for students interested in exploring more sustainable college cultures.\r\n\r\nThe book itself has been a collaborative effort with my students, as they teach me about the real life of college culture. Students in the class have been teaching me about college culture and commenting on the essays for years—how else would I know anything about wild parties? They love correcting my essays as I do theirs, marking “CBS” (clever but stupid) in the margins and pointing out where the prose is obscure. One student wrote the first draft of the Facebook section, and another helped significantly with the religion chapter. A 2003 St. Olaf graduate is my editor at Milkweed Editions (At one point, I told him that the manuscript was perfect, and he said he was hoping to make it “perfecter”); a 2010 grad drew most of the illustrations; and a 2008 grad has designed the website. Together, we’ve explored the common sense of college culture and some uncommon alternatives that might lead to a new “commons sense”—a set of beliefs and practices that might accustom us to our creative and conserving role in the global commons. We think we got it right—David Orr says that “This should be the first book that any college student reads.” And Peggy Barlett says, “This lively and insightful guide raises profound issues with a light touch—and speaks to the college student in all of us. I highly recommend it.”\r\n\r\nI have a few copies of the book you can look at here, and it’s available in the AASHE bookstore too. There’s also a website with additional materials at <strong>natureofcollege.org.</strong>\r\n\r\nIn American culture, most of us learn a number of coping mechanisms to deal with the stress and the strain of daily life.  In Campus Ecology and on the St. Olaf campus, we’re trying to develop hoping mechanisms (including our class) that allow us to transform the system instead of simply conforming to it.\r\n\r\nIn Daniel Quinn\'s novel <em>Ishmael</em>, a character contends that \"you can\'t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.\"  Having learned the dominant stories of American culture by finding them in their own lives, Campus Ecology students know that they need to imagine another story to be in. They know that we need to start imagining it now. And because of the structure of the class, they have some experience of living in that new story. It’s ecology; it’s ethics; it’s education; it’s hope.  It’s not yet sustainable, but it’s a way to imagine new stories in a culture that desperately needs them.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','inherit','open','open','','771-revision-2','','','2011-10-14 22:37:17','2011-10-14 22:37:17','',771,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/771-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(775,5,'2011-10-15 00:17:07','2011-10-15 00:17:07','<strong>Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, January 26, 2006</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Consuming U: How We Consume (at) College—and Why”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama, October 20, 2009</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>The Nature of Our Lives: Environmental Histories of College Culture”</em>\r\n\r\n2009 selection for the college’s Portier Lecture in History\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, August 18-19, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: Sustainability and College Culture”</em>\r\n\r\nOpening Faculty and Staff Meeting, workshop on sustainability across the curriculum\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University, September 9-10, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“College Fun and the Moral Ecology of Everyday Life”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, November 18, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\nReading groups on <em>The Nature of College</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Wisconsin, River Falls, March 23-24, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nSpeaker and co-facilitator for “`Big Idea:’ a workshop promoting faculty leadership in sustainability, co-sponsored by AASHE\r\n\r\n<strong>Luther College, April 3-4, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nKeynote Speaker and co-facilitator for conference sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest on “Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, April 20-21, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nLecture on <em>The Nature of Our Lives” </em>and faculty workshop in Environmental Studies\r\n\r\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, May 17, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives” and faculty workshop on sustainability across the curriculum</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, September 22, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“College Culture and the Imagination of America”</em>\r\n\r\nKeynote for undergraduate participants at the Imagining America Conference\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, September 23-24, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Social Networks and Ecological Communities”</em>\r\n\r\nUpper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability Conference\r\n\r\n<strong>Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Pittsburgh, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Campus Ecology and the Nature of College”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, November 16, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: St. Olaf’s Environmental Values”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, November 17, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nClass visit and EnviroThursday speaker\r\n\r\n<strong>Northland College, Ashland Wisconsin, January 18-19, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nHulings Lecture, “The Nature of Our Lives: Sustainability and College Culture”\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Crookston, April 18-19, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nEarth Week keynote speaker, faculty workshop on integrating sustainability into the curriculum\r\n\r\n<strong>Iowa State University, Ames, May 15-16</strong>\r\n\r\nFacilitator for Tall Grass Prairie faculty development workshop\r\n\r\n<strong>Concordia College, Moorhead, October 3-5, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nVisiting Writers Festival (nonfiction)\r\n\r\n<strong>Central College, Pella, Iowa, November 15, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nLecture for first-year Intersections program','Speaking Engagements and Workshops','','publish','closed','open','','speaking-engagements-and-workshops','','','2018-07-09 14:32:19','2018-07-09 19:32:19','',42,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=775',0,'page','',0),(776,5,'2011-10-15 00:16:42','2011-10-15 00:16:42','<strong>Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, January 26, 2006</strong><em></em>\n\n<em>“Consuming U: How We Consume (at) College—and Why”</em>\n\n<strong>Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama, October 20, 2009</strong><em></em>\n\n<em>The Nature of Our Lives: Environmental Histories of College Culture”</em>\n\n2009 selection for the college’s Portier Lecture in History\n\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, August 18-19, 2010</strong>\n\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: Sustainability and College Culture”</em>\n\nOpening Faculty and Staff Meeting, workshop on sustainability across the curriculum\n\n<strong>St. John’s University, September 9-10, 2010</strong>\n\n<em>“College Fun and the Moral Ecology of Everyday Life”</em>\n\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, November 18, 2010</strong>\n\nReading groups on <em>The Nature of College</em>\n\n<strong>University of Wisconsin, River Falls, March 23-24, 2011</strong>\n\nSpeaker and co-facilitator for “`Big Idea:’ a workshop promoting faculty leadership in sustainability, co-sponsored by AASHE\n\n<strong>Luther College, April 3-4, 2011</strong>\n\nKeynote Speaker and co-facilitator for conference sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest on “Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum”\n\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, April 20-21, 2011</strong>\n\nLecture on <em>The Nature of Our Lives” </em>and faculty workshop in Environmental Studies\n\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, May 17, 2011</strong>\n\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives” and faculty workshop on sustainability across the curriculum</em>\n\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, September 22, 2011</strong>\n\n<em>“College Culture and the Imagination of America”</em>\n\nKeynote for undergraduate participants at the Imagining America Conference\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, September 23-24, 2011</strong>\n\n<em>“Social Networks and Ecological Communities”</em>\n\nUpper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability Conference\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<strong>Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Pittsburgh, 2011</strong>\n\n<em>“Campus Ecology and the Nature of College”</em>\n\n<em> </em>\n\n<strong>St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, November 16, 2011</strong>\n\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: St. Olaf’s Environmental Values”</em>\n\n<em> </em>\n\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, November 17, 2011</strong>\n\nClass visit and EnviroThursday speaker\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<strong>Northland College, Ashland Wisconsin, January 18-19, 2012</strong>\n\nLecture and class visits\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<strong>Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University, February 4, 2012</strong>\n\nKeynote address for faculty pedagogy workshop','Speaking Engagements and Workshops','','inherit','open','open','','775-revision','','','2011-10-15 00:16:42','2011-10-15 00:16:42','',775,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/775-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(777,5,'2011-10-15 00:17:07','2011-10-15 00:17:07','<strong>Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, January 26, 2006</strong><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>“Consuming U: How We Consume (at) College—and Why”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama, October 20, 2009</strong><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>The Nature of Our Lives: Environmental Histories of College Culture”</em>\r\n\r\n2009 selection for the college’s Portier Lecture in History\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, August 18-19, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: Sustainability and College Culture”</em>\r\n\r\nOpening Faculty and Staff Meeting, workshop on sustainability across the curriculum\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University, September 9-10, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“College Fun and the Moral Ecology of Everyday Life”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, November 18, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\nReading groups on <em>The Nature of College</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Wisconsin, River Falls, March 23-24, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nSpeaker and co-facilitator for “`Big Idea:’ a workshop promoting faculty leadership in sustainability, co-sponsored by AASHE\r\n\r\n<strong>Luther College, April 3-4, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nKeynote Speaker and co-facilitator for conference sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest on “Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum”\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, April 20-21, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nLecture on <em>The Nature of Our Lives” </em>and faculty workshop in Environmental Studies\r\n\r\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, May 17, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives” and faculty workshop on sustainability across the curriculum</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, September 22, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“College Culture and the Imagination of America”</em>\r\n\r\nKeynote for undergraduate participants at the Imagining America Conference\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, September 23-24, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Social Networks and Ecological Communities”</em>\r\n\r\nUpper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability Conference\r\n\r\n<strong>Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Pittsburgh, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Campus Ecology and the Nature of College”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, November 16, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: St. Olaf’s Environmental Values”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, November 17, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nClass visit and EnviroThursday speaker\r\n\r\n<strong>Northland College, Ashland Wisconsin, January 18-19, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nLecture and class visits\r\n\r\n<strong>Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University, February 4, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nKeynote address for faculty pedagogy workshop','Speaking Engagements and Workshops','','inherit','open','open','','775-revision-2','','','2011-10-15 00:17:07','2011-10-15 00:17:07','',775,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/775-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(778,5,'2011-10-15 00:17:43','2011-10-15 00:17:43','<strong>Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, January 26, 2006</strong><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>“Consuming U: How We Consume (at) College—and Why”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>Spring Hill College, Mobile, Alabama, October 20, 2009</strong><em></em>\r\n\r\n<em>The Nature of Our Lives: Environmental Histories of College Culture”</em>\r\n\r\n2009 selection for the college’s Portier Lecture in History\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, August 18-19, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: Sustainability and College Culture”</em>\r\n\r\nOpening Faculty and Staff Meeting, workshop on sustainability across the curriculum\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University, September 9-10, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“College Fun and the Moral Ecology of Everyday Life”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>St. John’s University and College of St. Benedict, November 18, 2010</strong>\r\n\r\nReading groups on <em>The Nature of College</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Wisconsin, River Falls, March 23-24, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nSpeaker and co-facilitator for “`Big Idea:’ a workshop promoting faculty leadership in sustainability, co-sponsored by AASHE\r\n\r\n<strong>Luther College, April 3-4, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nKeynote Speaker and co-facilitator for conference sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest on “Integrating Sustainability into the Undergraduate Curriculum”\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, April 20-21, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nLecture on <em>The Nature of Our Lives” </em>and faculty workshop in Environmental Studies\r\n\r\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, May 17, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives” and faculty workshop on sustainability across the curriculum</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, September 22, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“College Culture and the Imagination of America”</em>\r\n\r\nKeynote for undergraduate participants at the Imagining America Conference\r\n\r\n<strong>University of Minnesota, Morris, September 23-24, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Social Networks and Ecological Communities”</em>\r\n\r\nUpper Midwest Association for Campus Sustainability Conference\r\n\r\n<strong>Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Pittsburgh, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“Campus Ecology and the Nature of College”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN, November 16, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\n<em>“The Nature of Our Lives: St. Olaf’s Environmental Values”</em>\r\n\r\n<strong>Macalester College, St. Paul, November 17, 2011</strong>\r\n\r\nClass visit and EnviroThursday speaker\r\n\r\n<strong>Northland College, Ashland Wisconsin, January 18-19, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nLecture and class visits\r\n\r\n<strong>Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University, February 4, 2012</strong>\r\n\r\nKeynote address for faculty pedagogy workshop','Speaking Engagements and Workshops','','inherit','open','open','','775-revision-3','','','2011-10-15 00:17:43','2011-10-15 00:17:43','',775,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/775-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(790,5,'2011-10-23 16:15:17','2011-10-23 16:15:17','In an era of budget cuts, many state governments are increasing funding for college departments that prepare students for today\'s corporate employers (especially the STEM disciplines), forgetting the tradition of liberal arts in higher education. Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, responds <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/10/michael_m_crow_president_of_arizona_state_university_explains_wh.html\">here</a>. My own take on practicality, written as a part of St. Olaf\'s mission statement, is here:\r\n\r\n<em>Indeed, one of the main practicalities of the liberal arts at institutions like St. Olaf is to show some of the impracticalities of the so-called \"real world.\"  Too often in modern societies, the push for practicality is a call to conform to the world the way it is, not the way it ought to be.  The practical world sometimes accomplishes so much because it encompasses so little, setting aside whole dimensions of the human person--aesthetic, spiritual, ethical, and sometimes even political. The liberal arts reject this narrow definition of practicality, and remind us of the fullness of our humanity.  By keeping our minds critically engaged with the world\'s presumed practicality, they free us to wonder how, practically, we might become as good as we could be.  At St. Olaf, therefore, when we teach students practical skills and knowledge, we also teach them ways of evaluating their use in the world.</em>\r\n\r\nIt is practical to get a job, but that\'s not the only practicality in a world of human beings, who are more than employees and consumers.','Education and Practicality','','publish','closed','closed','','education-and-practicality','','','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=790',0,'post','',0),(780,5,'2011-10-15 00:25:04','2011-10-15 00:25:04','I\'m recently back from the AASHE conference in Pittsburgh, where I talked about the class that inspired <em>The Nature of College, </em>and conspired with me to write it. Students fact-checked it against their own experience, and they edited to make sure it wasn\'t a boring textbook. If you\'d like to see a transcript of the talk, <a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/essays/the-ecologicians-teaching/environmental-studies-222-campus-ecology/campus-ecology-and-the-nature-of-college/\">look here.</a>','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','publish','closed','closed','','campus-ecology-and-the-nature-of-college','','\nhttp://natureofcollege.org/essays/the-ecologicians-teaching/environmental-studies-222-campus-ecology/campus-ecology-and-the-nature-of-college/','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=780',0,'post','',1),(781,5,'2011-10-15 00:24:07','2011-10-15 00:24:07','I\'m recently back from the AASHE conference in Pittsburgh, where I talked about the class that inspired <em>The Nature of College, </em>and conspired with me to write it. Students fact-checked it against their own experience, and they edited','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','inherit','open','open','','780-revision','','','2011-10-15 00:24:07','2011-10-15 00:24:07','',780,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/780-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(782,5,'2011-10-15 00:26:08','2011-10-15 00:26:08','I\'m recently back from the AASHE conference in Pittsburgh, where I talked about the class that inspired <em>The Nature of College, </em>and conspired with me to write it. Students fact-checked it against their own experience, and they edited to make sure it wasn\'t a boring textbook. If you\'d like to see a transcript of the talk, <a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/essays/the-ecologicians-teaching/environmental-studies-222-campus-ecology/campus-ecology-and-the-nature-of-college/\">look here.</a>','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','inherit','open','open','','780-autosave','','','2011-10-15 00:26:08','2011-10-15 00:26:08','',780,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/780-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(784,5,'2011-10-18 01:13:01','2011-10-18 01:13:01','<em>To prepare for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, American college students need to know more than the traditional disciplines can teach them. They need to understand the moral ecology of everyday life in America, and the daily practices that reinforce or resist the common sense of an unsustainable society. The Campus Ecology class at St. Olaf College does just that. Created by a senior student in 2004, the class helps students see the ethical and aesthetic (and practical) connections between their daily lives and the environmental crises of the planet. It’s also resulted in a book, </em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World<em> (Milkweed Editions, 2010), which traces the environmental impacts of Jo and Joe College as they perform the routines of everyday life, from the dorm room to the bathroom, from the clothes closet to the cafeteria, from the parking lots to the party house.  The materials in this section of the website, therefore, describe the advantages of connecting sustainability issues to the everyday lives of students, and shares the kinds of learning goals, readings, assignments, and practices (individual and collective) that can make sustainability not just an academic subject for students, but a normal part of their daily lives.</em>','Environmental Studies 222: Campus Ecology','','inherit','open','open','','720-autosave','','','2011-10-18 01:13:01','2011-10-18 01:13:01','',720,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/720-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(783,5,'2011-10-14 22:39:09','2011-10-14 22:39:09','<em>This talk at the AASHE conference in 2011 is a condensed version of an essay on \"The Moral Ecology of Everyday Life\" that will appear in a volume called <strong>Higher Education for Sustainability: Cases, Challenges and Opportunities from Across the Curriculum. </strong>Edited by Lucas Johnston, it will be published by Routledge in August 2012.</em>\r\n\r\n* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *\r\n\r\n<strong><em>Campus Ecology and The Nature of College</em></strong>\r\n\r\n<em>To prepare for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, American college students need to know more than the traditional disciplines can teach them. They need to understand the moral ecology of everyday life in America, and the daily practices that reinforce or resist the common sense of an unsustainable society. The Campus Ecology class at St. Olaf College does just that. Created by a senior student in 2004, the class helps students see the ethical and aesthetic (and practical) connections between their daily lives and the environmental crises of the planet. It’s also resulted in a book, </em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World<em> (Milkweed Editions, 2010), which traces the environmental impacts of Jo and Joe College as they perform the routines of everyday life, from the dorm room to the bathroom, from the clothes closet to the cafeteria, from the parking lots to the party house.  This essay, therefore, considers the advantages of connecting sustainability issues to the everyday lives of students, and shares the kinds of learning goals, readings, assignments, and practices (individual and collective) that can make sustainability not just an academic subject for students, but a normal part of their daily lives.</em>\r\n<p align=\"center\">* * * * * * * * * * * *</p>\r\nIn a beautiful essay called “Doing Good Work Together,” William Kittredge writes that “We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day long, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things.”\r\n\r\nRight now, Americans—and American college students—live in a set of stories that are increasingly unworkable.  We structure our lives around stories, explicit and implicit, that threaten the lives of more-than-human others who share the planet with us, and increasingly, the lives of people who are more susceptible to global weirding, climate change, rising oceans, freshwater shortages, soil depletion, deforestation, toxic pollution, and biodiversity loss.  In Environmental Studies, we often teach classes about these topics, but we don’t generally root them in the cultural patterns of college culture. St. Olaf’s Campus Ecology class does just that.\r\n\r\nThis story began in the Spring of 2001 when I taught a course called “The Culture of Nature.” In an attempt to show students a few local examples of the culture of nature, I invited Gene Bakko, our curator of natural lands, and Pete Sandberg, our facilities director, to talk about their environmental work on campus. That week, on our course website, an enthusiastic first-year student named Elise Braaten wrote about how amazing those stories were, and how you could teach a whole course on that.\r\n\r\nTwo years later, Elise declared an independent major called “Wild and Precious Life: Educating for an Ethic of Sustainability.” The title came from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” which asks us all, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In the fall of her senior year, as part of her senior project, she designed a course called Campus Ecology, and in the Spring she team-taught the course with me as an American Studies seminar.  The following year, I team-taught the course with another student, and the year after that, it moved into the Environmental Studies department <em>and</em> into the college catalogue. I love the idea that a course designed by a student is in the college catalogue\r\n\r\nBecause it’s a combination of American Studies and Environmental Studies, Campus Ecology is a strange amalgam of academic and personal approaches to ecology, education and sustainability. At St. Olaf, our American Studies program focuses on what I call “the moral ecology of everyday life,” the ideas and institutions that shape the common sense of our culture.  In <em>Habits of the Heart</em>, Robert Bellah defines moral ecology as \"the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community.\" In its Campus Ecology variation, moral ecology also includes the web of social values that tie people and nature together. It’s the stories we live in.\r\n\r\nThe main question of the class, as far as I can figure it out, is this: What are the cultural patterns on this college campus that reflect and affect the natural patterns of this place and the planet?  We answer these questions by contemplating a day in the life of a college student—waking up and using the bathroom, surveying the stuff in a dorm room, getting dressed, eating in the cafeteria, driving a car, going to a “wild party,” hooking up sexually, and framing life in religious and political terms. Such topics allow us to consider larger issues like comfort and convenience, materialism and time poverty, work and alienation, automobility and  tele-visions, Facebook and placebooks, play and <em>fun</em>damentalism, sex and love and biophilia, religion and spirituality, sitizenship and public policy. They let us see the ordinary consumption and assumptions of American college students, and the extraordinary problems that flow from our everyday lives. Environmentally speaking, a college campus is an organic machine for converting natural energy to human thoughtfulness. And Campus Ecology helps us see that firsthand.\r\n\r\nWhen we designed the course, Elise and I had several things in mind.  We wanted students to confront what Robert Bellah calls “the problem of invisible complexity,” the ways in which our visible lives depend so much on things we can’t see, on people and cultural patterns we don’t understand, and on natural processes that we take for granted.    Even fun, for example, is invisibly complex. We wanted students to think the unthinkable—or at least the unthought—and to confront their complicity in their culture, including its consuming culture of nature.  We wanted them to notice the tensions between the Romantic conceptions of nature that we routinely express, and the resourcist conceptions that configure so much of our lives.\r\n\r\nFrom the beginning, we planned the course to create “a space where imagination can happen,” so we invited students to combine the personal and the academic.  We required journals, where students could take ideas personally and look for cultural patterns in their own idiosyncratic experiences.    We asked students to “go deep,” thinking not just analytically but introspectively about their lives and their culture.  We wanted students to ask “What are people for?”  What is education for?”  “What are my deepest values?”  “What are my operative values?”  “What’s my real relationship with nature?”  And “How can I change my life (and my institutions) so that they reflect my deepest values?”\r\n\r\nIn doing this, we hoped to break down the mental barriers between college and the so-called “real world.”  We wanted to teach students that a college campus is as real as any other place, and that environmental experiments enacted on college campuses can be models for the so-called “real world.