Handbook : Unit informationEdith Cowan University

Faculty of Education and Arts

School: Communications and Arts

This unit information may be updated and amended immediately prior to semester. To ensure you have the correct outline, please check it again at the beginning of semester.

• Unit Title

  Environmental Humanities

• Unit Code

  CCA3101

• Year

  2015

• Enrolment Period

  1

• Version

  1

• Credit Points

  15

• Full Year Unit

  N

• Mode of Delivery

  On Campus
  

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Description

Many environmental issues confronting the world today have a human dimension involving people?s relationship with the earth. This unit explores this relationship beginning with a historical account of the cultural construction of nature. The unit then moves to a consideration of landscape aesthetics, focussing particularly on photography, as one of the major ways in which we relate to nature and nature is mediated to us. The unit concludes by looking at Aboriginal Country, bioregion, livelihood and symbiosis as providing alternative, and even oppositional, ways of being and living with the earth that are environmentally sustainable.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this unit students should be able to:

1. Analyse the role landscape aesthetics plays in representations of nature.
2. Critique the cultural history of conservation landscapes such as national parks and wilderness areas.
3. Discuss a range of environmental issues.
4. Discuss concepts of environmental sustainability and how these concepts are applied.
5. Examine the history of nature as a cultural construction.

Unit Content

1. Cultural history of national parks and wilderness.
2. Environmental sustainability.
3. Landscape aesthetics and conservation counter-aesthetics.
4. The history of the concept of nature and its relationship with culture.

Additional Learning Experience Information

Lectures, Screenings, Reading, Writing, and Tutorials.

Assessment

GS1 GRADING SCHEMA 1 Used for standard coursework units

Students please note: The marks and grades received by students on assessments may be subject to further moderation. All marks and grades are to be considered provisional until endorsed by the relevant Board of Examiners.

Text References

• ^ Giblett, R. (2009). Landscapes of culture and nature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
• ^ Giblett, R. (2011). People and places of nature and culture. Bristol: Intellect Books.
• Buell, L. (2005). The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination. New York-: Wiley-Blackell.
• Giblett, R. (1996). Postmodern wetlands: Culture, history, ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Giblett, R., & Tolonen, J. (2012). Photography and landscape. Bristol: Intellect.
• Gibson, R. (1995). Camera natura: Landscape in Australian feature films. In J. Frow and M. Morris (Eds). Australian cultural studies: A reader. (pp.209-221). St Leonards: Allen and Unwin.
• Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Williams, R. (1973). The country and the city. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Gore, A. (2006). An inconvenient truth. Paramount Pictures DVD.
• Virilio, P. (2009). Grey ecology. D. Burk (trans.) New York: Atropos.
• Wilson, A. (1992). The culture of nature: North American landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
• ? (2008). The body of nature and culture. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: Women, ecology and the scientific revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
• Ryan, J. (2012). Green sense: The aesthetics of plants, place and language. Oxford: Trueheart Press.

Journal References

• Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.
• Habitat.
• The Ecologist.
• Transformations.

^ Mandatory reference

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