DOMINATION OF THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST
Dept. #0422, Course #C91-0
Date & time: Winter to Spring quarter (nights) plus 1 week spring break field trip.
Average enrollment: 20

GRAND CANYON


COURSE DESCRIPTION: The curriculum of this course will focus on the study of
westward expansion and the consequence of that expansion--the insatiable desire
to dominate nature at all costs--on social policy, and on the environment. The
course will stress the environmental consequences of westward expansion:
irrigation attempts in arid environments, the value of farming and ranching in
those environments, power generation, social and political underpinnings of
expansionism, moral considerations, and so on. Students will receive 8-10 hours
of instruction per day.

The setting for this course will not be a classroom. This course will be taught
in the canyons and on the mesas of the Colorado Plateau. More specifically, it
will be taught on Lake Powell in southern Utah. When students arrive at the lake,
they will visit the Glen Canyon Dam to see how Lake Powell was created, be given
instruction about the reasons for the creation of Lake Powell, Lake Mead and
others on the Colorado River, and thus gain insight into the geological and
biological significance of the Colorado River and the Colorado Plateau. After two
days of instruction around and below the dam site, and an internal tour of the
dam, students will board a houseboat and set out onto the lake. Each day they
will take trips to different parts of the lake to see the environmental
consequences of the creation of the lake. Classes will be specifically tailored
to individual canyons so that students will literally see how geological and
biological processes combine to create entire ecosystems. As students hike up in
the canyons they will see how erosion works, and the power of water. As they
descend back toward the lake, they will come to realize the significance of
artificially creating a body of water that is 200 miles long and has over 1600
miles of shoreline. They will also come to realize that this lake is not unique
in its origin; virtually all of the large American rivers have been dammed. In
late afternoons and early evenings discussions will focus on the long-term
consequences of attempts at environmental domination. After dinner students will
debrief about what they learned that day and how it relates to the other days. At
night they will notice what silence really is, how a starry night truly looks,
and what it means to be in a desert with no humidity (for instance, naturally
occurring static electric charges in the atmosphere can be demonstrated quite
easily). Each morning after breakfast students will receive an introductory
lecture about the day's sites before visiting them. One day, for instance, the
class will hike a side canyon to a restored Anasazi ruin and learn firsthand
about the history of settlements in the area, about Native American populations,
etc. Later that afternoon there will be a lecture about contemporary Native
Americans, their political struggles, and what their position is in the attempt
to control and harvest energy. The field experience will end after 5 days on the
houseboat--a total of 8 days, including travel.

In preparation for the trip students will be asked to read several texts,
including A Sand County Almanac, XXXXX. They will also be required to view a
four-part series on irrigation in the American West entitled Cadillac Desert. Two
weeks prior to the field experience students will attend a Saturday orientation
session. After the trip, students will be required to hand in field journals, and
on the two Saturdays following the trip they will make presentations on one of
several key issues that they will have explored. Students will also be asked to
take an examination to directly test their empirical knowledge of the area they
studied.

"Domination of the American Southwest" will be team taught by Paul Friesema, Brad
Sageman, and David Schejbal. Each instructor will focus on his area of expertise
in effort to elucidate the complex, myriad aspects of expansionism as exemplified
at Glen Canyon. The instructors will coordinate their lectures so that they paint
one, coherent picture. For current purposes of clarification, however, the three
parts of the course will be as follows.

Paul Friesema's foci for the Spring course will be on the political processes and
practices during the initial decision making, concerning the Glen Canyon Dam,
linking this project with the broader politics of water resource development in
the West, and then specifically linking it with the other inter-related water
development struggles on the Colorado River system (e.g. the Echo Park
controversy at Dinosaur). He will then compare and contrast the political
milieus, focusing both on the revived attempt to dramatically transform the
management of the Dam (the spike experiment, removal, etc.), and the winding down
of further water resource development projects in the West, and on the Colorado
River system, using the ongoing struggles over the Animas-LaPlata project to
highlight some of the transformations.

