Instructor: Joost van Haren
Tues & Thurs | 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM | In Person
Spring 2025
This course explores how the culture we grow up in and how/where we live have strong implications for how we see and treat the world. The current dominant culture focuses on our environment as a resource to be used or extracted. This has caused climate change, severe loss of global species diversity, and profoundly changed how we live. Our fundamental disconnect from our global environment only perpetuates these problems and it is not sustainable. As humans, we need to reconnect with the world around us and learn how to be more open---physically and emotionally---to the beauty of diversity and re-learn to read the landscape and ecosystems. In this course, we will move through units that explore many places on the UA campus and around Tucson which is a UNESCO World Food Heritage City. On this journey, we will experience our environment not only through sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch, but also through proprioception (sense of our bodies in space), nociception (sense of pain, which we prefer to avoid) and thermoception (sense of temperature). We will explore the moral and emotional senses, guided by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and UN Sustainable Development Goals. We will use interdisciplinary thinking to interpret information along the way and apply interdisciplinary thinking to specific, real world projects.