\r\n\r\nWe also wanted to provide a space where students could act on their thinking, a place for what we came to call “practical idealism.”  We wanted to help students apply their ideas and ideals to the “real world” of college, to learn how to research problems, organize ideas, propose solutions, work collaboratively, and accomplish some good work <em>before</em> they graduate.\r\n\r\nWe created some unconventional assignments in this class, because we believe that education is more about what students <em>do</em> than about what they read or hear in class.     For example, we assigned students to audit their dorm rooms, making an inventory of all the stuff they found there, and trying to assess what it all means.  Here are a few excerpts that suggest the kind of deep learning that can happen in such an open-ended assignment:\r\n\r\n<em>All of the stuff in my dorm room tells a story. The story is about a group of people who call themselves Americans. By carefully reading the story that my dorm room tells, it is possible to learn who Americans are, how they live their lives, and how they feel about the world around them. So although a dorm room may be a very small space, it can and does say very big things about Americans and their values. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *<em>\r\n</em></p>\r\n<em>Now, as I’ve listed off my possessions, I’m feeling a bit guilty, like I do indeed have lots of useless crap. In all honesty, I think more of my things collect dust than get used. </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\r\n<em>Whenever I pay for a piece of clothing, it sends a message to the entire commodity chain from the advertisers to the retailers to the transporters to the dyers to the factory owners to the farmers of the material (or chemists if it’s synthetic).  This message is “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing.  It works.”  </em>\r\n\r\nAnother time, we assigned students to read a J. Crew catalogue.  We asked them to think about the catalogue as an artifact advertising not just clothes but American values, including American environmental values.  We asked them to consider the <em>nature </em>of consumer culture revealed in the catalogue—Romantic representations of nature in the background of photographs, the natural resources woven into the clothes, and the catalogue itself—made at that time of 100 percent virgin paper, with no recycled content.  Students generally think of themselves as savvy consumers, but I think every one of them got wiser in the course of this exercise.\r\n\r\nFor class another day, students used Mapquest to calculate the mileage of one round trip for each member of the faculty and staff listed in the college directory.  We were able to calculate mileage for 763 people.  While our calculations aren’t exact, our mileage figure offers a (very) rough estimate of our automotive environmental impact.   Each day, we discovered, the St. Olaf community is responsible for 19,788 miles of driving, almost enough to circumnavigate the earth.  It’s a small college, but that’s no small environmental impact.\r\n\r\nOur class takes “field trips” on campus to learn how our small city works. We tour the college cafeteria with the food service director, and learn how carefully he thinks about the environmental impacts of our meals.   We tour the power plant with the Director of Facilities, who has installed a wind turbine that generates almost a third of our electricity on campus land.   We tour our LEED Platinum science building to see how architects do ecological design. We tour prairie and forest restoration projects with our curator of natural lands, who helps us understand how the college is trying to make its land more sustainable, with wetlands and prairies and forests. Off campus, we’ve toured a home remodeled by a local nonprofit to provide green living for low-income families. These trips make our readings real, and they introduce students to people who teach them about the possibilities of social change. “I love the field trips,” said one student, “because we are using and appreciating our human resources to a greater extent.”\r\n\r\nIn Campus Ecology, we try to imagine our place in the world, so we always ask students to study the place that is St. Olaf. In the first year, we asked students to write an essay about campus from the perspective of a non-human organism, which was amazing. In the last few years, we’ve done what we call plot projects instead, asking students to pay attention to a particular place over the course of the semester, and to express the place in words and images that make it come alive as a connected part of an ecological community. Students <em>describe </em>their plot, of course, but they also <em>analyze </em>it ecologically, researching inhabitants and their habits, plotting resource flows, and exploring the aesthetics of functionality. Sometimes they invite other authors into the project, with poems or quotations or songs. Sometimes they take photographs, but other times they produce sketches or paintings or color maps or collages. Usually, the projects look like scrapbooks, but sometimes they’re mobiles or sculptures or webpages. Almost always, they’re inventive and imaginative—and emotional, as students develop affection for the places they’ve come to know so well.\r\n\r\nThe main assignment for the class, though, usually involves research on resource flows at the college and explanations of the environmental impacts of our everyday lives.  Students have produced reports for the college’s Sustainability Task Force, while they learn about the environmental implications of cars, the curriculum, architecture, energy, food, purchasing (including paper), water, waste and the landscape, both on the campus proper and on our prairie and forest restorations.\r\n\r\nDuring Earth Week, we share information with the college community.   The class composes and presents a chapel service, exploring the theme of caring for creation in its campus context.     On Earth Day itself, we annotate the campus, posting hundreds of small signs on walls and in halls to reveal the invisible complexity of the campus environment.   Here are a few samples of the annotations:\r\n\r\n<em>Going Up?  While this elevator gets you from floor to floor, it is designed to move slowly and thus encourage people to use their own energy to walk up stairs.  </em>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">* * *</p>\r\n<em>The Peace Coffee brewed in the Cage and the cafeteria makes good things happen because it’s fair-trade, shade-grown coffee, supporting workers and the environment in countries like Guatemala and Costa Rica.</em>\r\n\r\nThe annotations have been so successful that we’ve been asked to prepare permanent plaques so that this kind of on-site and ongoing environmental education will be a regular part of our campus life.\r\n\r\nWe can’t say with absolute certainty what the outcomes of this class will finally be for students.  But we already have a pretty good idea of some of its intellectual and environmental impacts.  We know, for example, that students are enthused if not exuberant about applying ideas to their own lives and circumstances.  “In this class,” said one of our students, “I am able to study and observe what goes on around me daily and question and wonder why everything happens the way it does and for once it isn\'t considered daydreaming in class.  And the ideas from this class have affected me a lot.”\r\n\r\nWe know that students enjoy the opportunity to integrate the personal and the academic. We know that students like the idea of seeing how ideas work out in real life. One of the students said, “I am learning that a class where you DO a lot is the most effective kind, and is really the only kind of sustainable education.  It seems ironic that we are sitting here, paying $40,000 to be passive, as if it will be a sustainable experience.  I am learning to demand more from life and my education, which is almost unheard of in American education.”  Another student added, “DOING something about our conversations is a great way to run this class.  In my water report, I feel like I am making changes.  I love it that this is demanded of me.”\r\n\r\nWe know that this isn’t just a classroom course.  We know that students talk about it all the time, and we’re delighted that the course isn’t merely an academic question—which is to say, a question that only a dork could care about.  “To be honest,” said one student, “I think that my friends and family are getting tired of me mentioning everything that I am learning and thinking about from this class.  Instead of saying \"This one time, at band camp...\", I say, \"Today, in Campus Ecology...\"  Another student says that “Campus Ecology is a class that I look forward to everyday and talk about all the time outside of class. I never dread doing homework and reading for it, because it is so interesting.” Another student adds, “For me the most important part of the class is that it teaches about where we are and what we can do as a part of our environment, but it also incorporates a philosophy that requires mindfulness anywhere. You don’t have to be living on a hill on the outskirts of a small town to understand [David] Orr, but rather it calls you whoever you are, wherever you are.”\r\n\r\nWe’ve discovered how valuable a student professor can be.  Students like the <em>idea </em>of a student-professor, and they loved Elise’s embodiment of that role. They loved her enthusiasm and engagement, and her sense of identification with them.  And she was a wonderful role model of practical idealism, especially for the younger students.  “When she gets excited,” said one student, “I do too because I respect her hopes and dreams for the class and the school.”  The only difficulty with Elise was that she set such a high standard.  But six other students have, in successive years, also brought their own personal and academic skills to professing, showing that academic thoughtfulness isn’t restricted to older people with degrees.\r\n\r\nWe know that some of the success of Campus Ecology comes not from us, or from the syllabus, but from the students who constitute this learning community.  One of the essential things that students get from the course is the knowledge that there are other students who care—and who care deeply—about things that really matter.  As one student said, “This course has the most genuinely passionate people in it out of any class I\'ve taken at St. Olaf.  The class (and my classmates) inspires me every day, and I rarely get that from my other classes.”\r\n\r\nWe also think that students are developing what I would call “carryover skills,” skills that they can take with them into the so-called “real world,” where they can be environmentally active in their own homes and businesses and communities.  By the end of the semester, we think they’ll know how to do effective research, and how to shape that research into proposals for institutional change.  We talk a lot about rhetoric, and the art of persuasion, so we think they’ll be able to advocate ideas without alienating an audience.  We think they’ll know how to look at an organization to determine who has the capacity to change things, and to find ways to work with those people to make it easier for them to move in environmental directions.  And we think they’ll have some examples of constructive failure.\r\n\r\nIn Campus Ecology, I think, students transmute knowledge into wisdom, individually and collectively. Because Campus Ecology students engage so fully in making sense of their lives, they also engage fully in making sense of the relationships in their lives, including relationships to nature.  They learn a lot about the cultural stories they live in, and how the moral ecology of their own lives affects the ecology of the planet. It’s a model that could be replicated in American Studies, Environmental Studies, sociology, anthropology, and a number of other disciplines. At St. Olaf, it fulfills a credit in the Arts and Humanities track of the Environmental Studies major, but it could be adapted to other general education requirements as well.\r\n\r\nBy combining learning and doing like this, we think we’re involved in a tradition of American education that dates back to one of its founders, Thomas Jefferson.  As he thought about the necessity of public education in the United States, Jefferson said that he wanted people educated \"so much as may enable them to read and understand what is going on in the world, and to keep their part of it going on right: for nothing can keep it right but their own vigilant and distrustful superintendence.\"    We’re also in the tradition of Emerson, who said in “The American Scholar” that action was the completion and fulfillment of scholarship.\r\n\r\nLast—but definitely not least—we’re teaching students the practice of hope.  By design, this course is an exploration of hope.These days, American college culture is not generally hopeful.    These students have watched too much news and too much late-night TV to be naïve about their world.  They’ve grown up with the Simpsons and South Park and MTV and acquired the skepticism that Michael Moffat calls “Undergraduate Cynical.”  They’ve watched enough reality TV to wonder about the intelligence of the average human being.  And they’ve grown up with each other, teaching each other that bitching and cynicism are signs of maturity.\r\n\r\nThe truth is that things are in bad shape, and we need to be clear about the state of the world.  But if that’s the only truth we tell our students, things will get even worse.  We also need to tell the truth about people who have changed the world, about traditions of care and collaboration, about institutions with resources to conserve our resources, about real people engaged in the work of creating a culture of permanence on this planet.\r\n\r\nIn Campus Ecology, our reading helps us with what we might call histories of hope. The central reading of the class is David Orr’s <em>Earth in Mind</em>, which offers hope of re-thinking higher education for the ecological revolution of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. We read Paul Gruchow’s <em>Grass Roots  </em>for its Midwestern landscapes, including the landscapes of mindfulness. We read Scott Russell Sanders’ <em>Hunting for Hope</em>, in which he finds hope in simple, everyday virtues like wildness, embodiment, family, fidelity, skill, simplicity, beauty, and the spirit. We connect our campus hopes to the outside world by reading a book called <em>Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, </em>which offers hope that we can become responsible for our consuming lives if we understand the full cost of it.  And we read a lot of poetry about nature and everyday life. In all of this reading, we’re examining how our words construct our worlds—including the world of the self.\r\n\r\nWe’ve also <em>written</em> a book in this class. As it turns out, even though college faculty interact with college students all the time, we don’t write much about them—or more precisely, we don’t write much that college students would want to read. Over the years, I started writing essays on the moral ecology of college culture, and <em>The Nature of College: How a New Understanding of Campus Life Can Change the World </em>is the result.  Exploring college culture, consumer culture and the environment by analyzing the everyday lives of college students, the book probes why college students act the way they do, and why it matters ecologically.  Even though they think they’re charting their own way in the independence of college culture, students are still subject to American culture’s powerful stories, including its consumerism and its consumer forgetfulness.   The book examines the everyday activity of Joe College and his sister Jo, focusing first on the common sense of college culture, and then on the culture of nature on campus. After considering the environmental impacts of Joe and Jo College, each chapter concludes with suggestions for students interested in exploring more sustainable college cultures.\r\n\r\nThe book itself has been a collaborative effort with my students, as they teach me about the real life of college culture. Students in the class have been teaching me about college culture and commenting on the essays for years—how else would I know anything about wild parties? They love correcting my essays as I do theirs, marking “CBS” (clever but stupid) in the margins and pointing out where the prose is obscure. One student wrote the first draft of the Facebook section, and another helped significantly with the religion chapter. A 2003 St. Olaf graduate is my editor at Milkweed Editions (At one point, I told him that the manuscript was perfect, and he said he was hoping to make it “perfecter”); a 2010 grad drew most of the illustrations; and a 2008 grad has designed the website. Together, we’ve explored the common sense of college culture and some uncommon alternatives that might lead to a new “commons sense”—a set of beliefs and practices that might accustom us to our creative and conserving role in the global commons. We think we got it right—David Orr says that “This should be the first book that any college student reads.” And Peggy Barlett says, “This lively and insightful guide raises profound issues with a light touch—and speaks to the college student in all of us. I highly recommend it.”\r\n\r\nI have a few copies of the book you can look at here, and it’s available in the AASHE bookstore too. There’s also a website with additional materials at <strong>natureofcollege.org.</strong>\r\n\r\nIn American culture, most of us learn a number of coping mechanisms to deal with the stress and the strain of daily life.  In Campus Ecology and on the St. Olaf campus, we’re trying to develop hoping mechanisms (including our class) that allow us to transform the system instead of simply conforming to it.\r\n\r\nIn Daniel Quinn\'s novel <em>Ishmael</em>, a character contends that \"you can\'t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.\"  Having learned the dominant stories of American culture by finding them in their own lives, Campus Ecology students know that they need to imagine another story to be in. They know that we need to start imagining it now. And because of the structure of the class, they have some experience of living in that new story. It’s ecology; it’s ethics; it’s education; it’s hope.  It’s not yet sustainable, but it’s a way to imagine new stories in a culture that desperately needs them.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Campus Ecology and the Nature of College','','inherit','open','open','','771-revision-3','','','2011-10-14 22:39:09','2011-10-14 22:39:09','',771,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/771-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(785,5,'2011-10-05 02:13:48','2011-10-05 02:13:48','','Environmental Studies 222: Campus Ecology','','inherit','open','open','','720-revision-3','','','2011-10-05 02:13:48','2011-10-05 02:13:48','',720,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/720-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(786,5,'2011-10-05 14:52:52','2011-10-05 14:52:52','<p align=\"center\">What We Learned in Campus Ecology</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">Spring 2011</p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n1.    Pay attention to details.\r\n\r\n2.    Nature can be closely related to religion.\r\n\r\n3.    Balancing economic development and environmental protection is really tough.\r\n\r\n4.    Why Americans do not adopt public transportation that often…\r\n\r\n5.    Pete Sandberg and Randy’s jobs really impressed me because of their hard work reducing waste and saving energy.\r\n\r\n6.    Dorm annotations—do we need that much stuff?\r\n\r\n7.    If people love their jobs they will definitely do them well.\r\n\r\n8.    American lifestyle is kind of wasteful for me.\r\n\r\n9.    Learn to love nature at an early age.\r\n\r\n10. Small changes can lead to big changes.\r\n\r\n11. I can use less than 10 minutes’ worth of water in the shower. I can use less than 5 minutes worth! I didn’t think it was possible.\r\n\r\n12. We are already suffering for our environmental sins in big ways.\r\n\r\n13. I could see environmental disaster in my lifetime.\r\n\r\n14. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be environmentally friendly.\r\n\r\n15. You can be environmentally-minded in <em>literally</em> every aspect of life; it’s not just one category of your day.\r\n\r\n16. Other people (lots of them!) enjoy nature. Huh!\r\n\r\n17. More is not always more—in schedules, in content of classes, in belongings, in variety of food, etc.\r\n\r\n18. It’s not that hard to reduce everyday impact.\r\n\r\n19. Feeling disgruntled about the future of the environment and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive.\r\n\r\n20. There is immeasurable energy in talking with other people about environmental hopes and ideas.\r\n\r\n21. Don’t ever, EVER give up on hope: sometimes it’s all you have in life.\r\n\r\n22. You can talk the talk, but if you don’t walk the walk, nothing is getting accomplished. Take initiative!\r\n\r\n23. Journaling is actually fun.\r\n\r\n24. Mary Oliver writes really good poems.\r\n\r\n25. Classes with less expectations/homework/tests actually make me want to work harder.\r\n\r\n26. 55 minutes 3 times a week is not enough time to discuss the issue of environmentalism.\r\n\r\n27. Driving your car less is more important than taking shorter showers.\r\n\r\n28. More people need to educate themselves on environmental topics; a small group of people can’t fix the world alone.\r\n\r\n29. I’m a really good listener. I may not talk much, but sometimes there are too many talkers in the world and not enough listeners to actually take the time to hear what they have to say.\r\n\r\n30. More treats in class.\r\n\r\n31. Hope—it is necessary for change and a good thing for life.\r\n\r\n32. Beauty—it’s all around us, we just need to <em>stop</em> and <em>look</em>.\r\n\r\n33. Politics—it can be difficult, but it’s important to get involved.\r\n\r\n34. Change—we need to work for it individually and as a group.\r\n\r\n35. Consumerism is a political act.\r\n\r\n36. Corporations have consumer power that can be used to incite change.\r\n\r\n37. Spending time on my plot in the natural lands helps with stress.\r\n\r\n38. Slow down—try not to rush through life, you may miss things.\r\n\r\n39. There are many environmental aspects to being a college student.\r\n\r\n40. Talk and listen to others—it’s amazing what you can learn.\r\n\r\n41. Hope is at the root of structural change.\r\n\r\n42. Parenting is political.\r\n\r\n43. I love Mary Oliver poetry—she gives a voice to feelings I didn’t know I had.\r\n\r\n44. Just sitting and observing for an hour can teach you more than 10 hours in the library.\r\n\r\n45. We are the stories we tell.\r\n\r\n46. Shopping is political (vote with your dollar).\r\n\r\n47. Showers should be shorter.\r\n\r\n48. Activism doesn’t have to be about carrying a sign and marching in the streets.\r\n\r\n49. We look at issues (environmental and otherwise) too simplistically in many cases. We need to realize how complex our interactions with the earth and one another really are. We need to <em>connect</em> and use “designing minds.”\r\n\r\n50. We can design buildings like trees. We can make them <em>breathe</em> (I loved seeing this when we toured Regents especially).\r\n\r\n51. What counts as natural and unnatural in nature.\r\n\r\n52. What nature means to me in my life.\r\n\r\n53. How St. Olaf is a part of natural systems.\r\n\r\n54. How my operative and expressed values affect the world and global “weirding.”\r\n\r\n55. Small actions make a difference.\r\n\r\n56. Communication can cause change.\r\n\r\n57. I learned to not be afraid to express my love for nature; I learned that telling people that I care can make them care.\r\n\r\n58. Environmentalism can be cool.\r\n\r\n59. Politics affects everything.\r\n\r\n60. There is hope in the world. We can change.\r\n\r\n61. Communicating values.\r\n\r\n62. To really observe.\r\n\r\n63. Taking time to reflect on my thoughts.\r\n\r\n64. Portrayal of nature in our surroundings.\r\n\r\n65. How influential consumerist society is on our daily lives.\r\n\r\n66. Importance of activism (I’m still working on that).\r\n\r\n67. Figuring out what hope is.\r\n\r\n68. Having meaningful relationships with people and our environment.\r\n\r\n69. Puns and plays on words make essays more fun to read.\r\n\r\n70. Thinking about what I’m going to do to create a better place for myself and for the future.\r\n\r\n71. Community is critical for social change.\r\n\r\n72. There is hope.\r\n\r\n73. GDP doesn’t measure wealth.\r\n\r\n74. Our operative and expressed values aren’t both present in our culture.\r\n\r\n75. There is a way to be environmentally religious.\r\n\r\n76. We need to change society to be more environmental.\r\n\r\n77. Politics is not, but should be, a part of our everyday lives.\r\n\r\n78. You need passion to make change.\r\n\r\n79. It’s important to learn the names of places and things.\r\n\r\n80. Always question what you are told.\r\n\r\n81. Systems.\r\n\r\n82. People have different ideals.\r\n\r\n83. Hope.\r\n\r\n84. Patience.\r\n\r\n85. I learned about myself.\r\n\r\n86. I learned to listen.\r\n\r\n87. That so many things are interconnected.\r\n\r\n88. Being an Environmental Studies major is cool.\r\n\r\n89. There is always a political side.\r\n\r\n90. St. Olaf is actually not that sustainable in the curriculum.\r\n\r\n91. Conversation is the single most effective way to learn.\r\n\r\n92. Sometimes/most of the time you need to plan time to do nothing—it stimulates thought.\r\n\r\n93. Community is extremely important.\r\n\r\n94. Doing individual acts, such as showering less or recycling, isn’t going to ‘save the world’—there needs to be a paradigm shift from industrial to ecological.\r\n\r\n95. You don’t need to take a test to show how much you’ve learned.\r\n\r\n96. To slow down.\r\n\r\n97. We need to love.\r\n\r\n98. My party affiliation does not align with my environmental views.\r\n\r\n99. Social injustice is key to our environmental problems.\r\n\r\n100.      Creating relationships is what makes the world go around.\r\n\r\n101.      Connecting to your place is important and fun.\r\n\r\n102.      Exploring can be fun alone, but is sometimes even better with a friend.\r\n\r\n103.      It’s hard to separate classes with similar content.\r\n\r\n104.      Don’t always judge a book by its cover.\r\n\r\n105.      I have hope that humans can have a net positive impact on the earth.\r\n\r\n106.      The most important conversations happen over and over again\r\n\r\n107.      It’s easy to think that everyone thinks similarly to you—this is not always true.\r\n\r\n108.      I’m glad to get to know Northfield, but I’m sad I’m leaving so soon.\r\n\r\n109.      Tracks in the snow.\r\n\r\n110.      Live intentionally.\r\n\r\n111.      You don’t have to know everything or be perfect.\r\n\r\n112.      That I <em>can</em> make a difference.\r\n\r\n113.      That spending time to convene with nature (particularly alone or just with my journal, cameral, and an open mind) is one of the best things I can do with my time.\r\n\r\n114.      That we can use everyday conversations, as well as deeper conversations, to instigate social change.\r\n\r\n115.      To think about things deeply and not just take them as they come.\r\n\r\n116.      That our culture promotes hookup relationships with nature, but I want to have and have started cultivating a long-term committed relationship based on love, effort, and gratitude.\r\n\r\n117.      That the Natural Lands haven’t always been there…thank GOD they are!\r\n\r\n118.      That Mary Coulson and Jim Farrell are AWESOME people, teachers, and role models.\r\n\r\n119.      That baking bread is really fun and <em>I </em>can even do it (I can’t cook).\r\n\r\n120.      That there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">IS</span> hope and that there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ARE</span> people in this world who care about things the way I do; that movements for social and environmental justice are both ideals and realities.\r\n\r\n121.      That EVERYONE should get to take Campus Ecology!\r\n\r\n122.      Higher education does not always equal greater life knowledge; sometimes more education makes us blind to simple solutions.\r\n\r\n123.      Hope is one of the most important things we can hold onto, despite Jennings, because it stimulates changes (or ideals) into action.\r\n\r\n124.      America’s highly individualized and competitive society is actually what is hurting us internationally.\r\n\r\n125.      St. Olaf’s Bon Appetit program is incredible! I want every freshman to get a tour of the caf during Week One.\r\n\r\n126.      Most of the stuff we buy ends up costing the environment farm more than the money we put in.\r\n\r\n127.      In order to implement change, you need to get involved in politics and ignore the sleazy politicians.\r\n\r\n128.      Think global, act local; focus on local projects and then more people will be affected.\r\n\r\n129.      It is okay to call yourself an environmentalist and do sustainable things, but not be perfect at it.\r\n\r\n130.      “Conserve” is in the world “conservative,” so maybe Republicans can be shown that environmental conservation is part of their definition.\r\n\r\n131.      We should work <em>with</em> big business to affect change, not against (don’t destroy companies/cities, but green them up).\r\n\r\n132.      Paradox of American individualist interests.\r\n\r\n133.      How to sit and think deeply about a plot.\r\n\r\n134.      Problem of environmentalism is a design problem.\r\n\r\n135.      Professor Farrell loves goodwill sweaters.\r\n\r\n136.      Importance of education to change.\r\n\r\n137.      How great Bon Appetit is.\r\n\r\n138.      Effective energy system we have at school.\r\n\r\n139.      Hope.\r\n\r\n140.      Conversation is a great way to learn.\r\n\r\n141.      Passion in every aspect of life.\r\n\r\n142.      How to think beyond what is said.\r\n\r\n143.      Local versus global; individual versus community.\r\n\r\n144.      I learned how to think while I read.\r\n\r\n145.      There is beauty everywhere and in everything.\r\n\r\n146.      Everything has an environmental impact.\r\n\r\n147.      To appreciate—to slow down.\r\n\r\n148.       Love everything.\r\n\r\n149.      