Directions:   Please come to each class having read the assignments for that class period. Note that each day there are two reading assignments. See the class syllabus for the daily reading schedule. Be prepared to discuss the following questions at each class.

Unit One: Historical Background

• John Locke – "On Property"
1. Does nature have any value in and of itself?
2. What puts the greatest part of value upon land?
• René Descartes – The Beast-Machine Theory
1. How do humans differ essentially from animals (brutes)?
2. By what tests ("two most certain tests") can one employ in order to know that animals are not really human?
• John Stuart Mill – "Nature"
1. What are the two principal meanings of the word "nature" that Mill identifies?
   
2. What is wrong when the word "nature" is used for what ought to be, for example, as implied in the phrase Naturam sequi?
• Pope Francis – Laudato Sí (24 May 2015)
1. Why is our common home beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth?
2. What is it in the life of St. Francis of Assisi that appeals so strongly to the Pope in his Encyclical?

Unit Two: Conservation Philosophies

• John Muir – Selected Readings
1. What is the Hetch Hetchy, and why does Muir want to protect it?
2. Is Muir a mystic in regard to nature?
• Gifford Pinchot – The Fight for Conservation, excerpted
1. How does Pinchot's conception of the first duty of the human race differ from John Muir's conception of the human relation to nature?
2. What does conservation mean to Pinchot?
• Leopold – The Land Ethic
1. What is land according to Leopold
2. By what criteria does Leopold consider a thing (i.e., an act or a policy) right?
• Leopold - Collaborative Conservation
  1. What lesson does the Coon Valley Cooperative teach?
  2. What does conservation mean to Leopold?

Unit Three: US Public Lands Agencies; Critical Responses

• Agencies
1. What are the major public lands agencies in the US Federal Government?
2. Do the conservation philosophies discussed in the last unit define (in part or in whole) the mission(s) of (any of) these agencies?
• The Wilderness Act
1. What is the human place in wild nature as defined by the Act?
2. What agencies administer the wilderness areas as defined by this Act?
• Guha — Radical American Environmentalism
1. In what sense or senses is the American environmentalist movement imperialistic?
2. What is the "disservice to American and global environmentalism" that Guha identifies in his critique of deep ecology?
• LaDuke — "Traditional Ecological Knowledge"
  1. What is traditional ecological knowledge, and why does it surpass the "scientific" ecological knowledge of the dominant colonialist culture?
  2. What is forced underdevelopment, and what are its effects?