Faculty, student interest drives expansion of sustainability curriculum

Claire Greenstein, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, plans to implement sustainability education into the Transitional Justice course she is developing for the fall 2022 semester.

After a conflict, or period of authoritarian rule, ends, “how do societies — governments, perpetrators, victims — democratize and rebuild?” Greenstein said. “That is what transitional justice is about, and that often has to do with sustainability. Many times, conflicts start because of economic inequality or the long-held grievances of people living in untenable circumstances. The literature shows you can prevent conflict recurrence by implementing justice and economic, societal and human development in sustainable ways, so you don’t find yourself in the same place.”

Sustainability is something that interests her, and it is a topic that students are “really interested in, but as a political scientist it’s not something I have training in,” Greenstein said. The Red Mountain Project was “a great way to get a crash course in sustainability.”

Mercy Aula, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, is expanding on sustainability topics in two courses she teaches: ENH 600, “Fundamentals of Environmental Health,” and ENH 697, “Environmental Health Perspectives.”

Sustainability has always been a part of those classes, but “I was looking to expand on those topics and make them more hands-on,” Aula said.

She says she found inspiration in activities at the Red Mountain Project workshop, including an exercise that challenged groups of faculty to generate teaching ideas from randomly assigned photographs. “Our team was asked to analyze a photo of a cafeteria and describe elements of sustainability based on the picture,” Aula said. “Among members of my group were two engineers, a writer, physicists, a filmmaker and myself, and we all brainstormed and put our ideas together. The breakout sessions were really impactful to me.”

For her fall course on environmental health, Aula will assign students a paper in which they must identify elements of their communities that are sustainable from economic, social and environmental perspectives, as well as gaps that exist. “But I was even able to immediately add some new elements to my summer classes as well,” she said.

Benjamin Meadows, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Economics, has updated his “Natural Resource Economics” course with new assignments and perspectives from the Red Mountain Project. “I was drawn to the Red Mountain Project because a lot of the work done in environmental economics — one of my fields of research — is deeply interdisciplinary,” Meadows said. His dissertation research, for instance, leaned on “the work of mathematicians, ecologists, fisheries scientists and natural resource modelers,” he said. “Additionally, my first year at UAB was the first year of COVID, so I’ve been eager to build relationships across campus.” 

In one Red Mountain Project group exercise, “we were encouraged to investigate the natural systems found in one photo,” Meadows said. “Our group’s photo had pictures of bee houses, bat houses and rodent houses, which led to the question ‘Which species should we harbor, and which species should we eliminate as a nuisance?’ This, in turn, sparked a robust conversation about the difference between pests and valued species.” Often, the species that are labeled as invasive are those whose costs exceed their benefits, such as fire ants, silver carp and kudzu, Meadows said, “while species that are still non-native but are perceived as valuable — brown trout, rainbow trout, earthworms — are verbally exempt from this label.” Similarly, some native species with benefits that are unquantified or unperceived — bats, which are pollinators and provide pest control, or carpenter bees and termites, which are dead-wood managers, for example — become labeled as pests and the public requests control strategies for them, Meadows points out.

In his spring 2023 offering of “Natural Resource Economics,” “I want to bring this conversation into the classroom,” Meadows said. His students will be assigned to economically validate one species as a pest or asset “to illuminate the conversation.”

Stephen Merritt, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, is developing a new course on the Anthropocene. This is a geological period “defined as the time when human activity has really impacted the Earth in an extremely significant way,” starting with the development of industrialization, he said. “Issues about the Anthropocene are very relevant to the world that we live in,” including economic issues, the food system and globalization. “In this course, students can better understand how they fit into the world around them.”

One major dimension of this is “global connectedness,” Merritt said. “It is a way to look at the Earth around us and recognize the human impact and how involved in that we all are.”

The Red Mountain Project itself emphasized connection, he adds. “I really appreciated, coming out of the COVID pandemic, having interaction with colleagues across UAB and realizing that issues of sustainability are so important across disciplines and subjects,” Merritt said.

Kyle Grimes, Ph.D., professor in the Department of English, is introducing new material on the Anthropocene to his existing course on nature writing, which “considers the relationship between human beings and the environment within the Western literary tradition,” he said. “We start with the two creation stories in Genesis, we work our way through the nature writing of people like Wordsworth and Thoreau, then — following the scientific revolution instigated by Darwin — we look at how humankind’s dominance of the natural world (i.e., the Anthropocene) necessitates a new ethic of sustainability.” 

Through classic writers as well as modern writers such as Rachel Carson and Wendell Berry, “we will consider some of the questions about Nature that have been significant in our history and that have bearing on current environmental discussion,” Grimes wrote in his syllabus, including “Are natural resources here for human use, or do we damage Nature by using natural resources? Does natural beauty express some genuine moral or ethical values? Is there some deeply spiritual quality in Nature that we need to protect, or is Nature just our name for a set of biochemical and mechanical processes that are indifferent to human desires?”

Although he has been teaching the course for the past several years, “I haven’t been completely satisfied with the final weeks’ content on the Anthropocene,” Grimes said. “The stipend and the RMP more generally have given me both the encouragement and the materials with which to connect the abstract conceptual aspects of the class with the very tangible activities and sustainability projects going on right here at UAB.”