The environment must be taken into consideration in everything we do, and being aware of this is part of living the good life.\r\n\r\n150.      We can learn from assignments in school but what we really learn from is <em>people</em>.\r\n\r\n151.      Sometimes the most valuable experiences have no ‘value’ in our socially constructed world.\r\n\r\n152.      Being politically active and aware is <em>important</em>.\r\n\r\n153.      Living simply really is better!\r\n\r\n154.      If you have free time, read or write, always!\r\n\r\n155.      Having hope is better than arguing if we should even have it at all.\r\n\r\n156.      Relishing small moments is more fulfilling than anticipating large ones.\r\n\r\n157.      Everyone should grow their own food and we should be a part of a society that allows time to do so.\r\n\r\n158.      The importance of stories—life is made of stories.\r\n\r\n159.      How to talk to people who disagree.\r\n\r\n160.      How to read for pleasure even if what is written is not a pleasing idea.\r\n\r\n161.      How to write between the lines (not intro/body/conclusion, but rather a discovery while you’re writing).\r\n\r\n162.      How Bon Appetit operates.\r\n\r\n163.      How culture creates us (media, education, parenting).\r\n\r\n164.      How to ask questions.\r\n\r\n165.      How to have a relationship with nature.\r\n\r\n166.      What is hope.\r\n\r\n167.      Through the anger and frustration I have felt in this class, I have learned that I am truly passionate about the Earth.\r\n\r\n168.      I learned that the place I’m living in is my responsibility.\r\n\r\n169.      I learned that where I’m from matters.\r\n\r\n170.      I learned that other people (many others) share my values.\r\n\r\n171.      I learned that if people don’t change, the world will.\r\n\r\n172.      I learned that if people do change, the world still will.\r\n\r\n173.      I learned about blue jeans.\r\n\r\n174.      I learned about energy on St. Olaf campus.\r\n\r\n175.      I learned things about St. Olaf I didn’t know before.\r\n\r\n176.      I learned that learned behavior is hard to change.\r\n\r\n177.      I learned that change starts with me.\r\n\r\n178.      Be appreciative towards all that surrounds you.\r\n\r\n179.      Be politically active.\r\n\r\n180.      Class can be just as educational without tests.\r\n\r\n181.      I can be afraid to take action if I expect to see change.\r\n\r\n182.      I learned just how much I value nature.\r\n\r\n183.      I learned that, while much more needs to be done for the earth, some actions have been taken.\r\n\r\n184.      I am guilty of, to quote Jim, “bitching” a lot.\r\n\r\n185.      Learning about myself is the greatest form of education.\r\n\r\n186.      Jo and Joe College are not real (kidding, of course).\r\n\r\n187.      I have learned that I am pretty normal. Now it is time for me to go out and make an effort to be unique by changing my habits and, through them, the world.\r\n\r\n188.      Overconsumption is the number one environmental killer.\r\n\r\n189.      The small things in nature are just as awe-inspiring as the grandiose things.\r\n\r\n190.      Our operative values don’t often correspond to our expressed values when it comes to environmentalism.\r\n\r\n191.      Having the variety of two instructors provides a nice change of pace.\r\n\r\n192.      Change needs to start on small levels so it can snowball to larger scales.\r\n\r\n193.      My plot is beautiful!\r\n\r\n194.      Many of my choices in life are unsustainable (i.e. a large consumption of beef) and I need to make some sacrifices in order to improve.\r\n\r\n195.      St. Olaf does a pretty good job at being eco-friendly.\r\n\r\n196.      In order to save nature, we need to love nature.\r\n\r\n197.      Economists are viewed in a negative light in much of environmental literature, and there’s some truth to that, but I intend to prove otherwise.\r\n\r\n198.      What I might want to do for graduate school.\r\n\r\n199.      That I think I want to be an environmental consultant for corporate businesses as my career.\r\n\r\n200.      That there is hope for change in our society (kind of cheesy).\r\n\r\n201.      That tofu has a large carbon footprint.\r\n\r\n202.      That I don’t need a stressful workload and big exams in order to learn a lot in a class.\r\n\r\n203.      That actually <em>being</em> in nature is just as important as working to preserve/restore/protect it.\r\n\r\n204.      We need to change our political system, education system, religious views, and corporate businesses. It’s not just small-scale changes (although those are good too).\r\n\r\n205.      Environmental studies should not be limited to one major or department.\r\n\r\n206.      Each individual’s actions can make a difference as it can lead to a movement and then cultural change.\r\n\r\n207.      CONSUMERISM IS BAD!\r\n\r\n208.      I learned how to look for hope.\r\n\r\n209.      I learned how to be more conscientious of my surroundings.\r\n\r\n210.      I learned how to relax in my writing and just write.\r\n\r\n211.      I learned about the intricacies of our facilities buildings.\r\n\r\n212.      From the STARS project, I found out that St. Olaf is pretty good at coordination and planning but could do better.\r\n\r\n213.      I learned a lot about a college student’s impact on the environment.\r\n\r\n214.      I learned that classes can have really good conversations.\r\n\r\n215.      I learned about place, and appreciating it.\r\n\r\n216.      I learned about Northfield, the town I’ve lived in for four years.\r\n\r\n217.      I learned that having a passionate and involved professor makes classes a lot better (NOT sucking up, it’s true!)\r\n\r\n218.      How to slow down and appreciate the world around me.\r\n\r\n219.      The importance of civic engagement, not civic resignation.\r\n\r\n220.      How strongly politics influences our lives and some ways we can influence them.\r\n\r\n221.      How nature is deeply affected and shaped by human culture.\r\n\r\n222.      A more concrete idea of my standards of “sustainability” and what the means.\r\n\r\n223.      Anger is a virtue.\r\n\r\n224.      That the antonym of “bitching” is “hoping,” which has altered my conversations with friends (in a good way).\r\n\r\n225.      Meals are one of the best times to share ideas, especially in college.\r\n\r\n226.      Food is important.\r\n\r\n227.      How colleges are harbors of change.\r\n\r\n228.      I get more out of conversations where no one’s trying to “win” or make the best point.\r\n\r\n229.      Parents are teachers.\r\n\r\n230.      We have a political, not an ecological problem (the symptoms are ecological).\r\n\r\n231.      Thinking economically is useful, though I don’t like to do it.\r\n\r\n232.      Buildings breathe.\r\n\r\n233.      Freshmen are really smart and cool.\r\n\r\n234.      St. Olaf is part of Northfield is part of Minnesota. I live all of those places.\r\n\r\n235.      It’s important and meaningful for everyone to know everyone else’s name.\r\n\r\n236.      Death and Earth are intimately linked.\r\n\r\n237.      We are not helpless or without agency. In fact, there are more things to be done to better our world and environment than can be fit into ten lifetimes. So many we have to <em>choose</em>!\r\n\r\n238.      School and learning are still the most fun things <em>ever</em>.\r\n\r\n239.      I learned some things that bring me joy.\r\n\r\n240.      I learned what hope is for (and wonder).\r\n\r\n241.      The importance of practice.\r\n\r\n242.      What “work” is.\r\n\r\n243.      Pete Sandberg is awesome.\r\n\r\n244.      Why shorter showers <em>do</em> matter.\r\n\r\n245.      About embodied energy.\r\n\r\n246.      Jim likes wordplay.\r\n\r\n247.      The triple bottom line.\r\n\r\n248.      Why growth is bad.\r\n\r\n249.      Why growth is good.\r\n\r\n250.      Why I love JRR Tolkien.\r\n\r\n251.      How to listen.\r\n\r\n252.      Class can be different (radical, student-led, outside).\r\n\r\n253.      Our current systems aren’t sustainable (politically, culturally, socially, etc).\r\n\r\n254.      Small changes are happening (ex. St. Olaf energy systems, Regents, STARS).\r\n\r\n255.      More needs to happen!!!\r\n\r\n256.      Many have hope (in us, kids, futures).\r\n\r\n257.      Many don’t.\r\n\r\n258.      Getting to know nature deeply is important beyond confines.\r\n\r\n259.      Poetry is beautiful. And powerful.\r\n\r\n260.      We need liberal radicals!\r\n\r\n261.      Olaf needs more radical dudes like Jim. We need to break the status quo more—that’s my hope/vision for St. Olaf.\r\n\r\n262.      Be curious and inquisitive.\r\n\r\n263.      Go outside and use my senses.\r\n\r\n264.      Individual behavior change is key—that should come first.\r\n\r\n265.      Creating a culture that displays its values outwardly should come next or simultaneously.\r\n\r\n266.      Political change should follow from cultural change because people will be actively engaged in the community’s well-being.\r\n\r\n267.      Environmental education and awareness are needed now!\r\n\r\n268.      Our current system cannot hold up much longer.\r\n\r\n269.      Act, communicate, teach and learn from others.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[10 Most important things I learned from teaching Campus Ecology (by Mary)]:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n1. I process information best when it comes full-circle in my life.\r\n\r\n2. I’ve changed a lot since I was a freshman.\r\n\r\n3. Every person is complex, and a classroom where students are allowed to be complex people is more interesting.\r\n\r\n4. Teaching is really about listening.\r\n\r\n5. There is not one over-arching solution to the environmental crisis, but may creative, place-specific solutions (thought up and implemented by many creative, place-loving people).\r\n\r\n6. St. Olaf students love deadlines, page limits, and clear directions.\r\n\r\n7. Mary Oliver is more complex than people let her be by just reading <em>The Summer Day</em>. She expresses through poetry what I’ve never found a way to express.\r\n\r\n8. The St. Olaf landscape, birds, sunshine, buildings, teachers, students, custodians, friends, sky, ponds, maple trees—will always be in my heart.\r\n\r\n9. I like being a leader. I also like being the center of attention. I also love people.\r\n\r\n10.  Everything goes back to love. And to politics. Love and politics.','What We Learned 2011','','inherit','open','open','','752-revision-2','','','2011-10-05 14:52:52','2011-10-05 14:52:52','',752,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/752-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(787,5,'2011-10-18 01:15:01','2011-10-18 01:15:01','<p align=\"center\">What We Learned in Campus Ecology</p>\r\n<p align=\"center\">Spring 2011</p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n1.    Pay attention to details.\r\n\r\n2.    Nature can be closely related to religion.\r\n\r\n3.    Balancing economic development and environmental protection is really tough.\r\n\r\n4.    Why Americans do not adopt public transportation that often…\r\n\r\n5.    Pete Sandberg and Randy’s jobs really impressed me because of their hard work reducing waste and saving energy.\r\n\r\n6.    Dorm annotations—do we need that much stuff?\r\n\r\n7.    If people love their jobs they will definitely do them well.\r\n\r\n8.    American lifestyle is kind of wasteful for me.\r\n\r\n9.    Learn to love nature at an early age.\r\n\r\n10. Small changes can lead to big changes.\r\n\r\n11. I can use less than 10 minutes’ worth of water in the shower. I can use less than 5 minutes worth! I didn’t think it was possible.\r\n\r\n12. We are already suffering for our environmental sins in big ways.\r\n\r\n13. I could see environmental disaster in my lifetime.\r\n\r\n14. It doesn’t have to be expensive to be environmentally friendly.\r\n\r\n15. You can be environmentally-minded in <em>literally</em> every aspect of life; it’s not just one category of your day.\r\n\r\n16. Other people (lots of them!) enjoy nature. Huh!\r\n\r\n17. More is not always more—in schedules, in content of classes, in belongings, in variety of food, etc.\r\n\r\n18. It’s not that hard to reduce everyday impact.\r\n\r\n19. Feeling disgruntled about the future of the environment and enjoying life are not mutually exclusive.\r\n\r\n20. There is immeasurable energy in talking with other people about environmental hopes and ideas.\r\n\r\n21. Don’t ever, EVER give up on hope: sometimes it’s all you have in life.\r\n\r\n22. You can talk the talk, but if you don’t walk the walk, nothing is getting accomplished. Take initiative!\r\n\r\n23. Journaling is actually fun.\r\n\r\n24. Mary Oliver writes really good poems.\r\n\r\n25. Classes with less expectations/homework/tests actually make me want to work harder.\r\n\r\n26. 55 minutes 3 times a week is not enough time to discuss the issue of environmentalism.\r\n\r\n27. Driving your car less is more important than taking shorter showers.\r\n\r\n28. More people need to educate themselves on environmental topics; a small group of people can’t fix the world alone.\r\n\r\n29. I’m a really good listener. I may not talk much, but sometimes there are too many talkers in the world and not enough listeners to actually take the time to hear what they have to say.\r\n\r\n30. More treats in class.\r\n\r\n31. Hope—it is necessary for change and a good thing for life.\r\n\r\n32. Beauty—it’s all around us, we just need to <em>stop</em> and <em>look</em>.\r\n\r\n33. Politics—it can be difficult, but it’s important to get involved.\r\n\r\n34. Change—we need to work for it individually and as a group.\r\n\r\n35. Consumerism is a political act.\r\n\r\n36. Corporations have consumer power that can be used to incite change.\r\n\r\n37. Spending time on my plot in the natural lands helps with stress.\r\n\r\n38. Slow down—try not to rush through life, you may miss things.\r\n\r\n39. There are many environmental aspects to being a college student.\r\n\r\n40. Talk and listen to others—it’s amazing what you can learn.\r\n\r\n41. Hope is at the root of structural change.\r\n\r\n42. Parenting is political.\r\n\r\n43. I love Mary Oliver poetry—she gives a voice to feelings I didn’t know I had.\r\n\r\n44. Just sitting and observing for an hour can teach you more than 10 hours in the library.\r\n\r\n45. We are the stories we tell.\r\n\r\n46. Shopping is political (vote with your dollar).\r\n\r\n47. Showers should be shorter.\r\n\r\n48. Activism doesn’t have to be about carrying a sign and marching in the streets.\r\n\r\n49. We look at issues (environmental and otherwise) too simplistically in many cases. We need to realize how complex our interactions with the earth and one another really are. We need to <em>connect</em> and use “designing minds.”\r\n\r\n50. We can design buildings like trees. We can make them <em>breathe</em> (I loved seeing this when we toured Regents especially).\r\n\r\n51. What counts as natural and unnatural in nature.\r\n\r\n52. What nature means to me in my life.\r\n\r\n53. How St. Olaf is a part of natural systems.\r\n\r\n54. How my operative and expressed values affect the world and global “weirding.”\r\n\r\n55. Small actions make a difference.\r\n\r\n56. Communication can cause change.\r\n\r\n57. I learned to not be afraid to express my love for nature; I learned that telling people that I care can make them care.\r\n\r\n58. Environmentalism can be cool.\r\n\r\n59. Politics affects everything.\r\n\r\n60. There is hope in the world. We can change.\r\n\r\n61. Communicating values.\r\n\r\n62. To really observe.\r\n\r\n63. Taking time to reflect on my thoughts.\r\n\r\n64. Portrayal of nature in our surroundings.\r\n\r\n65. How influential consumerist society is on our daily lives.\r\n\r\n66. Importance of activism (I’m still working on that).\r\n\r\n67. Figuring out what hope is.\r\n\r\n68. Having meaningful relationships with people and our environment.\r\n\r\n69. Puns and plays on words make essays more fun to read.\r\n\r\n70. Thinking about what I’m going to do to create a better place for myself and for the future.\r\n\r\n71. Community is critical for social change.\r\n\r\n72. There is hope.\r\n\r\n73. GDP doesn’t measure wealth.\r\n\r\n74. Our operative and expressed values aren’t both present in our culture.\r\n\r\n75. There is a way to be environmentally religious.\r\n\r\n76. We need to change society to be more environmental.\r\n\r\n77. Politics is not, but should be, a part of our everyday lives.\r\n\r\n78. You need passion to make change.\r\n\r\n79. It’s important to learn the names of places and things.\r\n\r\n80. Always question what you are told.\r\n\r\n81. Systems.\r\n\r\n82. People have different ideals.\r\n\r\n83. Hope.\r\n\r\n84. Patience.\r\n\r\n85. I learned about myself.\r\n\r\n86. I learned to listen.\r\n\r\n87. That so many things are interconnected.\r\n\r\n88. Being an Environmental Studies major is cool.\r\n\r\n89. There is always a political side.\r\n\r\n90. St. Olaf is actually not that sustainable in the curriculum.\r\n\r\n91. Conversation is the single most effective way to learn.\r\n\r\n92. Sometimes/most of the time you need to plan time to do nothing—it stimulates thought.\r\n\r\n93. Community is extremely important.\r\n\r\n94. Doing individual acts, such as showering less or recycling, isn’t going to ‘save the world’—there needs to be a paradigm shift from industrial to ecological.\r\n\r\n95. You don’t need to take a test to show how much you’ve learned.\r\n\r\n96. To slow down.\r\n\r\n97. We need to love.\r\n\r\n98. My party affiliation does not align with my environmental views.\r\n\r\n99. Social injustice is key to our environmental problems.\r\n\r\n100.      Creating relationships is what makes the world go around.\r\n\r\n101.      Connecting to your place is important and fun.\r\n\r\n102.      Exploring can be fun alone, but is sometimes even better with a friend.\r\n\r\n103.      It’s hard to separate classes with similar content.\r\n\r\n104.      Don’t always judge a book by its cover.\r\n\r\n105.      I have hope that humans can have a net positive impact on the earth.\r\n\r\n106.      The most important conversations happen over and over again\r\n\r\n107.      It’s easy to think that everyone thinks similarly to you—this is not always true.\r\n\r\n108.      I’m glad to get to know Northfield, but I’m sad I’m leaving so soon.\r\n\r\n109.      Tracks in the snow.\r\n\r\n110.      Live intentionally.\r\n\r\n111.      You don’t have to know everything or be perfect.\r\n\r\n112.      That I <em>can</em> make a difference.\r\n\r\n113.      That spending time to convene with nature (particularly alone or just with my journal, cameral, and an open mind) is one of the best things I can do with my time.\r\n\r\n114.      That we can use everyday conversations, as well as deeper conversations, to instigate social change.\r\n\r\n115.      To think about things deeply and not just take them as they come.\r\n\r\n116.      That our culture promotes hookup relationships with nature, but I want to have and have started cultivating a long-term committed relationship based on love, effort, and gratitude.\r\n\r\n117.      That the Natural Lands haven’t always been there…thank GOD they are!\r\n\r\n118.      That Mary Coulson and Jim Farrell are AWESOME people, teachers, and role models.\r\n\r\n119.      That baking bread is really fun and <em>I </em>can even do it (I can’t cook).\r\n\r\n120.      That there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">IS</span> hope and that there <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">ARE</span> people in this world who care about things the way I do; that movements for social and environmental justice are both ideals and realities.\r\n\r\n121.      That EVERYONE should get to take Campus Ecology!\r\n\r\n122.      Higher education does not always equal greater life knowledge; sometimes more education makes us blind to simple solutions.\r\n\r\n123.      Hope is one of the most important things we can hold onto, despite Jennings, because it stimulates changes (or ideals) into action.\r\n\r\n124.      America’s highly individualized and competitive society is actually what is hurting us internationally.\r\n\r\n125.      St. Olaf’s Bon Appetit program is incredible! I want every freshman to get a tour of the caf during Week One.\r\n\r\n126.      Most of the stuff we buy ends up costing the environment farm more than the money we put in.\r\n\r\n127.      In order to implement change, you need to get involved in politics and ignore the sleazy politicians.\r\n\r\n128.      Think global, act local; focus on local projects and then more people will be affected.\r\n\r\n129.      It is okay to call yourself an environmentalist and do sustainable things, but not be perfect at it.\r\n\r\n130.      “Conserve” is in the world “conservative,” so maybe Republicans can be shown that environmental conservation is part of their definition.\r\n\r\n131.      We should work <em>with</em> big business to affect change, not against (don’t destroy companies/cities, but green them up).\r\n\r\n132.      Paradox of American individualist interests.\r\n\r\n133.      How to sit and think deeply about a plot.\r\n\r\n134.      Problem of environmentalism is a design problem.\r\n\r\n135.      Professor Farrell loves goodwill sweaters.\r\n\r\n136.      Importance of education to change.\r\n\r\n137.      How great Bon Appetit is.\r\n\r\n138.      Effective energy system we have at school.\r\n\r\n139.      Hope.\r\n\r\n140.      Conversation is a great way to learn.\r\n\r\n141.      Passion in every aspect of life.\r\n\r\n142.      How to think beyond what is said.\r\n\r\n143.      Local versus global; individual versus community.\r\n\r\n144.      I learned how to think while I read.\r\n\r\n145.      There is beauty everywhere and in everything.\r\n\r\n146.      Everything has an environmental impact.\r\n\r\n147.      To appreciate—to slow down.\r\n\r\n148.       Love everything.\r\n\r\n149.      The environment must be taken into consideration in everything we do, and being aware of this is part of living the good life.\r\n\r\n150.      We can learn from assignments in school but what we really learn from is <em>people</em>.\r\n\r\n151.      Sometimes the most valuable experiences have no ‘value’ in our socially constructed world.\r\n\r\n152.      Being politically active and aware is <em>important</em>.\r\n\r\n153.      Living simply really is better!\r\n\r\n154.      If you have free time, read or write, always!\r\n\r\n155.      Having hope is better than arguing if we should even have it at all.\r\n\r\n156.      Relishing small moments is more fulfilling than anticipating large ones.\r\n\r\n157.      Everyone should grow their own food and we should be a part of a society that allows time to do so.\r\n\r\n158.      The importance of stories—life is made of stories.\r\n\r\n159.      How to talk to people who disagree.\r\n\r\n160.      How to read for pleasure even if what is written is not a pleasing idea.\r\n\r\n161.      How to write between the lines (not intro/body/conclusion, but rather a discovery while you’re writing).\r\n\r\n162.      How Bon Appetit operates.\r\n\r\n163.      How culture creates us (media, education, parenting).\r\n\r\n164.      How to ask questions.\r\n\r\n165.      How to have a relationship with nature.\r\n\r\n166.      What is hope.\r\n\r\n167.      Through the anger and frustration I have felt in this class, I have learned that I am truly passionate about the Earth.\r\n\r\n168.      I learned that the place I’m living in is my responsibility.\r\n\r\n169.      I learned that where I’m from matters.\r\n\r\n170.      I learned that other people (many others) share my values.\r\n\r\n171.      I learned that if people don’t change, the world will.\r\n\r\n172.      I learned that if people do change, the world still will.\r\n\r\n173.      I learned about blue jeans.\r\n\r\n174.      I learned about energy on St. Olaf campus.\r\n\r\n175.      I learned things about St. Olaf I didn’t know before.\r\n\r\n176.      I learned that learned behavior is hard to change.\r\n\r\n177.      I learned that change starts with me.\r\n\r\n178.      Be appreciative towards all that surrounds you.\r\n\r\n179.      Be politically active.\r\n\r\n180.      Class can be just as educational without tests.\r\n\r\n181.      I can be afraid to take action if I expect to see change.\r\n\r\n182.      I learned just how much I value nature.\r\n\r\n183.      I learned that, while much more needs to be done for the earth, some actions have been taken.\r\n\r\n184.      I am guilty of, to quote Jim, “bitching” a lot.\r\n\r\n185.      Learning about myself is the greatest form of education.\r\n\r\n186.      Jo and Joe College are not real (kidding, of course).\r\n\r\n187.      I have learned that I am pretty normal. Now it is time for me to go out and make an effort to be unique by changing my habits and, through them, the world.\r\n\r\n188.      Overconsumption is the number one environmental killer.\r\n\r\n189.      The small things in nature are just as awe-inspiring as the grandiose things.\r\n\r\n190.      Our operative values don’t often correspond to our expressed values when it comes to environmentalism.\r\n\r\n191.      Having the variety of two instructors provides a nice change of pace.\r\n\r\n192.      Change needs to start on small levels so it can snowball to larger scales.\r\n\r\n193.      My plot is beautiful!\r\n\r\n194.      Many of my choices in life are unsustainable (i.e. a large consumption of beef) and I need to make some sacrifices in order to improve.\r\n\r\n195.      St. Olaf does a pretty good job at being eco-friendly.\r\n\r\n196.      In order to save nature, we need to love nature.\r\n\r\n197.      Economists are viewed in a negative light in much of environmental literature, and there’s some truth to that, but I intend to prove otherwise.\r\n\r\n198.      What I might want to do for graduate school.\r\n\r\n199.      That I think I want to be an environmental consultant for corporate businesses as my career.\r\n\r\n200.      That there is hope for change in our society (kind of cheesy).\r\n\r\n201.      That tofu has a large carbon footprint.\r\n\r\n202.      That I don’t need a stressful workload and big exams in order to learn a lot in a class.\r\n\r\n203.      That actually <em>being</em> in nature is just as important as working to preserve/restore/protect it.\r\n\r\n204.      We need to change our political system, education system, religious views, and corporate businesses. It’s not just small-scale changes (although those are good too).\r\n\r\n205.      Environmental studies should not be limited to one major or department.\r\n\r\n206.      Each individual’s actions can make a difference as it can lead to a movement and then cultural change.\r\n\r\n207.      CONSUMERISM IS BAD!\r\n\r\n208.      I learned how to look for hope.\r\n\r\n209.      I learned how to be more conscientious of my surroundings.\r\n\r\n210.      I learned how to relax in my writing and just write.\r\n\r\n211.      I learned about the intricacies of our facilities buildings.\r\n\r\n212.      From the STARS project, I found out that St. Olaf is pretty good at coordination and planning but could do better.\r\n\r\n213.      I learned a lot about a college student’s impact on the environment.\r\n\r\n214.      I learned that classes can have really good conversations.\r\n\r\n215.      I learned about place, and appreciating it.\r\n\r\n216.      I learned about Northfield, the town I’ve lived in for four years.\r\n\r\n217.      I learned that having a passionate and involved professor makes classes a lot better (NOT sucking up, it’s true!)\r\n\r\n218.      How to slow down and appreciate the world around me.\r\n\r\n219.      The importance of civic engagement, not civic resignation.\r\n\r\n220.      How strongly politics influences our lives and some ways we can influence them.\r\n\r\n221.      How nature is deeply affected and shaped by human culture.\r\n\r\n222.      A more concrete idea of my standards of “sustainability” and what the means.\r\n\r\n223.      Anger is a virtue.\r\n\r\n224.      That the antonym of “bitching” is “hoping,” which has altered my conversations with friends (in a good way).\r\n\r\n225.      Meals are one of the best times to share ideas, especially in college.\r\n\r\n226.      Food is important.\r\n\r\n227.      How colleges are harbors of change.\r\n\r\n228.      I get more out of conversations where no one’s trying to “win” or make the best point.\r\n\r\n229.      Parents are teachers.\r\n\r\n230.      We have a political, not an ecological problem (the symptoms are ecological).\r\n\r\n231.      Thinking economically is useful, though I don’t like to do it.\r\n\r\n232.      Buildings breathe.\r\n\r\n233.      Freshmen are really smart and cool.\r\n\r\n234.      St. Olaf is part of Northfield is part of Minnesota. I live all of those places.\r\n\r\n235.      It’s important and meaningful for everyone to know everyone else’s name.\r\n\r\n236.      Death and Earth are intimately linked.\r\n\r\n237.      We are not helpless or without agency. In fact, there are more things to be done to better our world and environment than can be fit into ten lifetimes. So many we have to <em>choose</em>!\r\n\r\n238.      School and learning are still the most fun things <em>ever</em>.\r\n\r\n239.      I learned some things that bring me joy.\r\n\r\n240.      I learned what hope is for (and wonder).\r\n\r\n241.      The importance of practice.\r\n\r\n242.      What “work” is.\r\n\r\n243.      Pete Sandberg is awesome.\r\n\r\n244.      Why shorter showers <em>do</em> matter.\r\n\r\n245.      About embodied energy.\r\n\r\n246.      Jim likes wordplay.\r\n\r\n247.      The triple bottom line.\r\n\r\n248.      Why growth is bad.\r\n\r\n249.      Why growth is good.\r\n\r\n250.      Why I love JRR Tolkien.\r\n\r\n251.      How to listen.\r\n\r\n252.      Class can be different (radical, student-led, outside).\r\n\r\n253.      Our current systems aren’t sustainable (politically, culturally, socially, etc).\r\n\r\n254.      Small changes are happening (ex. St. Olaf energy systems, Regents, STARS).\r\n\r\n255.      More needs to happen!!!\r\n\r\n256.      Many have hope (in us, kids, futures).\r\n\r\n257.      Many don’t.\r\n\r\n258.      Getting to know nature deeply is important beyond confines.\r\n\r\n259.      Poetry is beautiful. And powerful.\r\n\r\n260.      We need liberal radicals!\r\n\r\n261.      Olaf needs more radical dudes like Jim. We need to break the status quo more—that’s my hope/vision for St. Olaf.\r\n\r\n262.      Be curious and inquisitive.\r\n\r\n263.      Go outside and use my senses.