Students weigh environmental issues during J-Term

Hiking to the Little Greenbrier Schoolhouse and touring the Walker Sisters Cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park can make lasting impressions on 21st-Century students – especially if the air is frigid and the ground is frozen.

“Experiential” is the name of the game in FRS130: Perspectives on the Environment, and for that first week of January Term, students are asked to experience a little of what life was like – sans automobiles and electric heat – for early settlers.

“Someone can read article after article on the way that European settlers adapted to the frontier land of East Tennessee and not really understand the settlers’ perspective on the environment,” explained Dr. Drew Crain, associate professor of biology and coordinator for FRS130. “But when students actually walk the steps of these settlers and touch the buildings that their hands built, they are experiencing the environment as the settlers did.”

While students have similar discussions and experiences about the historical perspectives on the environment during the first week of January Term, their second week is spent intensely studying and researching one of four subtopics: Energy, forestry, solid waste or water. Students have the opportunity to sign up for the one subject that most fits with their interests.

“Each topic has different trips and data collection projects,” Crain explained. “For instance, in forestry, we examine how forests are managed on a small scale (from 10 to 1,000 acres) through exercises in the College Woods and on a large scale (hundreds of thousands of acres) through exercises in the Cherokee National Forest.”

Students enrolled in the water sections visit water treatment facilities, and research projects include sampling various water sources and testing for variables such as pH, nitrate and fecal coliform bacteria presence.

Those studying energy focus their discussions and research on renewable energy sources. They visit wind-generated power facilities and homes powered with solar energy and conduct projects on hybrid vehicles.

Solid waste groups (also called “garbology groups”) visit local landfills that use different means of waste processing.

“They also have the odoriferous – but not onerous – task of examining one family’s trash for a week,” Crain said. “Students are always enlightened to discover how much waste a family can generate, and it is always fun to see how much observers of trash can surmise about the family.”

The culmination of FRS130 is students’ formation of their personal environmental ethic. In the third and final week, all students take part in a simulation of a congressional hearing on whether tax dollars should be spent to purchase private lands for increasing existing national park or national forest lands. In this simulation, students are assigned a character (e.g., hunter, land developer, mayor, senator, forester) and present an argument based on the perspective of that character. Such an exercise emphasizes critical thinking skills as well as the complexity involved in environmental protection.

Also during the final week, students and faculty attend a lecture by an invited guest who discusses his or her environmental ethic. And on the last day of January Term, students are required to answer the question “What is my Environmental Ethic?” in a 750-word essay written in class. FRS130 isn’t the last time they’ll see – or reflect on – their ethic. In Ethics 490: Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Ethical Thought, professors hand out those three-year-old compositions and ask the authors, “What’s changed?”

“The experiential nature of FRS130 is the reason that it is so successful at being an ‘eye opener’ for students,” Crain said. “Most all students leave the class with a much greater awareness and appreciation of the environment and environmental resources.”

The environmental ethic written by Erin Mentzer ’08 last year proves this. Prior to the course, she said she recycled and didn’t litter, but that was the extent of her environmental concern.

“Like many others, I, in theory, wanted to preserve nature’s beauty,” she wrote in her environmental ethic essay. “However, I assumed that this massive task was best left to others to implement. In essence, I was choosing not to actively participate in caring for the environment; I wanted to enjoy the benefits of clean air and water without doing the work to ensure purity. After completing J-term, I have to honestly say that I am far from where I began, but equally far from where I would like to be …”