Bill Currie is developing a new undergraduate course for fall 2018, titled “Sustainability Issues in the Great Lakes Region.”  This new course, listed as Environ 305, is offered as part of the recently re-organized Program in the Environment, a joint undergraduate major between the School for Environment and Sustainability and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.

Brief course description:

The Great Lakes region includes the 5 Great Lakes, 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 address eight sustainability issues or ‘wicked’ environmental problems in the 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.

The course will use a case study approach. Rather than learning general principles about a single discipline, students will undertake an in-depth analysis of each issue, building multiple layers of understanding that draw from a range of disciplines and perspectives.  Each case focuses on a specific, real-world issue that involves aspects of environmental science or ecology, economics and market failures, regulation at multiple levels of government, local jobs, legal issues, connections across scales and boundaries, and stakeholders from different cultures who hold different values and perspectives.  These eight case studies will be covered:

• Lake Michigan water diversion in Waukesha, WI
• Lake Erie harmful algal blooms
• Enbridge Line 5, an oil pipeline that runs beneath the Mackinac Straits
• Forest loss, fragmentation, and conservation in the region
• Argo dam in Ann Arbor
• Mining, in particular metallic sulfide mining on the Michigan UP
• Monarch butterfly decline
• Coastal wetland restoration and invasive Phragmites

Students will learn to examine complexities, tradeoffs, and joint goals and outcomes for sustainability issues using critical thinking and multiple perspectives. Assignments will include web-based research, blog posts, and synthesis writing assignments.