\r\n\r\n264.      Individual behavior change is key—that should come first.\r\n\r\n265.      Creating a culture that displays its values outwardly should come next or simultaneously.\r\n\r\n266.      Political change should follow from cultural change because people will be actively engaged in the community’s well-being.\r\n\r\n267.      Environmental education and awareness are needed now!\r\n\r\n268.      Our current system cannot hold up much longer.\r\n\r\n269.      Act, communicate, teach and learn from others.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n[10 Most important things I learned from teaching Campus Ecology (by Mary)]:\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n1. I process information best when it comes full-circle in my life.\r\n\r\n2. I’ve changed a lot since I was a freshman.\r\n\r\n3. Every person is complex, and a classroom where students are allowed to be complex people is more interesting.\r\n\r\n4. Teaching is really about listening.\r\n\r\n5. There is not one over-arching solution to the environmental crisis, but may creative, place-specific solutions (thought up and implemented by many creative, place-loving people).\r\n\r\n6. St. Olaf students love deadlines, page limits, and clear directions.\r\n\r\n7. Mary Oliver is more complex than people let her be by just reading <em>The Summer Day</em>. She expresses through poetry what I’ve never found a way to express.\r\n\r\n8. The St. Olaf landscape, birds, sunshine, buildings, teachers, students, custodians, friends, sky, ponds, maple trees—will always be in my heart.\r\n\r\n9. I like being a leader. I also like being the center of attention. I also love people.\r\n\r\n10.  Everything goes back to love. And to politics. Love and politics.','What We Learned 2011','','inherit','open','open','','752-revision-3','','','2011-10-18 01:15:01','2011-10-18 01:15:01','',752,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/752-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(788,5,'2011-10-07 00:48:50','2011-10-07 00:48:50','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763/ikea-logo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\r\n\r\n1. Less material\r\n2. Renewable materials\r\n3. Recycled materials\r\n4. Environmentally better materials\r\n5. Separable and recyclable\r\n6. Quality\r\n7. Transport efficient\r\n8. Energy-efficient production\r\n9. Renewable energy in production\r\n10. Raw material\r\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\r\n\r\nFor more on Ikea\'s environmental commitments, click <a href=\"http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/about_ikea/pdf/ikea_ser_2010.pdf\">here</a>. As more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable. And that\'s a good deal.','','','inherit','open','open','','763-revision-5','','','2011-10-07 00:48:50','2011-10-07 00:48:50','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(789,5,'2011-10-18 03:26:50','2011-10-18 03:26:50','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763/ikea-logo/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-765\"><img class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-765\" title=\"Ikea logo\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Ikea-logo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"257\" height=\"196\" /></a>Students buy a lot of shelves and desks and furniture at Ikea, and now they can get more for their money, because Ikea is introducing a product scorecard evaluating on 11 different stages of the product chain. The evaluation includes:\r\n\r\n1. Less material\r\n2. Renewable materials\r\n3. Recycled materials\r\n4. Environmentally better materials\r\n5. Separable and recyclable\r\n6. Quality\r\n7. Transport efficient\r\n8. Energy-efficient production\r\n9. Renewable energy in production\r\n10. Raw material\r\n11. Ensuring that products help customers to reduce energy, water or waste in their homes\r\n\r\nFor more on Ikea\'s environmental commitments, click <a href=\"http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/about_ikea/pdf/ikea_ser_2010.pdf\">here</a>. As more and more companies follow Ikea\'s lead, ordinary consumption can become both more conscientious and more sustainable. And that\'s a good deal.','Change Begins in the Dorm Room!','','inherit','open','open','','763-revision-6','','','2011-10-18 03:26:50','2011-10-18 03:26:50','',763,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/763-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(791,5,'2011-10-23 16:14:33','2011-10-23 16:14:33','In an era of budget cuts, many state governments are increasing funding for departments that prepare students for today\'s corporate employers, forgetting the tradition of liberal arts in higher education. Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, responds <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/10/michael_m_crow_president_of_arizona_state_university_explains_wh.html\">here</a>. My own response, written as a part of St. Olaf\'s mission statement, is here:\n\n<em>Indeed, one of the main practicalities of the liberal arts at institutions like St. Olaf is to show some of the impracticalities of the so-called \"real world.\"  Too often in modern societies, the push for practicality is a call to conform to the world the way it is, not the way it ought to be.  The practical world sometimes accomplishes so much because it encompasses so little, setting aside whole dimensions of the human person--aesthetic, spiritual, ethical, and sometimes even political. The liberal arts reject this narrow definition of practicality, and remind us of the fullness of our humanity.  By keeping our minds critically engaged with the world\'s presumed practicality, they free us to wonder how, practically, we might become as good as we could be.  At St. Olaf, therefore, when we teach students practical skills and knowledge, we also teach them ways of evaluating their use in the world.</em>\n\nIt is practical to get a job, but that\'s not the only practicality in a world of human beings, where','Education and Practicality','','inherit','open','open','','790-revision','','','2011-10-23 16:14:33','2011-10-23 16:14:33','',790,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/790-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(792,5,'2011-10-24 00:18:19','2011-10-24 00:18:19','In an era of budget cuts, many state governments are increasing funding for college departments that prepare students for today\'s corporate employers (especially the STEM disciplines), forgetting the tradition of liberal arts in higher education. Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, responds <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/10/michael_m_crow_president_of_arizona_state_university_explains_wh.html\">here</a>. My own take on practicality, written as a part of St. Olaf\'s mission statement, is here:\n\n<em>Indeed, one of the main practicalities of the liberal arts at institutions like St. Olaf is to show some of the impracticalities of the so-called \"real world.\"  Too often in modern societies, the push for practicality is a call to conform to the world the way it is, not the way it ought to be.  The practical world sometimes accomplishes so much because it encompasses so little, setting aside whole dimensions of the human person--aesthetic, spiritual, ethical, and sometimes even political. The liberal arts reject this narrow definition of practicality, and remind us of the fullness of our humanity.  By keeping our minds critically engaged with the world\'s presumed practicality, they free us to wonder how, practically, we might become as good as we could be.  At St. Olaf, therefore, when we teach students practical skills and knowledge, we also teach them ways of evaluating their use in the world.</em>\n\nIt is practical to get a job, but that\'s not the only practicality in a world of human beings, who are more than employees and consumers.','Education and Practicality','','inherit','open','open','','790-autosave','','','2011-10-24 00:18:19','2011-10-24 00:18:19','',790,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/790-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(793,5,'2011-10-23 16:15:17','2011-10-23 16:15:17','In an era of budget cuts, many state governments are increasing funding for departments that prepare students for today\'s corporate employers, forgetting the tradition of liberal arts in higher education. Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, responds <a href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2011/10/michael_m_crow_president_of_arizona_state_university_explains_wh.html\">here</a>. My own response, written as a part of St. Olaf\'s mission statement, is here:\r\n\r\n<em>Indeed, one of the main practicalities of the liberal arts at institutions like St. Olaf is to show some of the impracticalities of the so-called \"real world.\"  Too often in modern societies, the push for practicality is a call to conform to the world the way it is, not the way it ought to be.  The practical world sometimes accomplishes so much because it encompasses so little, setting aside whole dimensions of the human person--aesthetic, spiritual, ethical, and sometimes even political. The liberal arts reject this narrow definition of practicality, and remind us of the fullness of our humanity.  By keeping our minds critically engaged with the world\'s presumed practicality, they free us to wonder how, practically, we might become as good as we could be.  At St. Olaf, therefore, when we teach students practical skills and knowledge, we also teach them ways of evaluating their use in the world.</em>\r\n\r\nIt is practical to get a job, but that\'s not the only practicality in a world of human beings, who are more than employees and consumers.','Education and Practicality','','inherit','open','open','','790-revision-2','','','2011-10-23 16:15:17','2011-10-23 16:15:17','',790,'http://natureofcollege.org/2011/10/790-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(807,5,'2012-05-09 21:20:40','2012-05-09 21:20:40','Work in progress','The Ecologician\'s Quotations','','publish','closed','open','','the-ecologicians-quotations','','','2018-07-09 14:32:20','2018-07-09 19:32:20','',75,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=807',0,'page','',0),(808,5,'2012-05-09 21:19:43','2012-05-09 21:19:43','','The Ecologician\'s Quotations','','inherit','open','open','','807-revision','','','2012-05-09 21:19:43','2012-05-09 21:19:43','',807,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/05/807-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(809,5,'2012-05-09 21:21:43','2012-05-09 21:21:43','Work in progress','The Ecologician\'s Quotations','','inherit','open','open','','807-autosave','','','2012-05-09 21:21:43','2012-05-09 21:21:43','',807,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/05/807-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(811,5,'2012-06-28 22:49:41','2012-06-28 22:49:41','Many of the illustrations in the book come from the pen of Jens Matson, a 2010 St. Olaf graduate. They are pointed, witty and whimsical, and they add a whole new dimension to the book. Here they are without the distractions of the text. Enjoy!','Illustrations','','inherit','open','open','','810-revision','','','2012-06-28 22:49:41','2012-06-28 22:49:41','',810,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/810-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(812,5,'2012-06-28 22:57:04','2012-06-28 22:57:04','It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39 of <em>The Nature of College</em>\r\n\r\n[button]<a href=\"Dorm room audit0001\">Dorm Room Inventory</a>[/button]\r\n\r\n<strong>\r\n</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Dorm room inventory','','publish','closed','open','','dorm-room-inventory','','','2018-07-09 14:32:20','2018-07-09 19:32:20','',810,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=812',0,'page','',0),(813,5,'2012-06-28 22:54:15','2012-06-28 22:54:15','','Dorm room audit0001','Dorm room audit','inherit','open','open','','dorm-room-audit0001','','','2012-06-28 22:54:15','2012-06-28 22:54:15','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Dorm-room-audit0001.pdf',0,'attachment','application/pdf',0),(818,5,'2012-06-28 22:58:59','2012-06-28 22:58:59','Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39. It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-3','','','2012-06-28 22:58:59','2012-06-28 22:58:59','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(815,5,'2012-06-28 22:51:34','2012-06-28 22:51:34','Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39. It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision','','','2012-06-28 22:51:34','2012-06-28 22:51:34','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(817,5,'2012-06-28 22:57:04','2012-06-28 22:57:04','Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39. It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.\r\n\r\nDorm room audit0001','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-2','','','2012-06-28 22:57:04','2012-06-28 22:57:04','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(821,5,'2012-06-30 13:56:07','2012-06-30 13:56:07','Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39. It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.\r\n\r\n<strong>\r\n</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-5','','','2012-06-30 13:56:07','2012-06-30 13:56:07','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision-5/',0,'revision','',0),(843,5,'2012-07-18 02:53:09','2012-07-18 02:53:09','<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Intro</span>: <em>During this hot summer season, Americans are looking for ways to keep cool.  Today, on the 110th anniversary of air conditioning, Dr. America, who is nothing but cool, cranks up the heat on air conditioning.</em>\r\n<p align=\"center\">* * * * * * * * * * * * *</p>\r\nWe live on the only planet in the solar system with an atmosphere that supports life.  The air we breathe is a beautifully conditioned combination of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases.  But it isn\'t conditioned enough for most Americans, who like to put on airs that have been treated some more.  As the old saying goes, \"If you can\'t stand the heat, air condition the kitchen.\"\r\n\r\nInvented by Willis Carrier in 1902, the air conditioner is essentially a refrigerator for human beings.  Like a refrigerator, it takes heat and humidity from the conditioned air, and deposits them elsewhere.  Air conditioning conditions the air, but it also conditions cultural expectations.  It reveals our preference for the great indoors, and our predilection for what we proudly call \"climate control.\"  It suggests that, unlike other animals, Americans expect the environment to adapt to them instead of adapting to the environment.\r\n\r\nSuch comfort does not come cheaply.  In Minnesota, it costs roughly 25 cents a day to run a fan, $2.50 to run a room air conditioner, and $6.00 for central air conditioning.\r\n\r\nAir conditioning is a simple technology that replaces the complex cultural conditioning that taught primitive people--like our parents and grandparents--how to deal with heat.  Before air conditioning, people generally did not build cities in deserts.  In past times, in temperate climates, they planted trees or shrubs to shade their homes.  They used awnings to shield windows on the east and west side of buildings.  And, instead of cooling all of the spaces of the building, they used fans to cool the particular spaces that they occupied.  When indoor spaces became too hot, they sat on porches where the evening breeze brought some relief.  For work, they designed buildings with windows that opened.  In some cultures less obsessed with work, a siesta also served to keep people from the busy-ness of business during the hottest hours of the day.  Sometimes, too, people were simply uncomfortable.\r\n\r\nSixty percent of American homes--and 75 percent of new homes--are equipped with air conditioners, which annually consume the electrical equivalent of seven large coal power plants.  Fifteen percent of American electrical output goes to space cooling; on a hot day, a third of Northeastern energy consumption and half in the South Central States goes into air conditioning.  The fuel we burn to cool our homes and offices releases a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Since 1958, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by eleven percent.  This means that air conditioning the indoors comes as the cost of the global warming of the outdoors.\r\n\r\nEvery time Dr. America and his fellow Americans use energy extracted from the combustion of coal or oil or wood, we flip the global thermostat to \"warmer.\"  Indeed, the whole industrial era has been an experiment in air conditioning.  The widespread use of fossil fuels pours greenhouse gases into the air, where they trap infrared heat energy attempting to escape into space.  Air conditioning, therefore, is only the chilly tip of the iceberg that may be melting as a result of Americans\' attempts to condition the climate.\r\n\r\nGenerally, Americans stay cool in the face of this warming by airing their brains, removing the facts that cause them discomfort.  Conditioning the air, they have also conditioned themselves to consider their comfort a constant in a natural cycle of the seasons.\r\n\r\n\"On the air\" from the American Studies Museum, this is Dr. America, keeping cool.','Air Conditioning','','publish','closed','closed','','air-conditioning','','','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=843',0,'post','',0),(820,5,'2012-06-28 23:01:26','2012-06-28 23:01:26','Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39. It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.\r\n\r\n<strong><a title=\"Edit “Dorm room audit0001”\" href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-admin/media.php?attachment_id=813&amp;action=edit\">Dorm room audit0001</a></strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-4','','','2012-06-28 23:01:26','2012-06-28 23:01:26','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(822,5,'2012-06-30 13:57:47','2012-06-30 13:57:47','It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39 of <em>The Nature of College</em>\r\n\r\n[button]dorm room audit0001[/button]\r\n\r\n<strong>\r\n</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-6','','','2012-06-30 13:57:47','2012-06-30 13:57:47','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision-6/',0,'revision','',0),(823,5,'2012-06-30 13:59:28','2012-06-30 13:59:28','It\'s amazing how our materialism materializes when we pause to count our possessions.Here\'s the dorm room inventory from p. 39 of <em>The Nature of College</em>\r\n\r\n[button]<a href=\"dorm room audit0001\">Dorm Room Inventory</a>[/button]\r\n\r\n<strong>\r\n</strong>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Dorm room inventory','','inherit','open','open','','812-revision-7','','','2012-06-30 13:59:28','2012-06-30 13:59:28','',812,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/812-revision-7/',0,'revision','',0),(824,5,'2012-06-30 14:10:44','2012-06-30 14:10:44','I love teaching! When you\'re in a room of curious and committed young people, trying to make sense of the world, it\'s exhilarating. I\'m one of those people who says \"Thank God it\'s Monday,\" because I get to converse with students who want to know how the world works so that they can do good work in the world.\n\nI tend to be an unconventional teacher because I\'ve been blessed with students who love intellectual play, and surrounded by colleagues who believe in active learning, especially in settings like St. Olaf\'s Paracollege, which encouraged faculty to make learning make sense for students, not just for professional practitioners of academic disciplines.\n\nThe class that inspired <em>The Nature of College </em>is Campus Ecology, and you can find out more about it here.','The Ecologician\'s Teaching','','inherit','open','open','','717-autosave','','','2012-06-30 14:10:44','2012-06-30 14:10:44','',717,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/717-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(828,5,'2012-06-30 14:38:37','2012-06-30 14:38:37','One of the most creative projects to come out of Campus Ecology was a series of posters designed by Britta Schroeter. Here they are:\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-826\" title=\"Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;','Sustainability isn\'t just for . . .','','inherit','open','open','','825-revision','','','2012-06-30 14:38:37','2012-06-30 14:38:37','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/825-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(829,5,'2012-06-30 17:11:35','2012-06-30 17:11:35','One of the most creative projects to come out of Campus Ecology was a series of posters designed by Britta Schroeter. Here they are:\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-826\" title=\"Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-830\" title=\"Food\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food-630x406.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"406\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-831\" title=\"Treehuggers\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-832\" title=\"Conservation\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-834\" title=\"leaves\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-833\" title=\"Church\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-835\" title=\"Plants\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>','Sustainability is not just . . .','','inherit','open','open','','825-autosave','','','2012-06-30 17:11:35','2012-06-30 17:11:35','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/825-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(830,5,'2012-06-30 14:40:24','2012-06-30 14:40:24','','Food','','inherit','open','open','','food','','','2012-06-30 14:40:24','2012-06-30 14:40:24','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(831,5,'2012-06-30 14:42:11','2012-06-30 14:42:11','','Treehuggers','','inherit','open','open','','treehuggers','','','2012-06-30 14:42:11','2012-06-30 14:42:11','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(832,5,'2012-06-30 14:43:18','2012-06-30 14:43:18','','Conservation','','inherit','open','open','','conservation','','','2012-06-30 14:43:18','2012-06-30 14:43:18','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(833,5,'2012-06-30 14:44:00','2012-06-30 14:44:00','','Church','','inherit','open','open','','church','','','2012-06-30 14:44:00','2012-06-30 14:44:00','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(834,5,'2012-06-30 14:45:57','2012-06-30 14:45:57','','leaves','','inherit','open','open','','leaves','','','2012-06-30 14:45:57','2012-06-30 14:45:57','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(835,5,'2012-06-30 14:46:44','2012-06-30 14:46:44','','Plants','','inherit','open','open','','plants','','','2012-06-30 14:46:44','2012-06-30 14:46:44','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(836,5,'2012-06-30 14:39:00','2012-06-30 14:39:00','One of the most creative projects to come out of Campus Ecology was a series of posters designed by Britta Schroeter. Here they are:\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-826\" title=\"Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;','Sustainability isn\'t just for . . .','','inherit','open','open','','825-revision-2','','','2012-06-30 14:39:00','2012-06-30 14:39:00','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/825-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(837,5,'2012-06-30 14:47:39','2012-06-30 14:47:39','One of the most creative projects to come out of Campus Ecology was a series of posters designed by Britta Schroeter. Here they are:\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-826\" title=\"Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-830\" title=\"Food\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food-630x406.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"406\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-831\" title=\"Treehuggers\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-832\" title=\"Conservation\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-834\" title=\"leaves\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-833\" title=\"Church\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-835\" title=\"Plants\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>','Sustainability is not just for . . .','','inherit','open','open','','825-revision-3','','','2012-06-30 14:47:39','2012-06-30 14:47:39','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/825-revision-3/',0,'revision','',0),(838,5,'2012-06-30 17:07:35','2012-06-30 17:07:35','\"[The professor] had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense.  He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust--many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well--but his misfortune was that he loved youth--he was weak to it, it kindled him.  If there was one eager eye, one doubting, self-critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant.  That ardour could command him.\"\r\n\r\nWilla Cather, <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Professor\'s House</span></em>','Creative Student Thinking (and Expression)','','publish','closed','open','','creative-student-thinking-and-expression','','','2018-07-09 14:32:20','2018-07-09 19:32:20','',717,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=838',0,'page','',0),(839,5,'2012-06-30 17:05:33','2012-06-30 17:05:33','','Student Creativity','','inherit','open','open','','838-revision','','','2012-06-30 17:05:33','2012-06-30 17:05:33','',838,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/838-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(840,5,'2012-06-30 17:08:38','2012-06-30 17:08:38','\"[The professor] had managed for years to live two lives, both of them very intense.  He would willingly have cut down on his university work, would willingly have given his students chaff and sawdust--many instructors had nothing else to give them and got on very well--but his misfortune was that he loved youth--he was weak to it, it kindled him.  If there was one eager eye, one doubting, self-critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant.  That ardour could command him.\"\n\nWilla Cather\n\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Professor\'s House</span>','Creative Student Thinking (and Expression)','','inherit','open','open','','838-autosave','','','2012-06-30 17:08:38','2012-06-30 17:08:38','',838,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/838-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(841,5,'2012-06-30 17:07:35','2012-06-30 17:07:35','','Creative Student Thinking (and Expression)','','inherit','open','open','','838-revision-2','','','2012-06-30 17:07:35','2012-06-30 17:07:35','',838,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/838-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(842,5,'2012-06-30 14:48:49','2012-06-30 14:48:49','One of the most creative projects to come out of Campus Ecology was a series of posters designed by Britta Schroeter. Here they are:\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-826\" title=\"Sustainability is not just for Environmenal Studies majors . . .\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/ArtMajor-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-830\" title=\"Food\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Food-630x406.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"406\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-831\" title=\"Treehuggers\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Treehuggers-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-832\" title=\"Conservation\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Conservation-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-834\" title=\"leaves\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/leaves-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-833\" title=\"Church\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Church-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants.jpg\"><img class=\"alignleft size-large wp-image-835\" title=\"Plants\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/Plants-630x407.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"630\" height=\"407\" /></a>','Sustainability is not just . . .','','inherit','open','open','','825-revision-4','','','2012-06-30 14:48:49','2012-06-30 14:48:49','',825,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/06/825-revision-4/',0,'revision','',0),(844,5,'2012-07-18 02:53:07','2012-07-18 02:53:07','<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Intro</span>: <em>During this hot summer season, Americans are looking for ways to keep cool.  Today, on the 110th anniversary of air conditioning, Dr. America, who is nothing but cool, cranks up the heat on air conditioning.</em>\n<p align=\"center\">* * * * * * * * * * * * *</p>\nWe live on the only planet in the solar system with an atmosphere that supports life.  The air we breathe is a beautifully conditioned combination of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases.  But it isn\'t conditioned enough for most Americans, who like to put on airs that have been treated some more.  As the old saying goes, \"If you can\'t stand the heat, air condition the kitchen.\"\n\nInvented by Willis Carrier in 1902, the air conditioner is essentially a refrigerator for human beings.  Like a refrigerator, it takes heat and humidity from the conditioned air, and deposits them elsewhere.  Air conditioning conditions the air, but it also conditions cultural expectations.  It reveals our preference for the great indoors, and our predilection for what we proudly call \"climate control.\"  It suggests that, unlike other animals, Americans expect the environment to adapt to them instead of adapting to the environment.\n\nSuch comfort does not come cheaply.  In Minnesota, it costs roughly 25 cents a day to run a fan, $2.50 to run a room air conditioner, and $6.00 for central air conditioning.\n\nAir conditioning is a simple technology that replaces the complex cultural conditioning that taught primitive people--like our parents and grandparents--how to deal with heat.  Before air conditioning, people generally did not build cities in deserts.  In past times, in temperate climates, they planted trees or shrubs to shade their homes.  They used awnings to shield windows on the east and west side of buildings.  