Professor Nancy Langston, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Fall 2007 Lectures Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:55-10:45, 6210   SOC SCI

Office hours Mondays, 11:30-1:30, A109 Russell Labs (note new location)

emails (type these into your email program without the spaces--we put them in to deter spammers)

  • Professor Langston: nelangst @ wisc.edu 
  • Ann Carlson anncarlson @ wisc.edu
  • Liz Mills esmills @ wisc.edu
  • Paul Heiberger heiberger @ wisc.edu
  • Christine Vatovec vatovec @ wisc.edu

COURSE DESCRIPTION 

When you look at a tree, what do you see? What language would you use to describe that tree? The scientific vocabulary of ecology? The metaphorical language of literature, poetry, or art? Or would your frame of reference be economic? The choice is endless.  Moreover, such choices have changed over time; we do not look at trees in the same way our ancestors did.

Environmental controversies have their roots in deep and often bitter disagreements about how different groups see nature, and how these groups envision the proper human relationship to nature.  Should we control nature, and reshape it to purely human, utilitarian ends?  Should we preserve it completely untouched?  Or should we find some other path between these two extremes?  Such questions have critical implications for the land, and for the human communities that depend on that land.

Complicated relationships develop between ecosystems and human cultures.  Stories are central to these relationships; cultures construct nature by telling stories about what nature is and what nature means to them.  Relationships between stories and land go two ways:  the land itself shapes the stories people tell about their relationships to that land.  And in turn, stories affect the ways people change the land.  Trees get cut, grasslands get plowed, wilderness areas get established, and predators get eradicated, depending on the web of myths, stories, and perceptions people bring with them.

The goal of this class is to explore these changing ideas about nature, in order to understand the roots of current environmental dilemmas.  Central themes will include environmental justice, changing perceptions of the relationship between nature and culture; cultural conflicts between Native Americans and Euro-Americans over land; the ways economic and political institutions affect ideas about the land; and the ecological effects of changing scientific paradigms.