Here I'll collect my thoughts and links relevant to my participation in planning and development of this Program. I was a member of the Advisory Group on International Education from which Global Stewardship developed, and I wrote a variety of memos, comments and reports on that account between May 1999 and March 2001. I'll link some of them in what follows, but the whole collection is here. I've also been at work on a pilot for one of Global Stewardship's foundation courses, in Human Geography. The syllabus for the course (University Scholars 202) is an evolving document.
12 September 2001
The events of yesterday seem to change everything, in ways that are at the very least unpredictable. They make Global Stewardship if anything more important, and should suggest to us that we broaden the purview of our notion of Stewardship. We live in a world that is connected in many ways, some of which we only appreciate when events present us with new evidence. It is more than ever essential to see that world as a whole, and to develop the means to protect that world as a whole.
One of the threats to the connected world, particularly noticeable today, is a level of hatred such that people are willing to sacrifice themselves --they have the power of being willing to die, against which there are few defenses. A critical mass of such people means that civilized society is not sustainable, so we must find the means not to create the conditions under which such levels of hatred thrive and grow. This means, among other things, that we must develop the means to understand, control, prevent and heal the local warfare that feeds such hatreds.
One of the things we need to do as a committee is develop our own sense of what 'Stewardship' is meant to encompass. At the beginning of this year I did some investigations into how the phrase "Global Stewardship" has been used, and summarized what I found on a Web page (I do a lot of that...). Recent events suggest that I should revisit those links in some detail.
Another piece of the puzzle is the 'Global', and what it really means to adopt a global perspective. A review of Stuart Pimm's The World According to Pimm: A Scientist Audits the Earth by AAAS President Peter Raven (Why we must worry) in a recent issue of Science provoked me to amazon.com the book, and a brisk read of the first half led me to make a page for Human Geography summarizing some of its features. It seems to me that Pimm's book would make a worthy book-in-common for the committee, since it gives an unprecedented and up to date summary of issues (mostly environmental and scientific) at a global scale. Another that I've recently read and also think might be a candidate for book-in-common is J.R. McNeill's Something New Under the Sun: an environmental history of the twentieth-century world (see amazon.com's summary and reviews).
Generally we have studied human problems at local (and/or regional or national) levels, but remote sensing and other electronic tools give us more and more capabilities to monitor and study at greater scale. These perspectives and the tools that support them must find their way into teaching and research and learning, but there are few roadmaps for how this can be accomplished. I'm utterly convinced that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software is a vital part of this (see my voluminous GIS collection for more details).
Today's mail brought the 7 September issue of Science, in which is an article that addresses issues absolutely central to Global Stewardship: Humans as the World's Greatest Evolutionary Force (Stephen R. Palumbi Issue of 7 Sep 2001, pp. 1786-1790). The first article cited in the text is Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems (Peter M. Vitousek, Harold A. Mooney, Jane Lubchenco, Jerry M. Melillo Science Volume 277, Number 5325, Issue of 25 Jul 1997, pp. 494-499). The 'Similar articles found in Science' feature for the latter article is similarly instructive.
28 Sept
Can we defy Nature's end? (Pimm et al., Science Volume 293, Number 5538, Issue of 21 Sep 2001, pp. 2207-2208) is well worth reading in its entirety, but I want especially to call attention to this bit, because it's so much the essence of what Human Geography and Global Stewardship is aimed at illuminating:
Paradoxically, we are not limited by lack of knowledge, but by our failure to synthesize and distribute what we know. (2208)Synthesis and distribution are practical skills we need to involve ourselves in teaching.
1 Oct
That word anthropogenic... which may seem jargon-infested to some... does turn up quite frequently in literatures. I happened to do a search for the term in Web of Science and found more than 5000 occurrences of scientific articles in which it appears in the last 5 years, and 700 in which it appears in the title. And more than 10,000 occurrences of articles with 'anthropogenic' in their abstracts appear in Chemical Abstracts. And google.com finds more than 10,000 Web documents containing the word.
8 Oct
I'm still considering the Humanities course that I think should play an integral part in Global Stewardship, exploring the philosophical and ethical and literary aspects that aren't served all that well by sciences, social and natural. I'm no authority on this (all the more reason for the course), but it seems like writers (many of them 'literary naturalists', and most contrarian to orthodox views of their times) like Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, James Lovelock have been instrumental in developing and promulgating the ideas that gave rise to notions of responsible management of environment and resources. Few of our students would be familiar with many of these authors' works, as literature or as polemic, and many of them fall outside the usual territory of English or Philosophy, but surely within the Humanities.
In addition to the 'naturalist' perspective, there's an interesting literature developing around questions of globalism and hegemony which is at least as much literature as it is social science. Two that I happened to pick up in Asheville over the weekend which cast very interesting light on questions of globalization and responsibility, and provide perspectives that are not predominantly (North) American:
Pico Iyer The Global Soul : Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679776117/ (some of the reviewers aren't as positive as I am about this one)
Eduardo Galeano Upside Down : A Primer for the Looking-Glass World
HN18 .G25 2000
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805063757/
(see also his trilogy Memory of fire
New York : Pantheon Books, c1985-1988
Leyburn-Level 4 F1408.27 .G3413 1985)
"...an outstanding Latin American eye view of the making of the New World. From its first English language publication in 1985 it has been recognized as a classic of political engagement, original research, and literary form." (http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring98/galeano.htm)
26 Feb 2002
AAAS Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship, 2002 version
Pilot Environmental Sustainability Index (An Initiative of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow Environment Task Force, World Economic Forum) and see also Sherbenin and Levy editorial
What is Stewardship? (Ron Mahoney and Yvonne Carree Barkley)