Courses in this cluster will examine the tenuous position that the world finds itself in today, including the ways that humans on individual and societal levels have impacted the global climate, how we measure those impacts, and the global and demographic populations most dramatically affected.

Associated Course Pairings:

Course Descriptions

CC101: Environmental Crisis & the Anthropocene in Global and World Literature

Instructor: Ammar Naji
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
Block: 1

CC120: Discerning and Writing Earth’s Record from Rocks

Instructor: Christine Siddoway
Block: 2

This course introduces writing as a mechanism for inquiry, original expression, and discovery of the ‘fossilized’ record of Earth processes and past environments contained in the rocks of the Colorado Front Range. Through visits to local parks and open spaces that center upon world-renowned geological features, students will acquire observations and engage in critical thinking that provides a foundation for writing in the disciplines of geology, environmental science, and the natural sciences more broadly. The course will encourage students to ‘read’ the rocks through use of geological principles that guide observations and reduce the “noise” in nature, then compare their own experiences with indigenous oral histories and with literature that communicate compelling hypotheses about dynamic Earth events. Characteristics of geology discourse and rhetoric will be examined, and students will employ writing approaches suited to varied audiences. An intertwined practice of research and composition will offer the means to communicate about and increase understanding of past events that humans did not witness. By writing the record of Earth, students will gain a greater ability to engage in original scholarship in the natural sciences, experience scientific discovery, translate difficult concepts, and communicate new knowledge in impactful ways that engage diverse audiences.

1-2 afternoon field trips a week, and one overnight trip to the CC cabin.

CC103: Mathematics for Sustainability

Instructor: Mike Siddoway
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Formal Reasoning & Logic
Block: 1

“Mathematics for Sustainability” will cover topics connected to resource assessment including measurement, estimation, equilibrium and flows. We will also study energy stocks and ecological systems/networks; in particular energy flows in the climate system. Various models for growth will be discussed. Exponential and logarithm functions will be used as first approximations of growth (decay) behavior, and logistic models will be studied when considering environmental limits to change. Systems, connections and feedbacks will be focused on in specific case studies selected from (depending on the interests of students) control of wildfires, recycling, population growth and questions of control, genetic engineering and the future of food, nuclear power, efficient use of electricity at home, solar energy, the ecological impacts of electric vehicles, and federal predator controls in the service of the livestock industry. Basic statistics and probability theory will be used to understand and measure risk, payoffs, and when possible, to make careful predictions. Students will complete an individual research project presented at the end of the course that will make use of mathematical tools to better understand a topic in sustainability.

CC120: Documenting, Interpreting, and Writing the Human Past

Instructor: Scott Ingram
Block: 2

How do we know what happened in the past when we don't have any written or oral records of what occurred? The answer is archaeology -- the scientific study of the past through the material traces of past human activity. Archaeology, a sub-discipline of anthropology, seeks to create new knowledge of the world by documenting and interpreting the diversity of past human ways of doing and being. In this course, we will focus on how writing functions to produce and communicate archaeological and anthropological knowledge of both the past and present. You will learn how interpretations of the past are created and evaluated by archaeologists and how these practices have generated positive and negative consequences. To develop your own writing, you will practice documenting, mapping, and interpreting past human activities at archaeological sites using archaeological, historical, and anthropological modes of inquiry.

2-3 8:30-5 field trips.

CC104: Religion, Race and the Climate Catastrophe

Instructor: Yogesh Chandrani
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Historical Perspective
Block: 1

The unfolding planetary crisis has led to a resurgence of discourse on the key question of capitalism and its relationship to the climate catastrophe. Thus, the term “capitalocene” has emerged as an alternative to the dominant category “anthropocene,” which obfuscates the problem by indiscriminately assigning agency for the catastrophe to an abstract human. There is a growing recognition that the costs of our climate catastrophe are not evenly distributed and are being largely borne by the peoples of the global south and by racial minorities in Europe and the United States. This course is premised on the assumption that the unprecedented event of a species—“human beings”—emerging as a geological force demands a more fundamental interrogation of the modern human condition (i.e., the historical processes that contributed to the making of modern human beings). In the course, we will investigate the history and system of the “capitalocene,” paying particular attention to the constitutive role of modern colonialism in the birth of racial capitalism and in the violent displacement of understandings of nature that underpin the cosmologies and traditions of indigenous and colonized societies. We will be concerned with exploring the emergence of religion as a site of epistemological doubt and struggle and how religious communities respond to the upheavals caused by the climate catastrophe.

2-3 day trips to the Fine Arts Center at CC.

CC120: Writing Black Lives: The Theory and Literary Tradition of African American Autobiography

Instructor: Anbegwon Atuire
Block: 2

This course introduces students to African American autobiographical writing arguably one of the earliest forms of the African American literary tradition. We will engage with readings from the Slave Narratives to contemporary African American autobiographies reflecting the lived experience of Blackness in the United States of America. We will read and discuss critical scholarship on some autobiographies and the literary tradition of African American autobiography. As a first-year writing class, we will devote some of the course to individual exploratory writing in autobiographical essays. Writing is central to knowledge creation. The process of writing is critical to meaning making. We will analyze assumptions about literacy writing as a contested colonized and racial space.

One day trip to Five Points Denver, possible evening attendance at a performance required.