ENVS246 - Spirituality in the Age of Global Warming

We are living in the midst of one of the most severe crisis in the Earth's history. Science confirms the glaciers are melting, hurricanes are growing more intense, and the oceans are rising. But there is also a deeply spiritual dimension to global warming that does not factor into the scientific explanations. This part of the problem has been more powerfully expressed in film, literature, and art. We will be looking at films like Lee's "When the Levees Broke," about how the people of New Orleans turned to music and storytelling to rebuild their communities in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Linda Hogan's novel, "Solar Storm" which explores how Native American women drw upon spirituality to heal their community after a dam flooded their ancestral homeland. The class will also work on an ongoing research project in partnership with th eCanadian government and Ojibwe First Nations who submitted a successful UNESCO World Heritage Site application to preserve the boreal forest and the Native people's traditional knowledge about their land. The class will be working on an interactive map to document how photographs, oral histories, and artwork helped convince UNESCO to preserve the land and the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of the people who have lived on that land for thousands of years.