And, instead of cooling all of the spaces of the building, they used fans to cool the particular spaces that they occupied.  When indoor spaces became too hot, they sat on porches where the evening breeze brought some relief.  For work, they designed buildings with windows that opened.  In some cultures less obsessed with work, a siesta also served to keep people from the busy-ness of business during the hottest hours of the day.  Sometimes, too, people were simply uncomfortable.\n\nSixty percent of American homes--and 75 percent of new homes--are equipped with air conditioners, which annually consume the electrical equivalent of seven large coal power plants.  Fifteen percent of American electrical output goes to space cooling; on a hot day, a third of Northeastern energy consumption and half in the South Central States goes into air conditioning.  The fuel we burn to cool our homes and offices releases a hundred million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Since 1958, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by eleven percent.  This means that air conditioning the indoors comes as the cost of the global warming of the outdoors.\n\nEvery time Dr. America and his fellow Americans use energy extracted from the combustion of coal or oil or wood, we flip the global thermostat to \"warmer.\"  Indeed, the whole industrial era has been an experiment in air conditioning.  The widespread use of fossil fuels pours greenhouse gases into the air, where they trap infrared heat energy attempting to escape into space.  Air conditioning, therefore, is only the chilly tip of the iceberg that may be melting as a result of Americans\' attempts to condition the climate.\n\nGenerally, Americans stay cool in the face of this warming by airing their brains, removing the facts that cause them discomfort.  Conditioning the air, they have also conditioned themselves to consider their comfort a constant in a natural cycle of the seasons.\n\n\"On the air\" from the American Studies Museum, this is Dr. America, keeping cool.','Air Conditioning','','inherit','open','open','','843-revision','','','2012-07-18 02:53:07','2012-07-18 02:53:07','',843,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/07/843-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(863,6,'2015-04-21 03:01:19','2015-04-21 03:01:19','-75','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:01:19','2015-04-21 03:01:19','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(847,5,'2012-07-27 16:20:07','2012-07-27 16:20:07','In my Campus Ecology class, when we’re reading the chapter on “The Nature of Screens,” I ask students to watch their favorite programs for its environmental implications. Here’s an example—try it for your own shows. What will it take to change media portrayals of environmentalism?\r\n\r\n<em>Yesterday in class we discussed TV and how TV makes us think about environmental values. How perfect then that today I was watching my Scrubs DVD collection and saw the environmental episode they did. In the show, the janitor takes on making the hospital sustainable, comically threatening those who didn’t recycle, carpool to work, etc. Like all Scrubs episodes, it was hilarious, but I decided to focus on what environmentally the episode was telling me. The episode just ended up upholding the common <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">comical view</span> of environmentalists. First, the person who pushed the janitor to become an environmentalist was the hospital’s lawyer and resident sad-sack, Ted. It’s also a common theme on the show that the janitor’s pretty crazy. So that’s what a viewer takes away from the show—environmentalists are made up of pathetic and weird people. Throughout the episode the janitor is also mocked for what he was doing, including being the stereotypical “hippie.” And by the end of the episode, he gives up, thinking he can’t and hasn’t made a change—another negative environmental message. The one positive was the episode did end by showing people carpooling and wrapping it up by saying maybe we can affect small changes even when we feel we aren’t making a difference.  So that was a nice little end, but overall I got a negative portrayal at environmentalists from the media, a view I think TV takes too often. </em>','The Nature of \"Scrubs\"','','publish','closed','closed','','the-nature-of-scrubs','','','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=847',0,'post','',0),(848,5,'2012-07-27 16:20:05','2012-07-27 16:20:05','In my Campus Ecology class, when we’re reading the chapter on “The Nature of Screens,” I ask students to watch their favorite programs for its environmental implications. Here’s an example—try it for your own shows. What will it take to change media portrayals of environmentalism?\n\n<em>Yesterday in class we discussed TV and how TV makes us think about environmental values. How perfect then that today I was watching my Scrubs DVD collection and saw the environmental episode they did. In the show, the janitor takes on making the hospital sustainable, comically threatening those who didn’t recycle, carpool to work, etc. Like all Scrubs episodes, it was hilarious, but I decided to focus on what environmentally the episode was telling me. The episode just ended up upholding the common <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">comical view</span> of environmentalists. First, the person who pushed the janitor to become an environmentalist was the hospital’s lawyer and resident sad-sack, Ted. It’s also a common theme on the show that the janitor’s pretty crazy. So that’s what a viewer takes away from the show—environmentalists are made up of pathetic and weird people. Throughout the episode the janitor is also mocked for what he was doing, including being the stereotypical “hippie.” And by the end of the episode, he gives up, thinking he can’t and hasn’t made a change—another negative environmental message. The one positive was the episode did end by showing people carpooling and wrapping it up by saying maybe we can affect small changes even when we feel we aren’t making a difference.  So that was a nice little end, but overall I got a negative portrayal at environmentalists from the media, a view I think TV takes too often. </em>','The Nature of \"Scrubs\"','','inherit','open','open','','847-revision','','','2012-07-27 16:20:05','2012-07-27 16:20:05','',847,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/07/847-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(849,5,'2012-07-27 16:21:12','2012-07-27 16:21:12','In my Campus Ecology class, when we’re reading the chapter on “The Nature of Screens,” I ask students to watch their favorite programs for its environmental implications. Here’s an example—try it for your own shows. What will it take to change media portrayals of environmentalism?\n\n<em>Yesterday in class we discussed TV and how TV makes us think about environmental values. How perfect then that today I was watching my Scrubs DVD collection and saw the environmental episode they did. In the show, the janitor takes on making the hospital sustainable, comically threatening those who didn’t recycle, carpool to work, etc. Like all Scrubs episodes, it was hilarious, but I decided to focus on what environmentally the episode was telling me. The episode just ended up upholding the common <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">comical view</span> of environmentalists. First, the person who pushed the janitor to become an environmentalist was the hospital’s lawyer and resident sad-sack, Ted. It’s also a common theme on the show that the janitor’s pretty crazy. So that’s what a viewer takes away from the show—environmentalists are made up of pathetic and weird people. Throughout the episode the janitor is also mocked for what he was doing, including being the stereotypical “hippie.” And by the end of the episode, he gives up, thinking he can’t and hasn’t made a change—another negative environmental message. The one positive was the episode did end by showing people carpooling and wrapping it up by saying maybe we can affect small changes even when we feel we aren’t making a difference.  So that was a nice little end, but overall I got a negative portrayal at environmentalists from the media, a view I think TV takes too often. </em>','The Nature of \"Scrubs\"','','inherit','open','open','','847-autosave','','','2012-07-27 16:21:12','2012-07-27 16:21:12','',847,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/07/847-autosave/',0,'revision','',0),(850,5,'2012-07-29 21:54:52','2012-07-29 21:54:52','Some college students major in math, but all college students should be interested in the new math explained in Bill McKibben’s <a href=\"http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719\">new essay </a>in <em>Rolling Stone</em>. McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on global warming in 1989, synthesizes the scientific literature to show that three numbers matter immensely in the future of the planet.\r\n\r\nThe first is 2—the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is the outer limit for average global warming. Beyond that, conditions on the planet will be so bad that inhabitants may find it basically uninhabitable. So far, we’ve warmed the planet just eight-tenths of a degree, and the catastrophes flow one after the other. We’ve also emitted enough carbon already to warm the planet another eight-tenths of a degree. There’s not much room for error.\r\n\r\nThe second number is 565 gigatons—the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted in the future without exceeding the limits of habitability. That’s a big number, but not for 7 billion people burning carbon in various forms. Currently, emissions are 31.6 gigatons annually. At the rate humanity is going, we’ll emit another 565 gigatons in 16 years. The math is inexorable—but the future is not. Individually and collectively, we have a choice.\r\n\r\nThe third number is 2,795 gigatons—the amount of carbon in the proven reserves of fossil-fuel corporations, and countries—like Venezuela or Kuwait—that produce like corporations. As you’ve no doubt noticed, that number is five times larger than 565. There’s five times as much carbon available than we need to destroy the planet. That’s what we might call a margin of unsafety.\r\n\r\nBecause it’s profitable—very profitable—fossil fuel companies plan to burn it all. AND they plan to discover more fossil fuels in places like the Arctic, which will be free of ice because of global warming. That’s the creative destruction of capitalism at its best—creating profits now but destroying the habitability of the planet in the process.\r\n\r\nSo what can a college student do? Get engaged. Vote for candidates who understand global warming, and understand the importance of change—economic, ecological, social, political. Vote for the candidates the oil and coal and gas industries <em>don\'t</em> support. Get engaged with the movement against coal. Start using Facebook for organizing ideas and protests. And ask demand that your professors address the new math in their classes—and not just in math.','The New Math','','publish','closed','closed','','the-new-math','','','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=850',0,'post','',0),(851,5,'2012-07-29 21:54:04','2012-07-29 21:54:04','Some college students major in math, but all college students should be interested in the new math explained in Bill McKibben’s new essay in <em>Rolling Stone</em>. McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on global warming in 1989, synthesizes the scientific literature to show that three numbers matter immensely in the future of the planet.\n\nThe first is 2—the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is the outer limit for average global warming. Beyond that, conditions on the planet will be so bad that inhabitants may find it basically uninhabitable. So far, we’ve warmed the planet just eight-tenths of a degree, and the catastrophes flow one after the other. We’ve also emitted enough carbon already to warm the planet another eight-tenths of a degree. There’s not much room for error.\n\nThe second number is 565 gigatons—the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted in the future without exceeding the limits of habitability. That’s a big number, but not for 7 billion people burning carbon in various forms. Currently, emissions are 31.6 gigatons annually. At the rate humanity is going, we’ll emit another 565 gigatons in 16 years. The math is inexorable—but the future is not. Individually and collectively, we have a choice.\n\nThe third number is 2,795 gigatons—the amount of carbon in the proven reserves of fossil-fuel corporations, and countries—like Venezuela or Kuwait—that produce like corporations. As you’ve no doubt noticed, that number is five times larger than 565. There’s five times as much carbon available than we need to destroy the planet. That’s what we might call a margin of unsafety.\n\nBecause it’s profitable—very profitable—fossil fuel companies plan to burn it all. AND they plan to discover more fossil fuels in places like the Arctic, which will be free of ice because of global warming. That’s the creative destruction of capitalism at its best—creating profits now but destroying the habitability of the planet in the process.\n\nSo what can a college student do? Get engaged. Vote for candidates who understand global warming, and understand the importance of change—economic, ecological, social, political. Get engaged with the movement against coal. Start using Facebook for organizing ideas and protests. And ask demand that your professors address the new math in their classes—and not just in math.','The New Math','','inherit','open','open','','850-revision','','','2012-07-29 21:54:04','2012-07-29 21:54:04','',850,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/07/850-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(852,5,'2012-07-29 21:54:52','2012-07-29 21:54:52','Some college students major in math, but all college students should be interested in the new math explained in Bill McKibben’s <a href=\"http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719\">new essay </a>in <em>Rolling Stone</em>. McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on global warming in 1989, synthesizes the scientific literature to show that three numbers matter immensely in the future of the planet.\r\n\r\nThe first is 2—the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is the outer limit for average global warming. Beyond that, conditions on the planet will be so bad that inhabitants may find it basically uninhabitable. So far, we’ve warmed the planet just eight-tenths of a degree, and the catastrophes flow one after the other. We’ve also emitted enough carbon already to warm the planet another eight-tenths of a degree. There’s not much room for error.\r\n\r\nThe second number is 565 gigatons—the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted in the future without exceeding the limits of habitability. That’s a big number, but not for 7 billion people burning carbon in various forms. Currently, emissions are 31.6 gigatons annually. At the rate humanity is going, we’ll emit another 565 gigatons in 16 years. The math is inexorable—but the future is not. Individually and collectively, we have a choice.\r\n\r\nThe third number is 2,795 gigatons—the amount of carbon in the proven reserves of fossil-fuel corporations, and countries—like Venezuela or Kuwait—that produce like corporations. As you’ve no doubt noticed, that number is five times larger than 565. There’s five times as much carbon available than we need to destroy the planet. That’s what we might call a margin of unsafety.\r\n\r\nBecause it’s profitable—very profitable—fossil fuel companies plan to burn it all. AND they plan to discover more fossil fuels in places like the Arctic, which will be free of ice because of global warming. That’s the creative destruction of capitalism at its best—creating profits now but destroying the habitability of the planet in the process.\r\n\r\nSo what can a college student do? Get engaged. Vote for candidates who understand global warming, and understand the importance of change—economic, ecological, social, political. Get engaged with the movement against coal. Start using Facebook for organizing ideas and protests. And ask demand that your professors address the new math in their classes—and not just in math.','The New Math','','inherit','open','open','','850-revision-2','','','2012-07-29 21:54:52','2012-07-29 21:54:52','',850,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/07/850-revision-2/',0,'revision','',0),(856,5,'2012-08-22 22:34:29','2012-08-22 22:34:29','Recently, I’m reading <em>Life at Home in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century, </em>a thorough ethno-archaeological dig through 27 American homes in the Los Angeles area. More later, but one sentence caught my eye: “While American children constitute a tiny fraction of the world’s population of children, U.S buyers are responsible for annually purchasing a mind-boggling 40 percent of the world’s toys.” It seems that we Americans love our children, and that we love them by teaching the lessons of materialism.\r\n\r\nAnd what might kids learn from all the toys they have? I’m not sure, but here are a few suggestions from a kid’s perspective:\r\n\r\n1) Fun is the primary purpose of life. Parents do buy educational toys, but not many, and nobody seriously thinks children will <em>play </em>with them very much.\r\n\r\n2) Our own imaginations are inadequate to the task of having fun. If we’re going to play, we need toys, and we need instructions. Age-appropriate toys—as marked on the box—guide us through the process of maturation.\r\n\r\n3) Plastic is the primary material of the cosmos. Later, of course, we discover that plastic toys are a life-cycle thing, but the primacy of plastic is learned early, along with the forgetfulness of its environmental impacts.\r\n\r\n4) It’s important to have desires. The ads on TV tell us that, but so do the “wish lists” compiled for birthdays and Christmas and other holidays. At any given moment, a normal American wants something s/he doesn’t yet have.\r\n\r\n5) It’s not enough to watch a movie or TV—you need to have the associated hardware that comes with happy meals or trips to Toys R Us.\r\n\r\n6) There’s no such thing as enough. You may have 22 Barbies, but there’s always one more—or at least a new outfit. In this way, children are acculturated to the excesses of American life.\r\n\r\n7) If Jimmy Jones has a toy, then I should have it to. I don’t know the concept yet, but I do know how to keep up with the Joneses.\r\n\r\n8) Emotions can be expressed with stuff. Parental love manifests itself not just in care and feeding, but in dolls and action figures, Beanie babies and other plush toys, Matchbox cars and other automotive vehicles, board games and video games, as well as the pre-school plastic that shakes, babbles, rattles and rolls.\r\n\r\n9) Toys are the payoff both for trauma and for good behavior. When Mom and Dad are out of town, when your feelings have been hurt, when you’ve done well in school, or when you need to be pacified, a toy is an appropriate response. This accustoms kids to a culture full of extrinsic rewards, and a closet full of forgotten trinkets and toys.\r\n\r\n10) Toys are a way for parents to have time to themselves. When children have enough toys—or too many—parents expect us to occupy ourselves instead of occupying increasingly scarce adult time. Toys and games—especially video games—are often a way of telling children to keep our distance.\r\n\r\nAll toys, therefore, are educational toys, and they teach us how to live in a consumer society, but not how to create a satisfying and sustainable society that might last more than a lifetime.','Toying with Materialism','','publish','closed','closed','','toying-with-materialism-2','','','2018-07-09 14:31:58','2018-07-09 19:31:58','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?p=856',0,'post','',0),(857,5,'2012-08-22 22:34:14','2012-08-22 22:34:14','','Toying with Materialism','','inherit','open','open','','856-revision','','','2012-08-22 22:34:14','2012-08-22 22:34:14','',856,'http://natureofcollege.org/2012/08/856-revision/',0,'revision','',0),(861,6,'2015-01-15 02:45:31','2015-01-15 02:45:31','','Contact form','','publish','open','open','','contact-form','','','2015-01-15 02:45:31','2015-01-15 02:45:31','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?post_type=wpcf7_contact_form&p=861',0,'wpcf7_contact_form','',0),(862,6,'2015-04-21 03:01:37','2015-04-21 03:01:37','<img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-868\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell-630x419.jpg\" alt=\"Jim Farrell\" width=\"630\" height=\"419\" />\r\n<h2><strong>Jim Farrell</strong> As Teacher</h2>\r\nReflections from St. Olaf Faculty\r\n<blockquote><em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em>\r\n\r\n<em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em></blockquote>\r\n<h2></h2>\r\n<h3>Charles Taliaferro</h3>\r\n<em>Philosophy, Environmental Studies, Paracollege</em>\r\n\r\nThree memories of Jim as professor. First, no one I know has ever come close to Jim’s patience and ability to ask a question and to wait in silence until a student responds. I was not surprised when one student told me Jim went 20 minutes waiting for a response. Second, on too many occasions to recall, Jim would work with, assist, and engage at length with students regardless of whether the students were enrolled in his courses. For many years, this stood out to me as the high water mark we should all aspire to. Third, I recall Jim running on campus. And every time I saw him run, I thought he is running from one great meeting with students and the time got away from him, and he is now running toward another meeting and he does not want to be late.\r\n<h3>W. Bruce Benson</h3>\r\n<em>College Pastor, emeritus</em>\r\n\r\nI admired Jim Farrell. It is difficult, maybe even unwise, to distill the many reasons down to one meta-reason, but I’m going to try. Faithfulness. I admired the unswerving, unwavering, undiluted faithfulness of his humanity. Jim didn’t teach well because he wanted to be noted for it, he taught well – amazingly well – because he was faithful. Faithful to his students, his subject, and the larger world. He wasn’t creative and imaginative because he thought being so was cool, but because his imagination was fired by faithfulness. He wanted to be faithful to life, truth, knowledge, community. Faithfulness pushed him to imagine better, more honest ways of living and understanding. He wasn’t on the cutting edge of social and ethical issues because he was a thrill seeker or an attention grabber, but because that’s where faithfulness to justice and the spirit of God compelled him to be. Even his gentleness – it did not come from timidity or a need to be liked, it came from his faithfulness to the dignity of others, his recognition that we all bear the image of God. Thanks be to God for Jim Farrell.\r\n<h3>Paul Jackson</h3>\r\n<em>Chemistry and <em>Environmental Studies</em></em>\r\n\r\nI’d like to make an offering, some brief thoughts about Jim, a teacher, mentor, colleague, friend, writer, author and lover of all nature, especially human-nature. This is not the human nature we typically think about when those words are uttered, but the connectivity between human cultures and the rest of Creation. Jim frequently reminded us that we are nature, we are gifts – to nature and to each other, and we are engaged in the continuing, evolving human-nature enterprise as stewards of God’s Creation.\r\n\r\nI recall the first time the Sustainability Task Force read, in full draft form, the principles we had been talking about, principles that came to life in words Jim penned to paper. Here is an excerpt about energy. “Environmentally speaking, a college campus is a place for converting natural energy to human thoughtfulness. It’s a place where people employ natural resources to refine and transmit the intellectual and artistic resources we call culture. Like all other colleges and universities, St. Olaf College is an organic machine, where nature’s energy is shaped by nature’s human energy, and vice versa. We think of a campus as a place, a location, a space – and it is. But more importantly, it’s a relationship, where human designs intersect with nature’s designs in food and water, heat and electricity, cars and computers, lawns and gardens and natural lands. A campus is one way of making love to nature – or of making war on it. It’s a way of caring for the Creation. A campus is, like it or not, an ecological design.” All of us were astounded by the conversational character of the writing, the relationship centered core of the story, and the imagery it conjured. It provided the group and campus with fuel to keep doing good work, no matter the obstacles.\r\n\r\nThis pursuit of good work is framed by what I call ‘embracing the cycles’ or the ‘gift of the persistently possible,’ a gift Jim consistently doled out. Rather than lament about a particular situation or become mired in despair and anger, the Daniel Quinn novel Ishmael and the words story and opportunity soon would pop up in discussions with Jim. The narrator says, “They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.” A given story might come to a close, yet another takes its place. The challenge is to rise up and recognize the new opportunity, the opportunity to use your gifts and talents to work with others who feel as passionately as you do to unfold the next story. This is jumping from the downcycle into the upcycle which can, at times, feel like you are actually in the spin cycle! Jim consistently encouraged all to step into their next story and to do so with gusto, whether it was students attempting to start an on-campus organic farm, a department trying to develop a revised curriculum, or a friend struggling to make sense of a life-changing event.\r\n\r\nJust how does one step into the next story? In the liberal arts sense, we do it with thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness embodied and expressed by people in the careful way they think and in how they care about other people and places. This kind of thinking and doing is hard work and certainly has its upcycles and downcycles. In parallel we do this as a spiritual journey or leap of faith. Our stories are deeply interconnected – making a tangled web of beauty reflective of God at work in the world. As the earth spins on its axis, meandering through space and time, may we have the courage to embrace our upcycles and downcycles to spin through life and see the gifts of the possible, in each other, in St. Olaf and in Creation. Thanks Jim, for encouraging all to see and practice a different kind of human-nature.\r\n<h3>Doug Casson</h3>\r\n<em>Political Science</em>\r\n\r\nAs a phenomenal teacher and thoughtful writer, Professor Farrell had the reputation for changing people’s lives. When I first met this giant of a man, I expected to be impressed. I waited for him to offer a brilliant critique of consumer culture or deliver one of his famous witticisms. Instead he leaned over and asked me what I thought.\r\n<h3>Colin Wells</h3>\r\n<em>English and American Conversations</em>\r\n\r\nOne of my favorite stories that Jim Farrell liked to tell was that when giving a final exam, he would sometimes simply ask students, “What did you learn in this class?” In modern pedagogy, we spend a lot of time thinking about “assessing student learning,” but Jim believed that the best way to assess their learning was to ask them directly. I think this story tells us a lot about Jim as a teacher. First, it exemplifies the aspect of Jim’s educational philosophy that wanted to keep the simplest and most fundamental things in plain sight. Teachers usually know what they’re sending out to their students, but not as much about what students are taking in. And rather than ask roundabout questions to determine what students learned, Jim said, why not just ask them to articulate it? This gets to the second aspect of his teaching philosophy that is so important to remember: students need to “own” their educational development – they should be conscious about what is happening to them as they’re learning. Students should be expected to articulate what they believe to be the most important ideas or issues they encounter, and they should be reminded that that is their job as college students: to figure out what they’re learning – or more precisely, to figure out what they most care about when they’re learning. I admit that I’ve never put Jim’s question on any of my own final exams, but thanks to my experience teaching with and being mentored by Jim when I was starting out, I’ve never forgotten that my job is to help students to answer this most basic question of all: “what are you learning”?\r\n<h3>Steve Polansky</h3>\r\n<em>English and Paracollege</em>\r\n\r\nWhen we were both new to St. Olaf – I was in my first year, Jim in his second – Jim and I taught together on a number of occasions, on an equal number of subjects. Subjects, typically, only one of us knew anything about. With regard to our “pedagogies” (I didn’t have a pedagogy then, or ever; Jim was developing his), we couldn’t have been more mismatched. Jim’s way of teaching was, to my mind, bizarre. For one, when he was not silent, which was most of the time, he was studiously inaudible – speaking quietly with one hand entirely covering his mouth. He practiced this perverse method, however, in such a way as too grab and hold a class’s attention, to a degree I, with all my capering loonishness, could never attain. He had this, to me, absolutely appalling way of asking a question (his questions could never be answered quickly or simply) and then waiting, as long as it took to come out, for the answer. He never rushed in to end the silence, never answered his own questions, never paraphrased his questions or, once he’d posed them, dumbed them down. All mainstay maneuvers in my ill-considered repertoire. Jim was a teacher for the long haul. You needed to be his student, or his teaching partner, for a semester, or a number of semesters, to appreciate just how good he was. And it wouldn’t be Jim you’d be watching, but his students. I happily number myself among them.