AssignmentEnvironmental Field TripTake a Look at Your World, at.docx

Assignment:
Environmental Field Trip
Take a Look at Your World, at Our Shared World*
Your assignment is to take a “field trip”: a nature walk, a tour
around your neighborhood, a bicycle ride, a trip to the city, or
any kind of journey by any mode of transportation, that gets you
out into your environment. Observe your surroundings, make of
note things, situations, people's behavior from the new lens the
course has given you to see things from the perspective of
environmental ethics. There are any number of ways of
approaching this assignment. You might have a particular place
in mind that is environmentally sensitive or that has been
designated as a susceptible to environmental pollution. You
might want to visit the local dump, a recycling center, or
wastewater treatment plant. You could take a trip to the beach,
to a waterway or river area, take a walk on a wilderness trail, or
drive out to the desert areas where people recreate on weekends
and vacations to see if these areas are being abused or suffer
from littering and pollution. You could visit the zoo or animal
park, or even go to a farm or food-processing plant.
*Important Note:
This report will also be used as part of your assignment in
Discussion Board 4: Please upload your paper to
"Field Trip Reports: Peer Exchange"
in doc sharing [top frame tool menu] as well as submitting it to
the dropbox [see link below] for this assignment for instructor
review and grading. Each student in the class will select another
student's Field Trip Report to use as a basis for analysis of
different political approaches to ecology and environmental
issues. See DB 4 for more details.
The idea is to apply what you have been learning in the course
to what is really going on in the world-your
lifeworld
, as the phenomenologists call it. This everyday world is our
true

environs
, or surrounding world. In some sense, this assignment is an
attempt to return to the place where, in a certain sense, you
already are--as part of the world, as part of nature--you are
really investigating a larger part of your own self-identity.
Observe carefully what you see, hear, smell, and feel. Use what
you have learned in the course to reflect on what you observe
and experience, and try to take things in from the perspective of
an environmental ethic, as you consider the various concepts
introduced in the course of nature, of the land, of our world as
an ecologically interdependent system.
The slide show,
Environmental Field Trip Reports
, features some excerpts from previous field trip reports. Please
take a few minutes to see what others have done in response to
this assignment.
Please note that the assignment is to WRITE A REPORT, not do
a PowerPoint slide show. The slide show that serves as an
example here was made just for the purposes of sharing what
other people have done on their field trips.
For an excellent example of this kind of this kind of thinking
and writing, read
Karen Warren's Rock-Climbing Narrative
, from her article, "The Power and the Promise of
Ecofeminism." Note the shift in her perspective and in her
understanding of her experience of the natural world. Without
labeling it as such, Warren has accomplished this shift in
perspective and new kind of awareness by adopting the
"phenomenological attitude" discussed by the
ecophenomenologist philosophers we study in Unit 3.
Write a report that details your experience, and try to be as
specific as possible. What were you expecting to encounter?
What, exactly, did you observe? How did you decide where to
go or what to look for? Did anything you studied cause you to
see things differently than you have in the past? Did you make
any critical discoveries or notice anything interesting or

surprising (or shocking!) about the environment or area you
visited? Assess anything you may find in terms of
environmental and ecological sustainability issues and, if
possible, come up with a recommendation for a possible
solution or way to improve the situation, should you find a
problem or environmentally sensitive situation. If you find no
problems, perhaps you have not traveled far enough; or, perhaps
you live in an area that is well attuned to environmental
conservation issues and engages in sustainability practices. If
that is the case, explain what is being done right.
Details
The report may be anywhere from 1000-1500 words (3 -5
typewritten pages), but the word count here is flexible in either
direction. It is more important for you to think deeply and
reflect on the ideas, arguments, and critiques you have been
reading than to just try to fill up the pages with empty
speculation. The material on ecophenomenology, covered in
Unit 3, should be particularly helpful in coming up with an
inspired or critically astute approach to this assignment: try
adopting the "phenomenological attitude":
Husserl's "phenomenological reduction" as you take a fresh look
at your environment. See if you can "bracket out" your habitual
thought patterns and preconceived ideas about what you are
seeing and experiencing--try looking at the world with the
"fresh" eyes of the phenomenologist.
Please include images, maps, charts, diagrams, or even links to
video clips in your report; you may find it useful to bring along
a digital camera to document your trip, and if you have your
images in electronic form, you should be able to share them
with the class. The inclusion of such "extras" will count for 5%
of your score on this report. This is not a research paper, so
there is no requirement for citing outside sources; however, you
may find it helpful to do so in completing the report and making
your recommendations. You may treat this as a piece of creative
nonfiction, an entry in an "environmental-awareness journal," a
journalistic article or blog post, or even the form of a letter:

creativity and expressive sensitivity are encouraged! If you do
cite sources, you may use MLA, APA, or any clearly
comprehensive documentation style. The purpose of this
assignment is to get you engaged beyond the purely academic
realm to explore environmental issues that are actually part of
your daily life.
*I emailed teacher to provide me easier instructions as far as
what I need done and this is what she emailed me:
This is not a research assignment...it is what I like to call an
"experiential report"; taking a cue from the
ecophenomenologists, I ask you to go out into your "lifeworld"
(the world you perceive, that affects you, that is your home,
your place to explore, your source of life in many ways...and so
on) and try to experience it in a new way (if possible); a new
way that is promoted by what you have been reading, learning,
discussing, and thinking about in the course so far. The articles
for Unit 3 are especially useful here (even though they may
seem a little difficult to get into at first reading). Please review
the PPT slide show along with the reading; it goes some
distance in helping to unravel some of the philosophical jargon
that these authors sometimes fall into.
So, take a "field trip": this could be as simple as a walk through
your own neighborhood, but now you are not moving through it
with your ordinary intention (visiting a neighbor, getting a
breath of fresh air, picking up some bread and milk at the corner
market, etc.); you are now moving through this familiar
territory with your perceptual mechanisms bracketing out your
ordinary conceptual framework, seeing the world anew, with
senses fresh and alert, as if it were a strange and new world.
What do you see now that was always there but never caught
your attention? What do you notice? What should you be
noticing, according to the thinkers and philosophers we've been
studying?
Maybe you want to do something more dramatic, such as taking
a nature hike, visiting a local or even more distant park or

publicly controlled natural reserve, or maybe you want to see
what's going on at your local recycling center, city dump, or
wastewater plant. The possibilities are wide open. Just go, look,
listen, smell, feel, think. Then report. I would also recommend
taking a camera and a notebook. This is about what you
experience, not about what others have to say.
*You can use information from the other assignments that
you've helped me with in the past two weeks, if you wish.

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