What is this Class?

Update 8/15/2025

Crazy complexity of nature, environment, and human cultural and social interactions

  • Delaware Run

The course introduces a broad array of material that is covered in other ENVS and non-ENVS courses at OWU in more detail

Active, engaged pedagogy

  • Theory into practice: OWU Connection-centered course & Department
  • What’s happening with the environment
    • How to think about the environment and stuff in it
      • How to do something about the environment: give you some agency

Think: different approaches to environment & sustainability (first half of RHM text):

  • Concepts that enable action
    • Population & Scarcity
    • Markets & Commodities
    • Institutions & the Commons
    • Environmental Ethics
    • Risks & Hazards
    • Political Economy
    • Social Construction of Nature
    • Feminism & the Environment
    • Racialized Environments

Then apply those concepts to understanding stuff in the environment (second half of RHM text)

    • Carbon Dioxide
    • Trees
    • Wolves
    • Uranium
    • Tuna
    • Lawns
    • Bottled Water
    • French Fries
    • E-Waste

Importance of the research process: intellectual skills imparted by a college education: Project, theory into practice

Importance of collaboration: student knowledge and interests, other OWU students, faculty, staff, OWU partners: ENVS 198/498

Lots of steps, parts, due dates: the research process: you are fully capable of managing a relatively complex project

Yeah, no Blackboard. It doesn’t work for a class like this.

Executive Function

So, AI. To paraphrase one screed:

    1. AI can be sloppy and incomplete, leaving out random parts of what you ask it to do
    2. AI hallucinates facts and data if it doesn’t know the answer
    3. AI claims objectivity or certainty when it possesses neither
    4. AI analysis breaks down if it’s asked to perform complicated tasks;
    5. It’s easy to become too reliant on AI; it will make you dumber because one gradually shifts one’s interpretative and analytical abilities to it (confirmed by a recent MIT study);
    6. How manipulative it can be, subtly shifting a user’s worldview over time to align with establishment dictates.
    7. AI encourages narcissism by subtly reflecting your views back to you and fawning over your ideas and work

That said: let’s give it a try.

Review course syllabus, schedule, project w/AI components.

Send me an email (jbkrygier@owu.edu) with the following info:

  • Your Name (preferred name)
  • The course (ENVS 110 [and section] and if you are in ENVS 198)
  • Did you take the anonymous AI survey?
  • Did you subscribe to the class calendar?
  • Did you look over the syllabus, schedule, and project pages?
  • Did you share the folder (see below)
  • Do you have access to the text (or will share the copy in the back of 207)?
  • Major (or ideas for major)
  • Year at OWU
  • Hometown (and state or country)
  • Reason for taking this course

Sharing your work with Instructor: this is how you turn stuff in

  • Go to your OWU Drive account
  • Create a new folder with the course and your last name
    • +New button (upper left) >> then Folder
    • Phoebe B. Peabody Beebe’s folder would be: ENVS 110 Beebe
    • Share that folder with me (so I can edit)

Later, when you are ready to turn in your work: for example, the 6-page chapter review:

  • put the document in the shared folder
  • email me that your document is in the shared folder and ready for me to review

Leave a Reply