\r\n\r\nJim would gladly teach and gladly learn. He was curious about everything. He was an obsessive note-taker, never without a stack of 3x5 cards in his breast pocket. He was a great researcher, greater at getting other people to do his research for him. He was a very funny man – more of a punster than a joke-teller – preferring, again to me incomprehensible, to laugh at other people’s jokes than to perpetrate his own. He was a curious blend of real ambition and real humility. He would have made a formidable politician, at any level. The only thing that made some meetings bearable for me, when I could bring myself to attend them, was waiting for Jim, who generally held fire for most of the proceedings, to offer his summary remark, which somehow managed to incorporate all the disparate ideas on the table and transform them into a coherent, elegant, eminently practicable whole.\r\n\r\nWhatever Jim’s pedagogy, whatever his academic skills, for me he was, more importantly, in the classroom and out, exemplary. He modeled decency and kindness, compassion and integrity. He was measured and thoughtful. He was a bit goofy looking on the basketball court, though he could really play, but he was graceful, in behavior and bearing, everywhere else. He seemed always at peace. Assuredly he had anger and anxiety in him, but I never saw him angry or anxious. He was a loving, steadfast husband and father, a devout and unassuming Christian. And he was a dear friend. My life is much the better for having known him.\r\n<h3>Beckie Judge</h3>\r\n<em>Economics and Environmental Studies</em>\r\n\r\nAs an economist, I focus on the world as it is.\r\nJim taught me to look at the world as it could be.\r\nFor this, I will always be grateful.\r\n<h3>L. DeAne Lagerquist</h3>\r\n<em>Religion, Paracollege, American Conversations</em>\r\n\r\nRemembering Jim is both a pleasure and in some ways difficult, not only emotionally. Since my arrival at St. Olaf in 1988 Jim has been a constant, always nearby, steady, and with a ready, wise insight. His presence was so pervasive and I relied upon it so much, but it is more difficult than I would have expected to isolate moments.\r\n\r\nFirst I met Jim in the context of the Paracollege and, most memorably for me, at Paradinners. Each week he would stand up to feed us a factoid. These were odd little bits of information, wrenched from their natural context, and used as a lens on much more. They were akin to the dense facts to which Jim introduced so many of us, faculty and students alike. They also displayed his agility of mind that saw the unexpected connection and was ready to play with words until they revealed more than most of us suspected was there.\r\n\r\nWhen I became Senior Tutor my responsibility was to keep things going. I had able help from Katherine Baker and Susan Carlson. From Jim I had inspiration. Our offices were next-door to each other. Just a few steps brought me into his whimsy. Just a few steps away was a reminder of why we were doing what we were doing. A hedge against the temptation to be too prescriptive or to take the system too seriously. Certainly that is one of the messages conveyed by the Dr. Seuss hat. Yes, what we are doing is important, but maybe so important that we should be able to laugh about.\r\n\r\nThen there was the context of the Paracollege being ‘defunded.’ Those were not easy days and weeks and two years. Jim helped us all stay focused on the learning, and not just what we were learning from the closing. Sure he was angry and convinced that the decision was wrong, but he was not distracted from the central task: the delight of learning. The speaker’s series we organized, “Some Things I Learned in the Paracollege,” was probably his idea. Certainly the ideas it articulated included many we could attribute to him.\r\n\r\nAnd, even as we prepared for that ending, Jim was among those who took initiative to develop American Conversations. The dense fact approach and the bold interdisciplinary character of the program reflect his way of teaching, learning, being in the world. I taught with him in AmCon twice: once the third, early 20th century course and once the introductory one. How such a tall man, who knew so much, could take up so little room and draw out such insight from students amazed me. I wish I could say that I figured out the magic. I did not, but I hope that I caught a little of it.\r\n\r\nHere are two ingredients: Jim loved to learn and was always engaged in it. Even when delivering something like a lecture, he managed to convey the dynamic of learning and to include his listeners in it. Jim trusted his students, and his colleagues. He expected that we would enter into the project with him, bringing as much passion and conviction and desire as he did.\r\n\r\nFinally, because it is last on the list and because it is the way I last communicated with Jim, he brought both those characteristics to collegial enterprises: faculty meetings, writing <em>St. Olaf 2000</em>, collaborating on <em>Claiming Our Callings</em>. He was the primary author of <em>St. Olaf 2000</em>. Perhaps writing about the college’s mission should have been intimidating for an Irish Catholic. It did not seem so for Jim. Because he embraced the mission and was eager to do it justice, because he was humble and willing to learn, what he wrote was fresh, inviting, and accurate. Along the way he encouraged us to point out what was “clever but stupid.” My last exchanges with Jim were about the Afterword we wrote for <em>Claiming Our Callings</em>. I was nervous about it, worried about how we’d mange the voice since his is distinctive and mine is mine. He was confident that we could. Readers will judge for themselves. What I hope is that the readers of that piece and the students I teach in years to come will hear from me something of Jim’s delight in learning, passion for the world, and trust that they share both for the good of all.\r\n<h3>Gary Gisselman</h3>\r\n<em>Theater and American Conversations</em>\r\n\r\nHe was generous with his help; wise and humble; incisive and self-effacing. It was never about him, always about you. Without preaching he helped us to think about the lives we were living. Jim possessed great humor and it was a joy to make him laugh. He never used his humor to humiliate. He loved teaching and he made his students his friends and taught me to do so as well. The unique relationship he had with me he had with everyone else who sought contact with him. It was not about you, it was about him.\r\n<h3>Barbara Reed</h3>\r\n<em>Religion and Asian Studies</em>\r\n\r\nMy first memory of meeting Jim Farrell was also the most important to me. When I first arrived at St. Olaf in 1982, the college community was still centered around the male faculty and their wives. When I was invited to tea by the Faculty Wives Club, I found it gracious but confusing for a new female faculty person. The old Division of History, Philosophy and Religion had evening gatherings for which the faculty wives baked coordinating desserts and poured coffee and tea. When it came to be my turn (or my spouse’s turn?), I was dreading the event as one more experience of being the ultimate outsider. But Jim also volunteered for that Division gathering and overturned the gender roles. He had some recipe for an unbaked pie which we put together right before the meeting. And he poured the tea. And he smiled. This may seem like a small thing, but the wisdom and compassion with which he related to me was so powerful during a time when I often felt isolated as an outsider. I saw that same wisdom and compassion again and again as Jim worked with colleagues and students. I suspect that Jim was a closet Bodhisattva.\r\n<h3>Irve Dell</h3>\r\n<em>Fine Art and Paracollege</em>\r\n\r\nIrreverence is a critical component of learning and living. It is not just a vehicle used to express displeasure. It is an invaluable tool that promotes the careful examination of that which we do revere insuring that the revered is not corrupted. Jim knew this and used the irreverence tool masterfully.\r\n<h3>Judy Kutulas</h3>\r\n<em>History and American Studies</em>\r\n\r\nJim was a prolific scholar, but, not a particularly orthodox one, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knew him. The book of his that I think best reveals his unique scholarly vision is The Spirit of the Sixties, which traces the intellectual evolution of figures who helped shape 1960s activism. Jim was, after all, of a generation that came of age in the midst of Sixties social turmoil. Yet those whose stories he chronicled each came at their activism from moral, spiritual, or religious perspectives that grounded their social agendas. They did not make revolution for the hell of it, as 1960s activist Abbie Hoffman once described it, but experienced what Jim called “revolutions of the heart” that moved them to serve their communities.\r\n\r\nJim’s own revolution of the heart led to his distinctively moral historical voice, scholarship whose point was not just to inform us about the past, but spark revolutions in our hearts as well. Part of Jim’s approach to scholarship was the conviction that no one should work alone; that it was only in community with others that ideas became fully formed. Many of us here tonight have benefited from the care with which he read our papers or our chapters and the insights he offered us about our own work. Jim was very ecumenical in this task, devoting equal energy to a student’s work and a colleague’s because, to him, they were equally valuable.\r\n\r\nAnother part of Jim’s “revolution of the heart” was the realization that traditional teaching didn’t really reach students at the level he desired. Intellectual growth, he believed, like scholarship, emerged holistically from one’s values and in community with others. When Jim began teaching at Olaf, the lecture was the norm, so he joined the Paracollege, where small-group tutorials replaced the structured classroom as the dominant mode of faculty-student interaction. After the Paracollege ended, his small-group independent studies continued, communities that begat other communities semester after semester. Instead of textbooks, Jim used dense facts, objects of complex significance that revealed history in quirky ways, like Model T Fords or Nike sneakers. He didn’t like to be tied down to the physical classroom either. Instead, he sent his students out to look at buildings, to play whiffle golf or walk around while they discussed, even to curate an American Studies museum full of everyday objects.\r\n\r\nJim taught his students to, in Adrienne Rich’s wonderful phrase, claim their educations, and they did so by co-teaching with him, running their own seminars when he was too ill to come to class, contributing to Moodle forums and, after the semester ended, continuing the conversation on e-mail. Jim believed that students already had the analytic skills necessary to make sense of their worlds; they just needed to practice, as he put it, “more care and acuity” doing what came naturally. Students rightly lapped it up, calling the result Jim Farrell Studies as they followed him from class to class. Like ripples on a pond, those students brought elements of Jim Farrell studies to the rest of us, whether it was signs telling us about the waste of plastic spoons in the Cage or the expectations his students carried into the rest of their classes.\r\n\r\nI’m really going to miss those signs in the Cage, by the way, because, if I may dense-fact them for a second, that Jim-voice was there both in their gentle, under-stated moral nudges and their whimsy. Jim once told me that editors just didn’t get his fondness for puns and other forms of wordplay; but any memory of Jim must recognize the centrality of humor to his endeavors. He never took himself too seriously; hence we remember him in part with silly hats.\r\n\r\nThese days it often feels like the outside world judges us and we too-often judge ourselves by how busy we are or how many hoops we can jump through before we are considered complete. Jim’s work as a scholar and a teacher suggests that we can – and should – do so much more for each other, nurturing each other’s spirits, bringing forth each other’s intellectual gifts, living in community, and yet never forgetting to find pleasure along the way.\r\n<h3>Carol Holly</h3>\r\n<em>English and Paracollege</em>\r\n\r\nFor the last two months we have been celebrating everything that Jim was to us at St. Olaf College – a great colleague, mentor, teacher, and friend. A colleague who from his early teaching in the Paracollege to his recent work on the Environmental Conversations left his mark everywhere on campus. But he also left his mark forever in our hearts. He was Jim Farrell, our irreplaceable teacher, mentor, colleague and friend. He was also Jim – just Jim – someone we loved.\r\n<h3>David Booth</h3>\r\n<em>Religion and Paracollege</em>\r\n\r\nThinking about Jim I always think of the “excellence” of our college – a complicated, delicate thing. We celebrate programs, organizations, and individuals that are excellent by any measure. We embrace familiar criteria and excel by those.\r\n\r\nAnd there is another source of our excellence. Something that sets us apart from many colleges. We have always embraced a certain venturesomeness – a risk taking that plays joyful games with traditions and standards – that explores the good in unexpected and dangerous places – that questions conventions with loving irony.\r\n\r\nJim was a master/mentor and role model for us all in this respect. Sure, he exemplified ordinary excellence, with his patient fact-checking, his reasonableness, his clear and sympathetic discourse. But never forget his impish love of transgressions and subversions. His deft puns that exposed hidden assumptions and asked us to question them. His patient exploration of “dense facts” to reveal deep truth about everyday life.\r\n\r\nFor two decades he was a guiding spirit of our St. Olaf Paracollege, which kept a cautious community flirting with danger. And since the Paracollege closed, Jim continuously invented new arrangements of subject matters, new configurations of teachers and students, new integrations of library-learning and lived-learning, new mergers of the personal and the political. He taught us not to invest too much in familiar conventions, but to have fun with them and press on them until they give up the bubbling life of the world beneath.\r\n\r\nWe should never forget what Jim embodied: that our St. Olaf excellence is a delicate balance of the customary and the subversive. Like a solemn procession of the faculty in academic garb, with one crazy-quilted top-hat bobbing along in the middle. If you see that sort of hat again, you will know it is a tribute to Jim and to the excellence we cherish.\r\n\r\nJim was called to be a teacher. As much as he laughed and lampooned, he knew the life of a professor to be utterly serious: a place where the future of students and the future of communities and the future of the planet come together. A matter so serious we better be able to risk laughs as we learn.\r\n\r\nHe taught students, not subjects. In a classroom – or on a lawn or in his office – he figured out the life and questions and prospects of each individual he met. He never delivered subject matter in the abstract. He subordinated his learning to the growth of each particular student. He helped them chart a way towards the projects that compelled them.\r\n\r\nAnd he taught students in the midst of the real demands raised by their concrete lives and concrete challenges – personal and intellectual. He helped them to find themselves; to know themselves in specific places; to know their own cultures in the midst of this living, finite, straining world.\r\n\r\nHe urged his community to see the implicit meanings of our habits and decisions. He invited us to acknowledge “the moral ecology of everyday life.” He invited us to teach and learn as if the future of the planet depended on it.\r\n\r\nHis absence may be palpable; his presence is no less palpable. And we can to live up to the example of his presence. A presence where he’s quipping, with a voice that urges lovingly and hopes confidently, something like this:\r\n\r\n“If God had wanted us to live sustainably, She would have given us brains.”\r\n<h3>Kathy Shea</h3>\r\n<em>Biology, Environmental Studies, Curator of Natural Lands</em>\r\n\r\nI didn’t have the opportunity to really work with Jim until recently. When I became Curator of Natural Lands in 2009 he invited me to lead a tour of the Natural Lands for his Campus Ecology class each spring. We would meet either by the Big Pond or, this past spring, by the pond in the Regents Building parking lot. At our starting point I talked about the history of the Natural Lands and then we walked through Norway Valley and/or around Big Pond (also known as Bakko Pond – a suggestion by Jim to honor the first Curator of Natural Lands, Gene Bakko). Jim promoted the kind of teaching you can do on a walk outside. You talk for a little while, and then give students a chance to ask questions and actually see the things you are talking about. We looked at the spring ephemeral flowers in the forest understory, the bluebird houses, the effects or prairie burning, and talked about the value of natural habitat restoration. Jim would often add a little something in his low-key manner to fill out the story or the explanation. Jim viewed the Natural Lands as an opportunity for students to learn about nature and as each student in his class picked a spot outside to observe over the course of the semester they developed a sense of place and a connection with the land.\r\n\r\nI saw Jim as a scholar by working with him on the book of essays on vocation, entitled ”Claiming Our Callings”, edited by DeAne Lagerquist and Kaethe Schwehn, in press with Oxford University Press. About 12 faculty contributed chapters and we would meet in smaller groups to make suggestions about each other’s work. Jim’s philosophy that we can all be better by working together became evident as we made suggestions to improve each other’s chapters. To me he said something like, I know that you know the writings of Wendell Berry, but we want to make sure that our readers make that connection by referring to him directly.\r\n\r\nAlso within the last year I remember attending a dinner for faculty thinking about retirement options. Jim was there and he said he wasn’t ready to retire because the students he was working with just kept getting better and better and he clearly loved working with them. I will teach a new course on sustainable agriculture this spring and had corresponded by email with Jim about it this past summer. He worked with a student to co-teach campus ecology and I plan to do something similar with the agriculture course next spring. Jim and I were planning to get together to talk about it when he felt better. I will be especially thinking of Jim this spring as I develop the agriculture course. I already have a student who has agreed to work with me and we will carry on his tradition as best we can. He left us when he was at the top of his teaching profession, empowering students to lead and guiding them along the way.\r\n<h3>Tom Williamson</h3>\r\n<em>Sociology and Anthropology</em>\r\n\r\nWhen I arrived at St. Olaf as a student 31 years ago, my older sister urged me to take a course with Dr. Farrell, as he was known then. I trusted her judgment and registered for a freshman history seminar called “The Gray Nineties,” which focused on the experience of the United States in the 1890s. Everything about the course was odd, odd, odd. None of us could initially figure out why we were concentrating our intellectual energy on an obscure decade in American history. The professor had a long syllabus full of bad puns, and he made sarcastic comments about academia (one that stuck with me was his claim that PhD programs are endurance contests more than measures of intellect). There was no sign of a textbook or anything to orient us historically. We read obscure novels (<em>The Damnation of Theron Ware</em>, of course) and curious historical ephemera, including a purple mimeograph of an archaic bicycling manual. Dr. Farrell had us sit around a table with him and discuss these strange things, while he enjoyed teasing the students from Chicago and telling us stories about his wife (such nuggets as “if you want to pursue something foolish like history, be certain to marry a lawyer first”). Our assignments included writing an introduction to a book that never existed, and another had us plot the geographic progression of world’s fairs in the U.S. We studied period advertisements and poetry and learned the history of sheet music. I was entranced. Like my sister, I took as many courses with Dr. Farrell as I could.\r\n\r\nI came to learn that the secret sauce in Dr. Farrell’s teaching was not the curious subject matter but rather the trust he had in students. He showed us that academic knowledge was something open to explore, rather than something fixed for us to swallow. When I returned from a semester studying in Thailand, for example, I was full of questions and confusion. I did a Paracollege tutorial with Dr. Farrell on the Vietnam War. He told me to write my own syllabus for the course and come up with my own assignments for our meetings. The most important lesson Dr. Farrell revealed to me in that tutorial was that I was in charge of my education. All human beings have inquiring minds, he would say, and to exercise that capacity we just need diligence and confidence. When I got to graduate school a few years later, two of my professors had students design the syllabus for their course. Some of my fellow students were a bit flustered, but my experience with Dr. Farrell made the assignment feel natural. He had taught me how to teach myself, and therefore I had gotten a great liberal arts gift: I had learned how to learn.\r\n\r\nAfter many years of twists and turns, I returned to St. Olaf. Dr. Farrell and I had fallen out of touch, but for me not out of mind. I vividly recall walking by the Theater building on an August day in 2001 with my sunglasses on, when I saw that distinctive tall figure approaching on the sidewalk. I raised my sunglasses and said “Dr. Farrell?” He laughed his generous laugh and that was the last time I ever called him by that name.\r\n\r\nWorking as Jim’s colleague meant I was able to study his example of how to inhabit the role of professor. Jim was a master of the academic meeting. Though he was a highly respected faculty member, he never dominated discussions. He was an excellent listener who could take in what his colleagues said and distill it into something helpful. In doing so Jim was beautifully subversive without being cynical. As a Lilly vocational fellow he helped us figure out how to articulate a sense of vocation that seemed fresh and vital. Jim didn’t mind dissent, either. In the last meetings I ever went to with him, in May of this year, I was feeling cranky about sustainability and made that known. Later that evening I was feeling sheepish (a common pattern) and I emailed him and apologized for being a grumpy anthropologist. He replied that there was a role in the world for grumpy anthropologists and that he was glad I was one. For someone who was involved in so many things over his 36 years at St. Olaf, it is difficult to think of a single enemy Jim made on our campus.\r\n\r\nIt is not surprising therefore that Jim taught me the limits of complaining. College professors can complain with an eloquence matched by few other professions – I certainly take pride in my ranting skills. Yet when I would seek Jim’s advice on the administration’s latest mistake, he would patiently listen and then move us on to what we could in fact do about the situation. That was Jim’s way. When he grew interested in environmental issues he didn’t lament that there was a dearth of sustainability education at St. Olaf; he worked patiently with students, faculty, and staff to help build an amazingly comprehensive program in environmental studies. Jim’s intellectual interests delved into the study of bad news: death, nuclear weapons, hyperconsumerism, and climate change. But his spiritual energy was all tied up in hope and possibility. It’s no surprise that even in his last days, weakened by cancer, Jim carried a plate spilling over with projects and ideas.\r\n\r\nWe talked a lot about teaching, too. When I was in a jam I would climb the stairs to his office and if he was free we would head off to the natural lands. One semester when it seemed like none of my classes were working, he patiently listened and then remarked how one of his own courses that term felt like a flop. I thought that if Jim Farrell can have a course go awkwardly that maybe it is ok if some of mine don’t work so well. I learned many things on those long walks. One of the important things was just how to have a good conversation. Jim and I drove once together to the Peace Prize Forum in Moorhead. Over the hours we discussed how to cook for our wives, the sublime delights of fast food (shhh!!!), growing up, growing old, raising kids, and everything else you would imagine talking about on a long car ride with Jim Farrell. When we approached Minneapolis on our return I remarked how much I enjoyed our conversations and he explained to me that a car was a good arrangement for male conversation. He said it was important to sit next to each other, not across from each other. We can open up better sideways, he said. That’s why those walks with Jim were always so effective.\r\n\r\nWe talked for many years about teaching a class together but it never seemed to work out. Then Jim’s health convinced me that we needed to make it happen sooner rather than later. In the spring of 2012 we put together a plan to teach two different fall semester courses in the same room at the same time. Mine was an existing So/An course called “Global Interdependence” and he created a new American Studies course called “Global Exchanges.” The idea was that I would teach about cultural flows outside the United States and he would teach about those inside the U.S., with the students then charged with figuring out the connections between them. I picked some of my favorite books (among them Jamaica Kincaid’s <em>A Small Place</em>, Charles Piot’s <em>Remotely Global</em>) and he picked some of his (among them Thomas Scott King’s <em>The Truth About Stories</em>, Mary Catherine Bateson’s <em>Peripheral Visions</em>). We apportioned these into alternating weeks, set up appropriate Moodle forums, and then let the class unfold.\r\n\r\nIt was a revelation to be back in Jim’s classroom. I was there as a student, a professor, and also as an anthropologist. I was able to see Jim’s method, up close, from those different perspectives. I quickly was reminded that to call what he did in the classroom a “method” or a “technique” was to misunderstand his professing. He became an excellent teacher not by having methods as much as by having well-integrated beliefs. He had belief in his students, for example. He had faith that they would learn. So in the first days of class he shared this: We were to be equals in the classroom, all of us teaching and learning together. There was to be very little evaluation. Participants in the course, faculty and students alike, were invited to give what they had to each other. You can imagine how all this sounds to students who have grown up in intensely hierarchical classrooms in an age of high stakes testing. I too had my doubts and thought, “will this work?”\r\n\r\nJim made it work. The primary assignment for students was to develop a reflective journal about their experience in the class. Jim encouraged students to write about the readings, of course, but also encouraged them to write about their politics, their religious faith, their off-campus work, their majors, and their life after graduation. The fact that the readings tied so well into all of those aspects of student experience made broad thinking flow naturally. The other key assignment was for students to engage on Moodle. To make that happen, Jim also engaged on Moodle. He responded to questions and posed questions of his own. The Moodle forums were uneven but productively uneven. Jim liked to have the journals intersect with Moodle, and one of his favorite journal comments was “you should post this on Moodle.” Not many people did post private journal thoughts on Moodle, but I think his comments gave students confidence that their ideas were worth sharing. And share they did, in all different kinds of class discussion. Jim liked different types of small groups to go with our large, awkward circle of 35 students. But I think his favorite was when I was up front and he would sit with them, his tall frame squeezed into a small Holland Hall desk, just another member of a group generating ideas.\r\n\r\nI learned much from Jim’s capacity to motivate students. He was not stingy with praise, and his kind words provided great energy to the class. His genuine affection for college students made his compliments seem entirely natural. He also wasn’t afraid to offer students his opinions. He asked them to share about their lives and thus felt it wasn’t fair for him not to share his own experience in return. He talked about cancer, briefly, but more about his politics, his youth, his writing and his family. I remember him once offering a denunciation of Republican environmental policy (or more precisely the lack thereof) and I recall thinking that he was being rather blunt. Jim trusted that his students would trust him on such matters, and they did. I was pleased that some of the more conservative members of the class felt quite open sharing their contrary ideas in their journals. Jim also trusted that students would do the best that they could. We had a couple of students who did not do much work, which of course distressed me. When I mentioned this to Jim, he said that he had noted it too. He challenged the students who were flagging to exert themselves a little more. But it would be fair to say he wasn’t that worried about whether they did or not. Instead, he was far more interested in the majority of students who were working diligently. The brilliance of Jim’s faith was his ability to get so many students to go far beyond the parameters of the class. We had some journals that were extraordinarily full of sparkling engagement, with the frequent comment “why can’t more classes be like this?”