The Great Lakes region includes the 5 Great Lakes and a bi-national political boundary that includes parts of eight US states and Canada. It is an economically important region, with seven major cities and is home to over 30 million people. It has extreme variability in land use and human impacts, from pristine, wildland ecosystems in the north to completely human-dominated landscapes of industrial agriculture in the south, with fragmented forests and rural landscapes in between.
This course will use a case-study approach. Rather than learning general principles about a single discipline, students undertake an in-depth analysis of eight sustainability issues, or ‘wicked’ environmental issues in the Great Lakes region. Wicked issues are those that cross disciplines, cross cultures, cross ecosystems and scales, and that have multiple types of stakeholders that often do not agree on the definition of the problem.
Students will learn to examine complexities, tradeoffs, and joint goals and outcomes for sustainability issues using critical thinking and multiple perspectives. Each case features a guest speaker from industry, government, or an NGO who is an expert on the topic.
Assignments include interactive class activities, web-based research, writing blog posts and writing two papers on case studies that you select. There are no exams. There will be an optional field trip to one of our case study sites.