Earth's
Eye
"I can be as jubilant
indoors, listening to Schubert or Scott Joplin, as when sauntering
underneath a mackerel sky on a day striped yellow, red, and green. Indeed
the density of sensations in which we live is such that one can do
both-enjoy a virtuoso pianist through a headset outside. We live two lives
or more in one nowadays, with our scads of travel, absurd excesses of
unread reading material, the barrage of Internet and TV screens, wallpaper
music, the serializing of polygamy and the elongation of youth blurring
old age.
A sort of mental gridlock sometimes blocks out the amber pond, the
mackerel sky, the seething leaves in a fresh breeze up in a canopy of
trees, and the Walkman's lavish outpourings of genius too. Even when we go for a walk the data jam."
-Edward Hoagland, Sierra
Prof and Course Data
marty feeney, ph.d.
feeneym@central.edu
martyfeeney@yahoo.com
216 jordan hall, box 22
office phone-5138
phone home-641.628.1153
phone ray-5239
office hours: mwf-1-2 p.m.
tr-9:30-10 a.m.
professional
career web pages
EcoTexts
Intersections: The Human
Place in the Global Environment
ed. by Mary Stark, Haileigh Meyers, Walt Cannon,
Jen Myers, Robin Martin,
Greg Shepherd, Keith Yanner, David Timmer, and Louise Zaffiro
"We must learn to reawaken
and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite
expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest
sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact that the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is
something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more
glorious to carve and paint the the very atmosphere and medium through
which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the
day, that is the highest of arts.
I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it
had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived."
-Henry David Thoreau
A Pocket Style Manual
(3rd Edition)
Diana Hacker
"Quick reference for writers
and researchers. Ax a writer you can turn to it for advice on revising
sentences for clarity, grammar, punctuation, and mechanics. As a
researcher you can refer to its tips on finding and evaluating sources and
to its color-coded sections on writing MLA, APA, and Chicago-style
papers."
10,080
Minutes Axiom
"There are 10,080 minutes in a
week. We meet for 150 minutes in a week. Do not schedule any activity (Wal-Mart
adventure, advisor meetings, Red Rock keggers, doctor's appointment,
video game championships, a Tremors marathon) during our 50 minutes.
Schedule everything else during the remaining 9,930 minutes. You know
right now that we meet MWF at noon and sometimes Thursday's at 11 a.m.
And 9,930 minutes should cover anything else. You are spending about $45
per class. If you skip 15 Friday classes you might as well take $625 out
of your wallet right now and burn it."
Classic Intersections Quotations
The Future of Life
Edward O. Wilson
"The race is now on between
the techno-scientific forces that are destroying the living environment
and those that can be harnessed to save it. We are inside a bottleneck
of overpopulation and wasteful consumption. If the race is won, humanity
can emerge in a far better condition. than when it entered, and with
most of the diversity of life intact."
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson
"There was once a town in the
heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its
surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous
farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring,
white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and
maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across
a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently
crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings."
Earth Odyssey: Around the
World in Search of our Environmental Future
Mark Hertsgaard
"If poverty is the biggest
environmental challenge of our time, however, wealth is the biggest
environmental burden. The consumption patterns of the nearly one billion
people who live in the affluent world of Europe, North America, and
other industrialized countries cause much more environmental damage-more
greenhouse gas emissions, more forest cutting, more soil, air, and water
pollution-that the strivings of the impoverished human majority.
Measured by population, Chinese outnumber Americans nearly five to one.
Yet the United States dwarfs China's total environmental impact because
Americans consume 53 times as many goods and services per capita."
The
Journal Safari
This is personal. A journal by
definition creates an immediacy between author and experience that
cannot be shoe-horned into a multiple-guess structure filled with
PSYCHO-metric
error. Every week you are expected to respond to readings listed on the
EcoText page.
The readings include
bookstore texts,
photocopied classic
texts,
Intersections essays
published in CentralMania.com, and
specific sections on
my Intersections web site.
You can write or type your responses (typed preferred). If you write please
be sure that your writing can be deciphered by more than the sharpest
observatory lenses. If you type it, try not to use freaky fonts that
look like calligraphic hallucinations. The journal is worth 35 percent
of the final grade. If you are relentlessly organized about this, do the
readings faithfully, respond specifically, make connections endlessly,
intersect infinitely, this experience will really pump up that first semester
GPA. A great
journal will illustrate concretely that you have interacted eloquently
with the readings. And it's on your own time, in your own space, without
the pressure of knowing everything for 50 minutes on a Tuesday, midterm
week.