\r\n\r\nThere are a lot of reasons why more classes can’t be like Jim’s. Jim liked to teach in the thick of student interest. That’s why he taught American Studies, sustainability and environmental issues, and his beloved Campus Ecology course. Jim’s teaching asked students to think deeply about their personal experience, which is a highly valuable aim. But many college courses are about things distant from student experience, and the faculty challenge is to encourage students to think deeply about those things, too. Jim’s teaching was also embodied teaching, that is it came from Jim’s being. Jim’s character was patient, hopeful, caring and his teaching was too. I wish I shared more of those qualities, but all professors enter the classroom as who they are, which is an authentic way to profess to students.\r\n\r\nJim was also who he was because of when he lived. Given the disciplines that he taught, Jim would no doubt lament my inattention to the historical context of his teaching. Jim came of age in the late 1960s, and the cultural ferment of that period left such a mark he wrote a book about it. For him the 1960s were not so much a time of revolt and revolution as they were a spirit of change and a questioning of hierarchy. Though Jim loved intellectual inquiry, he was deeply suspicious of academic pretension. His goofy hat at academic processions served as his sign that gravitas comes not from one’s appearance but from the quality of one’s ideas (he teased me whenever I made the mistake of wearing a tie to work). An academic is a human being with a passion for learning, he felt, not a robe matched to a mortarboard.\r\n\r\nJim’s 1960s ethos thus found great sustenance in St. Olaf’s 1960s experiment, the Paracollege. Jim talked often about how his colleagues and students in the Paracollege gave him the courage to teach subversively. For Jim and for many others at St. Olaf the Paracollege was a tiny program that proved to be a deep well of creativity and social capital. Jim would regale students with stories of Paracollege dinners and chess-match discussions. I remember a crazy 1980s campus event where Jim debated a friend in the English department about whether one learns more from studying Dante or shopping malls (any guess of which side Jim defended?). Even after the college closed the Paracollege Jim kept it going, teaching students in independent studies, nurturing new faculty on long walks, and in the process pulling out of that well forgotten buckets of water.\r\n\r\nNow in Jim’s absence we are to keep things going. We are fortunate that Jim Farrell remains with us in so many ways, especially in stories. Jim loved to teach the book <em>The Truth About Stories</em> in which Thomas King insists, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” That became a favorite quote because Jim loved stories (and quotes). He invited students to tell him their stories, and he continued the gift exchange by telling them his. He told skillful stories in class, in his many books, chapel talks, speeches, and in his quirky lectures as Dr. America. When he passed away those of us who knew him well wanted nothing more than to gather together and tell the stories.\r\n\r\nKing ends each story in his book with this coda:\r\n<blockquote>Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to your children. Turn it into a play. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.\r\nYou’ve heard it now.</blockquote>\r\nWriting this makes me miss my friend all the more. But here’s to continuing the story.\r\n<h3>Kendra Smith-Howard ’99</h3>\r\n<em>Associate Professor of History, SUNY Albany</em>\r\n\r\nJim Farrell was the first professor I met at Saint Olaf College. I enrolled in his American Studies 101 fall semester of my first year on campus. He saved me from a campus job in the caf by hiring me to be a research assistant, chaired my paracollege senior committee on “Nature and Culture,” hired me as a visiting instructor when I was a grad student, thereby bolstering my CV so that I could land in a tenure-track job. I owe my career in no small way to Jim Farrell.\r\n\r\nNo one more profoundly shaped my intellectual development and my view of the world than Jim. No one taught me more about teaching.\r\n\r\nJim’s teaching was fun, and touched upon fluffy topics like shopping malls. But Jim did not pander to student interests, or shy away from tough readings. He assigned enduring and important texts: William Cronon’s <em>Nature’s Metropolis</em>, Robert Bellah et. al.’s <em>Habits of the Heart</em>, Thomas Bender’s <em>Toward an Urban Vision</em>. He also taught disciplined writing by doing lots of it, and by inviting students to see the writing process by reading drafts and page-proofs.\r\n\r\nMore than topic, what set Jim’s teaching apart was how intensely he engaged with students and how relentlessly he supported them. Jim listened to students. Unfailingly and with abandon, he listened. His eagerness to learn more and read more alongside students – even if it took him into unfamiliar terrain – was also impressive. He was sensitive to students’ insecurities and fears, but also conveyed his relentless and abiding faith in their abilities. Jim was tickled when a normally-reticent student made a penetrating comment. Had Jim not said my senior year “you’re applying to grad school, right?” I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have the confidence to do so. As a teaching assistant at UW-Madison, Jim got a kick out of turning the tables and visiting me during <em>my</em> office hours. His commitment to students lasted long after students left the hill; he read seminar papers and drafts of dissertation chapters – offering penetrating comments (and adding a few puns). Because Jim cared so deeply about students, students confided in him and cried in his office about things beyond academics: faith, love, death, assault. And they found in Jim a patient, kind, and compassionate mentor and friend.\r\n\r\nJim’s teaching fostered idealism. He assigned fiction that imagined a better world. But his idealism was never pie-in-the-sky, but grounded. He offered practical steps to stave off defeatism. One key example was backwards thinking: start with the world you want, and then imagine what would be necessary for that to happen. Then plan backwards from that to conceive of the necessary pre-conditions. Another strategy that empowered students was asking students to treat campus as a laboratory for social change – annotating drinking fountains and dorm rooms with captions might seem silly, but such tasks served as vehicles for much larger thinking about how to live more lightly on the planet. Idealistic and earnest though he was, Jim was hardly pretentious or preachy.\r\n\r\nJim had fun. He festooned his syllabi with comic strips and cartoons, and punctuated conversations with poetry. The puns. Oh, the puns. He delivered them with a twinkle in his eye and a joyous grin. They were funny and punchy, but also symbolized something more: the playful thoughtfulness with which Jim approached daily life.\r\n\r\nI am a better scholar and a better person thanks to Jim Farrell. He was so compassionate a teacher, so gentle a being on the earth, so curious a mind that I know I will never be his equal. But through his teaching, Jim imprinted these qualities on his students. His example inspires and coaches, even as we feel acutely feel his absence.\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\n<img class=\" size-medium wp-image-883 aligncenter\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/farrell-hat-bw-280x263.jpg\" alt=\"Dr. America\" width=\"280\" height=\"263\" />\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Jim Farrell (1949-2013)</p>','Faculty Reflections','','publish','closed','open','','reflections','','','2018-07-09 14:32:20','2018-07-09 19:32:20','',0,'http://natureofcollege.org/?page_id=862',-75,'page','',0),(864,6,'2015-04-21 03:01:37','2015-04-21 03:01:37','','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:01:37','2015-04-21 03:01:37','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(865,6,'2015-04-21 03:03:05','2015-04-21 03:03:05','<p class=\"p1\"><i>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </i></p>\r\n<p class=\"p1\"><i>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </i></p>','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:03:05','2015-04-21 03:03:05','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(866,6,'2015-04-21 03:04:19','2015-04-21 03:04:19','<em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em>\r\n\r\n<em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em>','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:04:19','2015-04-21 03:04:19','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(867,6,'2015-04-21 03:04:39','2015-04-21 03:04:39','<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em></p>','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:04:39','2015-04-21 03:04:39','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(868,6,'2015-04-21 03:07:14','2015-04-21 03:07:14','','Jim Farrell','','inherit','open','open','','jim-farrell','','','2015-04-21 03:07:20','2015-04-21 03:07:20','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell.jpg',0,'attachment','image/jpeg',0),(869,6,'2015-04-23 01:48:07','2015-04-23 01:48:07','<img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-868\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell-630x419.jpg\" alt=\"Jim Farrell\" width=\"630\" height=\"419\" />\n<h2><strong>Jim Farrell</strong> As Teacher</h2>\nReflections from St. Olaf Faculty\n<blockquote><em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em>\n\n<em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em></blockquote>\n<h2></h2>\n<h3>Charles Taliaferro</h3>\n<em>Philosophy, Environmental Studies, Paracollege</em>\n\nThree memories of Jim as professor. First, no one I know has ever come close to Jim’s patience and ability to ask a question and to wait in silence until a student responds. I was not surprised when one student told me Jim went 20 minutes waiting for a response. Second, on too many occasions to recall, Jim would work with, assist, and engage at length with students regardless of whether the students were enrolled in his courses. For many years, this stood out to me as the high water mark we should all aspire to. Third, I recall Jim running on campus. And every time I saw him run, I thought he is running from one great meeting with students and the time got away from him, and he is now running toward another meeting and he does not want to be late.\n<h3>W. Bruce Benson</h3>\n<em>College Pastor, emeritus</em>\n\nI admired Jim Farrell. It is difficult, maybe even unwise, to distill the many reasons down to one meta-reason, but I’m going to try. Faithfulness. I admired the unswerving, unwavering, undiluted faithfulness of his humanity. Jim didn’t teach well because he wanted to be noted for it, he taught well – amazingly well – because he was faithful. Faithful to his students, his subject, and the larger world. He wasn’t creative and imaginative because he thought being so was cool, but because his imagination was fired by faithfulness. He wanted to be faithful to life, truth, knowledge, community. Faithfulness pushed him to imagine better, more honest ways of living and understanding. He wasn’t on the cutting edge of social and ethical issues because he was a thrill seeker or an attention grabber, but because that’s where faithfulness to justice and the spirit of God compelled him to be. Even his gentleness – it did not come from timidity or a need to be liked, it came from his faithfulness to the dignity of others, his recognition that we all bear the image of God. Thanks be to God for Jim Farrell.\n<h3>Paul Jackson</h3>\n<em>Chemistry</em>\n\nI’d like to make an offering, some brief thoughts about Jim, a teacher, mentor, colleague, friend, writer, author and lover of all nature, especially human-nature. This is not the human nature we typically think about when those words are uttered, but the connectivity between human cultures and the rest of Creation. Jim frequently reminded us that we are nature, we are gifts – to nature and to each other, and we are engaged in the continuing, evolving human-nature enterprise as stewards of God’s Creation.\n\nI recall the first time the Sustainability Task Force read, in full draft form, the principles we had been talking about, principles that came to life in words Jim penned to paper. Here is an excerpt about energy. “Environmentally speaking, a college campus is a place for converting natural energy to human thoughtfulness. It’s a place where people employ natural resources to refine and transmit the intellectual and artistic resources we call culture. Like all other colleges and universities, St. Olaf College is an organic machine, where nature’s energy is shaped by nature’s human energy, and vice versa. We think of a campus as a place, a location, a space – and it is. But more importantly, it’s a relationship, where human designs intersect with nature’s designs in food and water, heat and electricity, cars and computers, lawns and gardens and natural lands. A campus is one way of making love to nature – or of making war on it. It’s a way of caring for the Creation. A campus is, like it or not, an ecological design.” All of us were astounded by the conversational character of the writing, the relationship centered core of the story, and the imagery it conjured. It provided the group and campus with fuel to keep doing good work, no matter the obstacles.\n\nThis pursuit of good work is framed by what I call ‘embracing the cycles’ or the ‘gift of the persistently possible,’ a gift Jim consistently doled out. Rather than lament about a particular situation or become mired in despair and anger, the Daniel Quinn novel Ishmael and the words story and opportunity soon would pop up in discussions with Jim. The narrator says, “They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in.” A given story might come to a close, yet another takes its place. The challenge is to rise up and recognize the new opportunity, the opportunity to use your gifts and talents to work with others who feel as passionately as you do to unfold the next story. This is jumping from the downcycle into the upcycle which can, at times, feel like you are actually in the spin cycle! Jim consistently encouraged all to step into their next story and to do so with gusto, whether it was students attempting to start an on-campus organic farm, a department trying to develop a revised curriculum, or a friend struggling to make sense of a life-changing event.\n\nJust how does one step into the next story? In the liberal arts sense, we do it with thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness embodied and expressed by people in the careful way they think and in how they care about other people and places. This kind of thinking and doing is hard work and certainly has its upcycles and downcycles. In parallel we do this as a spiritual journey or leap of faith. Our stories are deeply interconnected – making a tangled web of beauty reflective of God at work in the world. As the earth spins on its axis, meandering through space and time, may we have the courage to embrace our upcycles and downcycles to spin through life and see the gifts of the possible, in each other, in St. Olaf and in Creation. Thanks Jim, for encouraging all to see and practice a different kind of human-nature.\n<h3>Doug Casson</h3>\n<em>Political Science</em>\n\nAs a phenomenal teacher and thoughtful writer, Professor Farrell had the reputation for changing people’s lives. When I first met this giant of a man, I expected to be impressed. I waited for him to offer a brilliant critique of consumer culture or deliver one of his famous witticisms. Instead he leaned over and asked me what I thought.\n<h3>Colin Wells</h3>\n<em>English and American Conversations</em>\n\nOne of my favorite stories that Jim Farrell liked to tell was that when giving a final exam, he would sometimes simply ask students, “What did you learn in this class?” In modern pedagogy, we spend a lot of time thinking about “assessing student learning,” but Jim believed that the best way to assess their learning was to ask them directly. I think this story tells us a lot about Jim as a teacher. First, it exemplifies the aspect of Jim’s educational philosophy that wanted to keep the simplest and most fundamental things in plain sight. Teachers usually know what they’re sending out to their students, but not as much about what students are taking in. And rather than ask roundabout questions to determine what students learned, Jim said, why not just ask them to articulate it? This gets to the second aspect of his teaching philosophy that is so important to remember: students need to “own” their educational development – they should be conscious about what is happening to them as they’re learning. Students should be expected to articulate what they believe to be the most important ideas or issues they encounter, and they should be reminded that that is their job as college students: to figure out what they’re learning – or more precisely, to figure out what they most care about when they’re learning. I admit that I’ve never put Jim’s question on any of my own final exams, but thanks to my experience teaching with and being mentored by Jim when I was starting out, I’ve never forgotten that my job is to help students to answer this most basic question of all: “what are you learning”?\n<h3>Steve Polansky</h3>\n<em>English and Paracollege</em>\n\nWhen we were both new to St. Olaf – I was in my first year, Jim in his second – Jim and I taught together on a number of occasions, on an equal number of subjects. Subjects, typically, only one of us knew anything about. With regard to our “pedagogies” (I didn’t have a pedagogy then, or ever; Jim was developing his), we couldn’t have been more mismatched. Jim’s way of teaching was, to my mind, bizarre. For one, when he was not silent, which was most of the time, he was studiously inaudible – speaking quietly with one hand entirely covering his mouth. He practiced this perverse method, however, in such a way as too grab and hold a class’s attention, to a degree I, with all my capering loonishness, could never attain. He had this, to me, absolutely appalling way of asking a question (his questions could never be answered quickly or simply) and then waiting, as long as it took to come out, for the answer. He never rushed in to end the silence, never answered his own questions, never paraphrased his questions or, once he’d posed them, dumbed them down. All mainstay maneuvers in my ill-considered repertoire. Jim was a teacher for the long haul. You needed to be his student, or his teaching partner, for a semester, or a number of semesters, to appreciate just how good he was. And it wouldn’t be Jim you’d be watching, but his students. I happily number myself among them.\n\nJim would gladly teach and gladly learn. He was curious about everything. He was an obsessive note-taker, never without a stack of 3x5 cards in his breast pocket. He was a great researcher, greater at getting other people to do his research for him. He was a very funny man – more of a punster than a joke-teller – preferring, again to me incomprehensible, to laugh at other people’s jokes than to perpetrate his own. He was a curious blend of real ambition and real humility. He would have made a formidable politician, at any level. The only thing that made some meetings bearable for me, when I could bring myself to attend them, was waiting for Jim, who generally held fire for most of the proceedings, to offer his summary remark, which somehow managed to incorporate all the disparate ideas on the table and transform them into a coherent, elegant, eminently practicable whole.\n\nWhatever Jim’s pedagogy, whatever his academic skills, for me he was, more importantly, in the classroom and out, exemplary. He modeled decency and kindness, compassion and integrity. He was measured and thoughtful. He was a bit goofy looking on the basketball court, though he could really play, but he was graceful, in behavior and bearing, everywhere else. He seemed always at peace. Assuredly he had anger and anxiety in him, but I never saw him angry or anxious. He was a loving, steadfast husband and father, a devout and unassuming Christian. And he was a dear friend. My life is much the better for having known him.\n<h3>Beckie Judge</h3>\n<em>Economics and Environmental Studies</em>\n\nAs an economist, I focus on the world as it is.\nJim taught me to look at the world as it could be.\nFor this, I will always be grateful.\n<h3>L. DeAne Lagerquist</h3>\n<em>Religion, Paracollege, American Conversations</em>\n\nRemembering Jim is both a pleasure and in some ways difficult, not only emotionally. Since my arrival at St. Olaf in 1988 Jim has been a constant, always nearby, steady, and with a ready, wise insight. His presence was so pervasive and I relied upon it so much, but it is more difficult than I would have expected to isolate moments.\n\nFirst I met Jim in the context of the Paracollege and, most memorably for me, at Paradinners. Each week he would stand up to feed us a factoid. These were odd little bits of information, wrenched from their natural context, and used as a lens on much more. They were akin to the dense facts to which Jim introduced so many of us, faculty and students alike. They also displayed his agility of mind that saw the unexpected connection and was ready to play with words until they revealed more than most of us suspected was there.\n\nWhen I became Senior Tutor my responsibility was to keep things going. I had able help from Katherine Baker and Susan Carlson. From Jim I had inspiration. Our offices were next-door to each other. Just a few steps brought me into his whimsy. Just a few steps away was a reminder of why we were doing what we were doing. A hedge against the temptation to be too prescriptive or to take the system too seriously. Certainly that is one of the messages conveyed by the Dr. Seuss hat. Yes, what we are doing is important, but maybe so important that we should be able to laugh about.\n\nThen there was the context of the Paracollege being ‘defunded.’ Those were not easy days and weeks and two years. Jim helped us all stay focused on the learning, and not just what we were learning from the closing. Sure he was angry and convinced that the decision was wrong, but he was not distracted from the central task: the delight of learning. The speaker’s series we organized, “Some Things I Learned in the Paracollege,” was probably his idea. Certainly the ideas it articulated included many we could attribute to him.\n\nAnd, even as we prepared for that ending, Jim was among those who took initiative to develop American Conversations. The dense fact approach and the bold interdisciplinary character of the program reflect his way of teaching, learning, being in the world. I taught with him in AmCon twice: once the third, early 20th century course and once the introductory one. How such a tall man, who knew so much, could take up so little room and draw out such insight from students amazed me. I wish I could say that I figured out the magic. I did not, but I hope that I caught a little of it.\n\nHere are two ingredients: Jim loved to learn and was always engaged in it. Even when delivering something like a lecture, he managed to convey the dynamic of learning and to include his listeners in it. Jim trusted his students, and his colleagues. He expected that we would enter into the project with him, bringing as much passion and conviction and desire as he did.\n\nFinally, because it is last on the list and because it is the way I last communicated with Jim, he brought both those characteristics to collegial enterprises: faculty meetings, writing <em>St. Olaf 2000</em>, collaborating on <em>Claiming Our Callings</em>. He was the primary author of <em>St. Olaf 2000</em>. Perhaps writing about the college’s mission should have been intimidating for an Irish Catholic. It did not seem so for Jim. Because he embraced the mission and was eager to do it justice, because he was humble and willing to learn, what he wrote was fresh, inviting, and accurate. Along the way he encouraged us to point out what was “clever but stupid.” My last exchanges with Jim were about the Afterword we wrote for <em>Claiming Our Callings</em>. I was nervous about it, worried about how we’d mange the voice since his is distinctive and mine is mine. He was confident that we could. Readers will judge for themselves. What I hope is that the readers of that piece and the students I teach in years to come will hear from me something of Jim’s delight in learning, passion for the world, and trust that they share both for the good of all.\n<h3>Gary Gisselman</h3>\n<em>Theater and American Conversations</em>\n\nHe was generous with his help; wise and humble; incisive and self-effacing. It was never about him, always about you. Without preaching he helped us to think about the lives we were living. Jim possessed great humor and it was a joy to make him laugh. He never used his humor to humiliate. He loved teaching and he made his students his friends and taught me to do so as well. The unique relationship he had with me he had with everyone else who sought contact with him. It was not about you, it was about him.\n<h3>Barbara Reed</h3>\n<em>Religion and Asian Studies</em>\n\nMy first memory of meeting Jim Farrell was also the most important to me. When I first arrived at St. Olaf in 1982, the college community was still centered around the male faculty and their wives. When I was invited to tea by the Faculty Wives Club, I found it gracious but confusing for a new female faculty person. The old Division of History, Philosophy and Religion had evening gatherings for which the faculty wives baked coordinating desserts and poured coffee and tea. When it came to be my turn (or my spouse’s turn?), I was dreading the event as one more experience of being the ultimate outsider. But Jim also volunteered for that Division gathering and overturned the gender roles. He had some recipe for an unbaked pie which we put together right before the meeting. And he poured the tea. And he smiled. This may seem like a small thing, but the wisdom and compassion with which he related to me was so powerful during a time when I often felt isolated as an outsider. I saw that same wisdom and compassion again and again as Jim worked with colleagues and students. I suspect that Jim was a closet Bodhisattva.\n<h3>Irve Dell</h3>\n<em>Fine Art and Paracollege</em>\n\nIrreverence is a critical component of learning and living. It is not just a vehicle used to express displeasure. It is an invaluable tool that promotes the careful examination of that which we do revere insuring that the revered is not corrupted. Jim knew this and used the irreverence tool masterfully.\n<h3>Judy Kutulas</h3>\n<em>History and American Studies</em>\n\nJim was a prolific scholar, but, not a particularly orthodox one, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knew him. The book of his that I think best reveals his unique scholarly vision is The Spirit of the Sixties, which traces the intellectual evolution of figures who helped shape 1960s activism. Jim was, after all, of a generation that came of age in the midst of Sixties social turmoil. Yet those whose stories he chronicled each came at their activism from moral, spiritual, or religious perspectives that grounded their social agendas. They did not make revolution for the hell of it, as 1960s activist Abbie Hoffman once described it, but experienced what Jim called “revolutions of the heart” that moved them to serve their communities.\n\nJim’s own revolution of the heart led to his distinctively moral historical voice, scholarship whose point was not just to inform us about the past, but spark revolutions in our hearts as well. Part of Jim’s approach to scholarship was the conviction that no one should work alone; that it was only in community with others that ideas became fully formed. Many of us here tonight have benefited from the care with which he read our papers or our chapters and the insights he offered us about our own work. Jim was very ecumenical in this task, devoting equal energy to a student’s work and a colleague’s because, to him, they were equally valuable.\n\nAnother part of Jim’s “revolution of the heart” was the realization that traditional teaching didn’t really reach students at the level he desired. Intellectual growth, he believed, like scholarship, emerged holistically from one’s values and in community with others. When Jim began teaching at Olaf, the lecture was the norm, so he joined the Paracollege, where small-group tutorials replaced the structured classroom as the dominant mode of faculty-student interaction. After the Paracollege ended, his small-group independent studies continued, communities that begat other communities semester after semester. Instead of textbooks, Jim used dense facts, objects of complex significance that revealed history in quirky ways, like Model T Fords or Nike sneakers. He didn’t like to be tied down to the physical classroom either. Instead, he sent his students out to look at buildings, to play whiffle golf or walk around while they discussed, even to curate an American Studies museum full of everyday objects.\n\nJim taught his students to, in Adrienne Rich’s wonderful phrase, claim their educations, and they did so by co-teaching with him, running their own seminars when he was too ill to come to class, contributing to Moodle forums and, after the semester ended, continuing the conversation on e-mail. Jim believed that students already had the analytic skills necessary to make sense of their worlds; they just needed to practice, as he put it, “more care and acuity” doing what came naturally. Students rightly lapped it up, calling the result Jim Farrell Studies as they followed him from class to class. Like ripples on a pond, those students brought elements of Jim Farrell studies to the rest of us, whether it was signs telling us about the waste of plastic spoons in the Cage or the expectations his students carried into the rest of their classes.\n\nI’m really going to miss those signs in the Cage, by the way, because, if I may dense-fact them for a second, that Jim-voice was there both in their gentle, under-stated moral nudges and their whimsy. Jim once told me that editors just didn’t get his fondness for puns and other forms of wordplay; but any memory of Jim must recognize the centrality of humor to his endeavors. He never took himself too seriously; hence we remember him in part with silly hats.\n\nThese days it often feels like the outside world judges us and we too-often judge ourselves by how busy we are or how many hoops we can jump through before we are considered complete. Jim’s work as a scholar and a teacher suggests that we can – and should – do so much more for each other, nurturing each other’s spirits, bringing forth each other’s intellectual gifts, living in community, and yet never forgetting to find pleasure along the way.