Humans and the Environment (Fall 2007)

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Overview of the Pilot Curriculum General Education Requirement
Current Pilot Curriculum General Requirement Course Descriptions

This course fulfills Category III of the General Education Requirement.

Faculty:

Daniel Janzen
Faculty, Biology
301 Leidy Labs/6018
898-5636
djanzen@sas.upenn.edu

Meeting Times:

LEC BIOL 140 401 T & R 3:00 - 4:30

Course Description:

The course covers a range of current topics in ecology and biodiversity, with emphasis on the interrelationship of both to humans. Lectures are an intensive update and exposure to current issues and potential solutions in contemporary human interactions with the environment. Topics are global in scope, but focused on case histories for actual examples. The emphasis is on providing biological and sociological background for select major environment-human interactions.

Lectures from previous years are available on the course web site at http://condor.sas.upenn.edu/cf/caterpillar

Topics for fall 2005 will include (not in order) many of the following, but some will also be replaced or de-emphasized in favor of breaking stories.
  • The sociology of science: Ants and Acacias, ecology and evolutionary biology of a mutualism.
  • The world is not colored green, but L-dopa, cocaine and caffeine.
  • Food-specificity of herbivores: why?
  • Why do bamboos wait so long to flower?
  • A day in the life of an African hunter.
  • Pleistocene anachronisms: the fruits the gomphotheres left behind and why we killed them.
  • Socio-economics of tropical hardwood timber harvest.
  • Tropical forest regeneration, climate change, the carbon crop (CTOs), debt for nature swaps, and other ways to monetize environmental services.
  • Biodevelopment of complex wildlands: Gardenification of wildlands and the absorption of the human footprint (Area de Conservacion Guanacaste).
  • Biodiversity Convention, Hot Spots, Conservation Agencies, and vocabulary.
  • View from the inside: the black bear and other guts.
  • Mammals and their biotic environment: Liomys mice and what is a seed?
  • Microbes and humans.
  • Animals and their physical environment: beaver.
  • Insects and their biotic environment: Rothschildia moths.
  • Tropical dry forest and how it works.
  • Tropical rainforest and how it works.
  • Life in the clouds and islands in the sky: tropical cloud forests.
  • Life on a small Caribbean island.
  • Life on the cold side: arctic ecosystems.
  • Life on the dry side: what is a desert?
  • The Encyclopedia of Life, barcoding species, and managing large complex masses of biodiversity information.

The course will integrate lectures, guest speakers, discussion sessions, reading assignments, and the Web to encourage you to explore how humans interact with the environment, and apply this to your own experience and trajectory.

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