Friesema will focus on the following two ideas: (1) The changes in political
perceptions, whereby the big issue at Glen Canyon has moved from concern over the
upstream consequences of the dam-the destruction of Glen Canyon-to the downstream
consequences-the impacts on the Grand Canyon. (2) The changes in the involvement
of American Indians in the political struggles over the Colorado River
management, from a relatively uninvolved and quiescent role at the time the dam
decision was made to the active involvement in management and policy issues
today. Focus will fall on tribal involvement in management of the reservoir and
water releases, to Rainbow Bridge conflicts, and to the still-to-be-developed
Navajo marina and hotel complex at the Antelope Point site. Speakers will be
invited from the research center at Page(interagency Grand Canyon Research and
Monitoring Center); from the NPS management of GCNRA, from the BuRec, and from
the Navajo Nation.

Brad Sageman will concentrate on the geologic history and resource utilization of
the Lake Powell region. One of the most important environmental issues facing
society today is the question of climate change and its relationship to the
burning of fossil fuels. The major fossil fuels are natural gas, oil, and coal,
and the dominant products of their combustion are water vapor and CO2, both of
which are critical greenhouse gases. The Lake Powell region offers a unique
opportunity to combine a brief investigation of the geological processes involved
in forming fossil fuels with an analysis of the cultural, economic, and technical
issues associated with the exploitation of such resources in the Four Corners
area.  This is because the area adjacent to the lake contains excellent exposures
of coal-bearing strata where students can observe and learn the basic stages of
coal bed formation. Across the lake, on the other side of Page, the Navajo
Generating Plant is a major coal-fired power facility. The plant is burning coal
of the very same age as that exposed on the west side of the lake (but mined from
an area on the Navajo Reservation to the south). This combination allows the
class to first address the geological issues with visits to the outcrops:

The issues that will be Sageman's main focus are: 1a) How, where, and why does
coal form? 1b) What are the implications of coal formation for the global carbon
cycle? 2) Generating Plant: a) Who is exploiting the coal, how much is being
burned, and how much remains in the ground to be mined? b) Who is buying the
power that is produced and how does the plant fit into the socio-economic
landscape of the Four Corners Region? c) What gases are being emitted from the
combustion, and what are the emission levels? d) What are the implications for
the global carbon cycle of the combusted products?

As implied above, this part of the course has two separate but related components
with two sets of goals: I) Geological: understanding the carbon cycle and coal
formation; II) Environmental: understanding coal exploitation, from mine to power
plant; understanding consequences of coal combustion;  understanding
socio-political issues associated with power generation in the southwest

David Schejbal will focus on the question whether the environment can be seen as
having some kind of intrinsic value, or whether it simply has use-value for
people. Glen Canyon is an ideal location for such an examination, because it
enables students to directly experience a moral controversy in practice.
Historically, Glen Canyon has been seen by environmentalists as a place of great
natural beauty and inherent value, and by Native Americans as a place of supreme
spirituality. It has been seen by the Bureau of Reclamation and other government
and privite interests as a place ideally suited for human use, be it the
harvesting of energy, ranching, or recreation. In the early 1960's the Bureau of
Reclamation won the argument in practice, but the moral controversy continues. It
is such a hot issue in fact, that this year Congress debated whether the Glen
Canyon Dam--the structure that flooded Glen Canyon and created Lake
Powell--should be removed, and thus "unflooding", though perhaps not bringing
back to its natural state, Glen Canyon. Specific questions about ecosystems,
species natural to the area, use versus natural value, and human rights continue
to occupy proponents of both sides of the controversy. Hence, for environmental
ethics, an issue mostly discussed solely in classrooms, Glen Canyon provides an
excellent filed site in which to see the reasons why many environmental ethical
issues are so hotly contested.

Students will be asked to read A Sand County Almanac as preparation for the trip,
and they will be asked to be prepared to discuss four essays chosen from
Environmental Ethics during the field part of the course. The approaches to
environmental ethics that will be discussed are humane moralism, ethical
humanism, and the land ethic.



PREREQUISITES:  GEOL A01, A11, or B01 or Geography B10 or B11; and Poli Sci B04 or C71, 
				or consent.

TEACHING METHODS:  Lecture 6:30 - 9pm, each week for 15 weeks

METHOD OF EVALUATION:  Lecture participation
                       Exams (3) and Term paper 
                       Field trip participation
                       Field journals