\n<h3>Carol Holly</h3>\n<em>English and Paracollege</em>\n\nFor the last two months we have been celebrating everything that Jim was to us at St. Olaf College – a great colleague, mentor, teacher, and friend. A colleague who from his early teaching in the Paracollege to his recent work on the Environmental Conversations left his mark everywhere on campus. But he also left his mark forever in our hearts. He was Jim Farrell, our irreplaceable teacher, mentor, colleague and friend. He was also Jim – just Jim – someone we loved.\n<h3>David Booth</h3>\n<em>Religion and Paracollege</em>\n\nThinking about Jim I always think of the “excellence” of our college – a complicated, delicate thing. We celebrate programs, organizations, and individuals that are excellent by any measure. We embrace familiar criteria and excel by those.\n\nAnd there is another source of our excellence. Something that sets us apart from many colleges. We have always embraced a certain venturesomeness – a risk taking that plays joyful games with traditions and standards – that explores the good in unexpected and dangerous places – that questions conventions with loving irony.\n\nJim was a master/mentor and role model for us all in this respect. Sure, he exemplified ordinary excellence, with his patient fact-checking, his reasonableness, his clear and sympathetic discourse. But never forget his impish love of transgressions and subversions. His deft puns that exposed hidden assumptions and asked us to question them. His patient exploration of “dense facts” to reveal deep truth about everyday life.\n\nFor two decades he was a guiding spirit of our St. Olaf Paracollege, which kept a cautious community flirting with danger. And since the Paracollege closed, Jim continuously invented new arrangements of subject matters, new configurations of teachers and students, new integrations of library-learning and lived-learning, new mergers of the personal and the political. He taught us not to invest too much in familiar conventions, but to have fun with them and press on them until they give up the bubbling life of the world beneath.\n\nWe should never forget what Jim embodied: that our St. Olaf excellence is a delicate balance of the customary and the subversive. Like a solemn procession of the faculty in academic garb, with one crazy-quilted top-hat bobbing along in the middle. If you see that sort of hat again, you will know it is a tribute to Jim and to the excellence we cherish.\n\nJim was called to be a teacher. As much as he laughed and lampooned, he knew the life of a professor to be utterly serious: a place where the future of students and the future of communities and the future of the planet come together. A matter so serious we better be able to risk laughs as we learn.\n\nHe taught students, not subjects. In a classroom – or on a lawn or in his office – he figured out the life and questions and prospects of each individual he met. He never delivered subject matter in the abstract. He subordinated his learning to the growth of each particular student. He helped them chart a way towards the projects that compelled them.\n\nAnd he taught students in the midst of the real demands raised by their concrete lives and concrete challenges – personal and intellectual. He helped them to find themselves; to know themselves in specific places; to know their own cultures in the midst of this living, finite, straining world.\n\nHe urged his community to see the implicit meanings of our habits and decisions. He invited us to acknowledge “the moral ecology of everyday life.” He invited us to teach and learn as if the future of the planet depended on it.\n\nHis absence may be palpable; his presence is no less palpable. And we can to live up to the example of his presence. A presence where he’s quipping, with a voice that urges lovingly and hopes confidently, something like this:\n\n“If God had wanted us to live sustainably, She would have given us brains.”\n<h3>Kathy Shea</h3>\n<em>Biology, Environmental Studies, Curator of Natural Lands</em>\n\nI didn’t have the opportunity to really work with Jim until recently. When I became Curator of Natural Lands in 2009 he invited me to lead a tour of the Natural Lands for his Campus Ecology class each spring. We would meet either by the Big Pond or, this past spring, by the pond in the Regents Building parking lot. At our starting point I talked about the history of the Natural Lands and then we walked through Norway Valley and/or around Big Pond (also known as Bakko Pond – a suggestion by Jim to honor the first Curator of Natural Lands, Gene Bakko). Jim promoted the kind of teaching you can do on a walk outside. You talk for a little while, and then give students a chance to ask questions and actually see the things you are talking about. We looked at the spring ephemeral flowers in the forest understory, the bluebird houses, the effects or prairie burning, and talked about the value of natural habitat restoration. Jim would often add a little something in his low-key manner to fill out the story or the explanation. Jim viewed the Natural Lands as an opportunity for students to learn about nature and as each student in his class picked a spot outside to observe over the course of the semester they developed a sense of place and a connection with the land.\n\nI saw Jim as a scholar by working with him on the book of essays on vocation, entitled ”Claiming Our Callings”, edited by DeAne Lagerquist and Kaethe Schwehn, in press with Oxford University Press. About 12 faculty contributed chapters and we would meet in smaller groups to make suggestions about each other’s work. Jim’s philosophy that we can all be better by working together became evident as we made suggestions to improve each other’s chapters. To me he said something like, I know that you know the writings of Wendell Berry, but we want to make sure that our readers make that connection by referring to him directly.\n\nAlso within the last year I remember attending a dinner for faculty thinking about retirement options. Jim was there and he said he wasn’t ready to retire because the students he was working with just kept getting better and better and he clearly loved working with them. I will teach a new course on sustainable agriculture this spring and had corresponded by email with Jim about it this past summer. He worked with a student to co-teach campus ecology and I plan to do something similar with the agriculture course next spring. Jim and I were planning to get together to talk about it when he felt better. I will be especially thinking of Jim this spring as I develop the agriculture course. I already have a student who has agreed to work with me and we will carry on his tradition as best we can. He left us when he was at the top of his teaching profession, empowering students to lead and guiding them along the way.\n<h3>Tom Williamson</h3>\n<em>Sociology and Anthropology</em>\n\nWhen I arrived at St. Olaf as a student 31 years ago, my older sister urged me to take a course with Dr. Farrell, as he was known then. I trusted her judgment and registered for a freshman history seminar called “The Gray Nineties,” which focused on the experience of the United States in the 1890s. Everything about the course was odd, odd, odd. None of us could initially figure out why we were concentrating our intellectual energy on an obscure decade in American history. The professor had a long syllabus full of bad puns, and he made sarcastic comments about academia (one that stuck with me was his claim that PhD programs are endurance contests more than measures of intellect). There was no sign of a textbook or anything to orient us historically. We read obscure novels (<em>The Damnation of Theron Ware</em>, of course) and curious historical ephemera, including a purple mimeograph of an archaic bicycling manual. Dr. Farrell had us sit around a table with him and discuss these strange things, while he enjoyed teasing the students from Chicago and telling us stories about his wife (such nuggets as “if you want to pursue something foolish like history, be certain to marry a lawyer first”). Our assignments included writing an introduction to a book that never existed, and another had us plot the geographic progression of world’s fairs in the U.S. We studied period advertisements and poetry and learned the history of sheet music. I was entranced. Like my sister, I took as many courses with Dr. Farrell as I could.\n\nI came to learn that the secret sauce in Dr. Farrell’s teaching was not the curious subject matter but rather the trust he had in students. He showed us that academic knowledge was something open to explore, rather than something fixed for us to swallow. When I returned from a semester studying in Thailand, for example, I was full of questions and confusion. I did a Paracollege tutorial with Dr. Farrell on the Vietnam War. He told me to write my own syllabus for the course and come up with my own assignments for our meetings. The most important lesson Dr. Farrell revealed to me in that tutorial was that I was in charge of my education. All human beings have inquiring minds, he would say, and to exercise that capacity we just need diligence and confidence. When I got to graduate school a few years later, two of my professors had students design the syllabus for their course. Some of my fellow students were a bit flustered, but my experience with Dr. Farrell made the assignment feel natural. He had taught me how to teach myself, and therefore I had gotten a great liberal arts gift: I had learned how to learn.\n\nAfter many years of twists and turns, I returned to St. Olaf. Dr. Farrell and I had fallen out of touch, but for me not out of mind. I vividly recall walking by the Theater building on an August day in 2001 with my sunglasses on, when I saw that distinctive tall figure approaching on the sidewalk. I raised my sunglasses and said “Dr. Farrell?” He laughed his generous laugh and that was the last time I ever called him by that name.\n\nWorking as Jim’s colleague meant I was able to study his example of how to inhabit the role of professor. Jim was a master of the academic meeting. Though he was a highly respected faculty member, he never dominated discussions. He was an excellent listener who could take in what his colleagues said and distill it into something helpful. In doing so Jim was beautifully subversive without being cynical. As a Lilly vocational fellow he helped us figure out how to articulate a sense of vocation that seemed fresh and vital. Jim didn’t mind dissent, either. In the last meetings I ever went to with him, in May of this year, I was feeling cranky about sustainability and made that known. Later that evening I was feeling sheepish (a common pattern) and I emailed him and apologized for being a grumpy anthropologist. He replied that there was a role in the world for grumpy anthropologists and that he was glad I was one. For someone who was involved in so many things over his 36 years at St. Olaf, it is difficult to think of a single enemy Jim made on our campus.\n\nIt is not surprising therefore that Jim taught me the limits of complaining. College professors can complain with an eloquence matched by few other professions – I certainly take pride in my ranting skills. Yet when I would seek Jim’s advice on the administration’s latest mistake, he would patiently listen and then move us on to what we could in fact do about the situation. That was Jim’s way. When he grew interested in environmental issues he didn’t lament that there was a dearth of sustainability education at St. Olaf; he worked patiently with students, faculty, and staff to help build an amazingly comprehensive program in environmental studies. Jim’s intellectual interests delved into the study of bad news: death, nuclear weapons, hyperconsumerism, and climate change. But his spiritual energy was all tied up in hope and possibility. It’s no surprise that even in his last days, weakened by cancer, Jim carried a plate spilling over with projects and ideas.\n\nWe talked a lot about teaching, too. When I was in a jam I would climb the stairs to his office and if he was free we would head off to the natural lands. One semester when it seemed like none of my classes were working, he patiently listened and then remarked how one of his own courses that term felt like a flop. I thought that if Jim Farrell can have a course go awkwardly that maybe it is ok if some of mine don’t work so well. I learned many things on those long walks. One of the important things was just how to have a good conversation. Jim and I drove once together to the Peace Prize Forum in Moorhead. Over the hours we discussed how to cook for our wives, the sublime delights of fast food (shhh!!!), growing up, growing old, raising kids, and everything else you would imagine talking about on a long car ride with Jim Farrell. When we approached Minneapolis on our return I remarked how much I enjoyed our conversations and he explained to me that a car was a good arrangement for male conversation. He said it was important to sit next to each other, not across from each other. We can open up better sideways, he said. That’s why those walks with Jim were always so effective.\n\nWe talked for many years about teaching a class together but it never seemed to work out. Then Jim’s health convinced me that we needed to make it happen sooner rather than later. In the spring of 2012 we put together a plan to teach two different fall semester courses in the same room at the same time. Mine was an existing So/An course called “Global Interdependence” and he created a new American Studies course called “Global Exchanges.” The idea was that I would teach about cultural flows outside the United States and he would teach about those inside the U.S., with the students then charged with figuring out the connections between them. I picked some of my favorite books (among them Jamaica Kincaid’s <em>A Small Place</em>, Charles Piot’s <em>Remotely Global</em>) and he picked some of his (among them Thomas Scott King’s <em>The Truth About Stories</em>, Mary Catherine Bateson’s <em>Peripheral Visions</em>). We apportioned these into alternating weeks, set up appropriate Moodle forums, and then let the class unfold.\n\nIt was a revelation to be back in Jim’s classroom. I was there as a student, a professor, and also as an anthropologist. I was able to see Jim’s method, up close, from those different perspectives. I quickly was reminded that to call what he did in the classroom a “method” or a “technique” was to misunderstand his professing. He became an excellent teacher not by having methods as much as by having well-integrated beliefs. He had belief in his students, for example. He had faith that they would learn. So in the first days of class he shared this: We were to be equals in the classroom, all of us teaching and learning together. There was to be very little evaluation. Participants in the course, faculty and students alike, were invited to give what they had to each other. You can imagine how all this sounds to students who have grown up in intensely hierarchical classrooms in an age of high stakes testing. I too had my doubts and thought, “will this work?”\n\nJim made it work. The primary assignment for students was to develop a reflective journal about their experience in the class. Jim encouraged students to write about the readings, of course, but also encouraged them to write about their politics, their religious faith, their off-campus work, their majors, and their life after graduation. The fact that the readings tied so well into all of those aspects of student experience made broad thinking flow naturally. The other key assignment was for students to engage on Moodle. To make that happen, Jim also engaged on Moodle. He responded to questions and posed questions of his own. The Moodle forums were uneven but productively uneven. Jim liked to have the journals intersect with Moodle, and one of his favorite journal comments was “you should post this on Moodle.” Not many people did post private journal thoughts on Moodle, but I think his comments gave students confidence that their ideas were worth sharing. And share they did, in all different kinds of class discussion. Jim liked different types of small groups to go with our large, awkward circle of 35 students. But I think his favorite was when I was up front and he would sit with them, his tall frame squeezed into a small Holland Hall desk, just another member of a group generating ideas.\n\nI learned much from Jim’s capacity to motivate students. He was not stingy with praise, and his kind words provided great energy to the class. His genuine affection for college students made his compliments seem entirely natural. He also wasn’t afraid to offer students his opinions. He asked them to share about their lives and thus felt it wasn’t fair for him not to share his own experience in return. He talked about cancer, briefly, but more about his politics, his youth, his writing and his family. I remember him once offering a denunciation of Republican environmental policy (or more precisely the lack thereof) and I recall thinking that he was being rather blunt. Jim trusted that his students would trust him on such matters, and they did. I was pleased that some of the more conservative members of the class felt quite open sharing their contrary ideas in their journals. Jim also trusted that students would do the best that they could. We had a couple of students who did not do much work, which of course distressed me. When I mentioned this to Jim, he said that he had noted it too. He challenged the students who were flagging to exert themselves a little more. But it would be fair to say he wasn’t that worried about whether they did or not. Instead, he was far more interested in the majority of students who were working diligently. The brilliance of Jim’s faith was his ability to get so many students to go far beyond the parameters of the class. We had some journals that were extraordinarily full of sparkling engagement, with the frequent comment “why can’t more classes be like this?”\n\nThere are a lot of reasons why more classes can’t be like Jim’s. Jim liked to teach in the thick of student interest. That’s why he taught American Studies, sustainability and environmental issues, and his beloved Campus Ecology course. Jim’s teaching asked students to think deeply about their personal experience, which is a highly valuable aim. But many college courses are about things distant from student experience, and the faculty challenge is to encourage students to think deeply about those things, too. Jim’s teaching was also embodied teaching, that is it came from Jim’s being. Jim’s character was patient, hopeful, caring and his teaching was too. I wish I shared more of those qualities, but all professors enter the classroom as who they are, which is an authentic way to profess to students.\n\nJim was also who he was because of when he lived. Given the disciplines that he taught, Jim would no doubt lament my inattention to the historical context of his teaching. Jim came of age in the late 1960s, and the cultural ferment of that period left such a mark he wrote a book about it. For him the 1960s were not so much a time of revolt and revolution as they were a spirit of change and a questioning of hierarchy. Though Jim loved intellectual inquiry, he was deeply suspicious of academic pretension. His goofy hat at academic processions served as his sign that gravitas comes not from one’s appearance but from the quality of one’s ideas (he teased me whenever I made the mistake of wearing a tie to work). An academic is a human being with a passion for learning, he felt, not a robe matched to a mortarboard.\n\nJim’s 1960s ethos thus found great sustenance in St. Olaf’s 1960s experiment, the Paracollege. Jim talked often about how his colleagues and students in the Paracollege gave him the courage to teach subversively. For Jim and for many others at St. Olaf the Paracollege was a tiny program that proved to be a deep well of creativity and social capital. Jim would regale students with stories of Paracollege dinners and chess-match discussions. I remember a crazy 1980s campus event where Jim debated a friend in the English department about whether one learns more from studying Dante or shopping malls (any guess of which side Jim defended?). Even after the college closed the Paracollege Jim kept it going, teaching students in independent studies, nurturing new faculty on long walks, and in the process pulling out of that well forgotten buckets of water.\n\nNow in Jim’s absence we are to keep things going. We are fortunate that Jim Farrell remains with us in so many ways, especially in stories. Jim loved to teach the book <em>The Truth About Stories</em> in which Thomas King insists, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” That became a favorite quote because Jim loved stories (and quotes). He invited students to tell him their stories, and he continued the gift exchange by telling them his. He told skillful stories in class, in his many books, chapel talks, speeches, and in his quirky lectures as Dr. America. When he passed away those of us who knew him well wanted nothing more than to gather together and tell the stories.\n\nKing ends each story in his book with this coda:\n<blockquote>Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell it to your children. Turn it into a play. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story.\nYou’ve heard it now.</blockquote>\nWriting this makes me miss my friend all the more. But here’s to continuing the story.\n<h3>Kendra Smith-Howard ’99</h3>\n<em>Associate Professor of History, SUNY Albany</em>\n\nJim Farrell was the first professor I met at Saint Olaf College. I enrolled in his American Studies 101 fall semester of my first year on campus. He saved me from a campus job in the caf by hiring me to be a research assistant, chaired my paracollege senior committee on “Nature and Culture,” hired me as a visiting instructor when I was a grad student, thereby bolstering my CV so that I could land in a tenure-track job. I owe my career in no small way to Jim Farrell.\n\nNo one more profoundly shaped my intellectual development and my view of the world than Jim. No one taught me more about teaching.\n\nJim’s teaching was fun, and touched upon fluffy topics like shopping malls. But Jim did not pander to student interests, or shy away from tough readings. He assigned enduring and important texts: William Cronon’s <em>Nature’s Metropolis</em>, Robert Bellah et. al.’s <em>Habits of the Heart</em>, Thomas Bender’s <em>Toward an Urban Vision</em>. He also taught disciplined writing by doing lots of it, and by inviting students to see the writing process by reading drafts and page-proofs.\n\nMore than topic, what set Jim’s teaching apart was how intensely he engaged with students and how relentlessly he supported them. Jim listened to students. Unfailingly and with abandon, he listened. His eagerness to learn more and read more alongside students – even if it took him into unfamiliar terrain – was also impressive. He was sensitive to students’ insecurities and fears, but also conveyed his relentless and abiding faith in their abilities. Jim was tickled when a normally-reticent student made a penetrating comment. Had Jim not said my senior year “you’re applying to grad school, right?” I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have the confidence to do so. As a teaching assistant at UW-Madison, Jim got a kick out of turning the tables and visiting me during <em>my</em> office hours. His commitment to students lasted long after students left the hill; he read seminar papers and drafts of dissertation chapters – offering penetrating comments (and adding a few puns). Because Jim cared so deeply about students, students confided in him and cried in his office about things beyond academics: faith, love, death, assault. And they found in Jim a patient, kind, and compassionate mentor and friend.\n\nJim’s teaching fostered idealism. He assigned fiction that imagined a better world. But his idealism was never pie-in-the-sky, but grounded. He offered practical steps to stave off defeatism. One key example was backwards thinking: start with the world you want, and then imagine what would be necessary for that to happen. Then plan backwards from that to conceive of the necessary pre-conditions. Another strategy that empowered students was asking students to treat campus as a laboratory for social change – annotating drinking fountains and dorm rooms with captions might seem silly, but such tasks served as vehicles for much larger thinking about how to live more lightly on the planet. Idealistic and earnest though he was, Jim was hardly pretentious or preachy.\n\nJim had fun. He festooned his syllabi with comic strips and cartoons, and punctuated conversations with poetry. The puns. Oh, the puns. He delivered them with a twinkle in his eye and a joyous grin. They were funny and punchy, but also symbolized something more: the playful thoughtfulness with which Jim approached daily life.\n\nI am a better scholar and a better person thanks to Jim Farrell. He was so compassionate a teacher, so gentle a being on the earth, so curious a mind that I know I will never be his equal. But through his teaching, Jim imprinted these qualities on his students. His example inspires and coaches, even as we feel acutely feel his absence.\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<img class=\" size-medium wp-image-883 aligncenter\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/farrell-hat-bw-280x263.jpg\" alt=\"Dr. America\" width=\"280\" height=\"263\" />\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Jim Farrell (1949-2013)</p>','Faculty Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-autosave-v1','','','2015-04-23 01:48:07','2015-04-23 01:48:07','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-autosave-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(870,6,'2015-04-21 03:07:28','2015-04-21 03:07:28','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-868\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell-630x419.jpg\" alt=\"Jim Farrell\" width=\"630\" height=\"419\" /></a>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em></p>\r\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em></p>','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:07:28','2015-04-21 03:07:28','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(871,6,'2015-04-21 03:08:53','2015-04-21 03:08:53','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-868\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell-630x419.jpg\" alt=\"Jim Farrell\" width=\"630\" height=\"419\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em>\r\n\r\n<em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em>\r\n<h2>Jim Farrell As Teacher</h2>\r\nReflections from St. Olaf Faculty','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:08:53','2015-04-21 03:08:53','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),(872,6,'2015-04-21 03:41:41','2015-04-21 03:41:41','<a href=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell.jpg\"><img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-868\" src=\"http://natureofcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/jim-farrell-630x419.jpg\" alt=\"Jim Farrell\" width=\"630\" height=\"419\" /></a>\r\n\r\n<em>At the start of the 2013–14 academic year at St. Olaf, faculty were mindful of the loss of our friend and colleague Jim Farrell, who died the previous summer. We considered the immense significance for the college of Jim’s teaching philosophy and practices. We mourned the loss of a great role model and mentor. We mourned that the college had lost an exemplar of a particular understanding of the academy’s work. </em>\r\n\r\n<em>So we collected – from colleagues who knew, taught with, or admired Jim – brief reflections about his teaching: short reports of how Jim’s manner, matter, and practice influenced us and the college for the good. As a collection, these reports offer satisfying personal remembrance, fitting tribute, and good service to the colleagues and students Jim loved and served so well. </em>\r\n<h2>Jim Farrell As Teacher</h2>\r\nReflections from St. Olaf Faculty\r\n\r\n<strong>Charles Taliaferro</strong>\r\n\r\nPhilosophy, Environmental Studies, Paracollege\r\n\r\nThree memories of Jim as professor. First, no one I know has ever come close to Jim’s patience and ability to ask a question and to wait in silence until a student responds. I was not surprised when one student told me Jim went 20 minutes waiting for a response. Second, on too many occasions to recall, Jim would work with, assist, and engage at length with students regardless of whether the students were enrolled in his courses. For many years, this stood out to me as the high water mark we should all aspire to. Third, I recall Jim running on campus. And every time I saw him run, I thought he is running from one great meeting with students and the time got away from him, and he is now running toward another meeting and he does not want to be late.\r\n\r\n<strong>W. Bruce Benson</strong>\r\n\r\nCollege Pastor, emeritus\r\n<p class=\"p1\">I admired Jim Farrell. It is difficult, maybe even unwise, to distill the many reasons down to one meta-reason, but I’m going to try. Faithfulness. I admired the unswerving, unwavering, undiluted faithfulness of his humanity. Jim didn’t teach well because he wanted to be noted for it, he taught well – amazingly well – because he was faithful. Faithful to his students, his subject, and the larger world. He wasn’t creative and imaginative because he thought being so was cool, but because his imagination was fired by faithfulness. He wanted to be faithful to life, truth, knowledge, community. Faithfulness pushed him to imagine better, more honest ways of living and understanding. He wasn’t on the cutting edge of social and ethical issues because he was a thrill seeker or an attention grabber, but because that’s where faithfulness to justice and the spirit of God compelled him to be. Even his gentleness – it did not come from timidity or a need to be liked, it came from his faithfulness to the dignity of others, his recognition that we all bear the image of God. Thanks be to God for Jim Farrell.</p>','Reflections','','inherit','open','open','','862-revision-v1','','','2015-04-21 03:41:41','2015-04-21 03:41:41','',862,'http://natureofcollege.org/2015/04/862-revision-v1/',0,'revision','',0),