So read the weekly assignment listed
on the EcoText
web page. Respond to each reading by
focusing on concepts, ideas, quotations that you think are significant.
Respond personally too. Personal examples, experiences, attitudes should
intersect with the readings. Otherwise this is just high school and we
are just dancing the academic funk. And it's disco...
No funky disco!
Environmental
Crime Scene Investigators (ECSI)
One of the themes of this course
focuses on apocalyptic visions of an environment battered, polluted,
poisoned, ravaged, abused.... So as a class we will become
investigators...become more aware of crimes against the environment and
look for clues that might help us manage the outcomes and effects-find
solutions... Last year, Iowa implemented a new policy to limit diesel
fumes from school bus exhaust. Last summer summer the heat wave in Europe created a problem for nuclear power plants in France because the power
demands generated a more frequent release of hot reactor cooling
water into rivers. And everyone worried about the effects on fish,
plant life, and the entire marine ecological system. In Boston the
harbor seems to have been cleaned up but the nearby beaches are still
registering high bacteria counts. What to do?
SOLUTIONS!
So I will ask you to work in teams as Environmental
Crime Scene Investigators but not as politicians.
Listed on
TideChart
page. We will research environmental crime and talk
about effects and possible solutions. This semester of Intersections our
focus will be on
SOLUTIONS.
We will search for expensive and cheap solutions, in- the-box and
outside-the-box solutions, and solutions for the present day and the
future as far as 2050. How can we keep the air, water, and soil safe for
our kids and grand kids?
We get very professional, I
will call CBS and request a slot on prime time for another crime scene
investigators show! CSI Pella... mmm... maybe a Friday night show.
The Motion Picture Experience
In the past 25 years, the academic
space shared by professor and students has moved beyond the chalkboard
jungle and the manufactured note-taking-robotics to an experiential
perspective that motivates personal involvement. In this class we will
experience motion pictures as a way to explore the five common outcomes
expected in a course called Intersections (Learner/Observer/Interpreter/Citizen/Consumer).
These motion picture experiences will not be Saturday night
popcorn/candy/soda escapades. Though candy might be involved. No, we
will view these motion pictures as texts, and
TEXTS
as significant as any printed text in this
course. So we will not be wheeling a TV/VCR into the classroom with the
promise that this will be "educational." No, we will meet in the
Dolby-Sound big screen van Emmerik studio. These sessions will be as
important as any classroom experience. And the prof will actually be
there too!
Geisler
Library Matrix
Intersections site
Wonderful site for exploring the human impact on the global
environment. Range of topics, issues, controversies, journal and newspaper
articles, studies, issue reviews will let us ZOOM in on the world, the
USA, and Iowa. Visit the site. Click on anything that interests you. Learn
how to navigate.
Indexes and Databases
Wow! Click on
EBSCOhost.
Research any and all environmental probes. Type in Chernobyl. Find any
journal articles? How does radiation affect the human organism?
LexisNexis
Type in Chesapeake Bay
pollution. What did you find? Good place to investigate environmental
crime scene.
The
Plagiarist
Do not turn yourself into a cheat.
The cheater, the copier, the research paper thief, the internet
cannibal, the human GPA parasite feed off the creepy academic
underworld where everything scams and fakes and rationalizes until the
behavior normalizes into "cool not your scribblings dude!" If
you miss a deadline, get an extension. If you are disorganized,
procrastinate, drink too much, sleep too much, zone out on cable, get
depressed...do not add cheat to that list. Make it a short list.
ADA
Statement
Central College abides by interpretations of the Americans with
Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that
stipulates no student shall be denied the benefits of an education
“solely by reason of a handicap.” Disabilities covered by law
include, but are not limited to, learning disabilities, hearing, sight
or mobility impairments, and other health related impairments. If you
have a documented disability that may have some impact on your work in
this class and for which you may require accommodations, please see me
and Nancy Kroese, Director of Student Support Services and Disability
Services Coordinator, (x5247) so that such accommodations may be
arranged.
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