Stress and Resilience /Ecology and Society
Helena Meyer-Knapp Tel. 867 6549 (email)
Karen Hogan Tel. 867 5078 (email)
Using analytical models from ecology and social science, this program will study how society and what we call "the environment" respond under stress. While the program was designed to give us a chance to study the effects of the war this fall in the United States, we are equally interested in how humans and other life and earth forms deal with "natural" disasters.

The program will start with some reflective work on the disasters we as individuals have experienced, and we will also do one social "simulation," that will reveal how communities create solidarity and support systems.

Readings will focus first on evolutionary adaptive systems, using parts of EO Wilson’s The Diversity of Life, and we will start right into outdoor field study of stress in nature by looking at sites on the Evergreen campus. We will then move to a study of ethics in crisis, reading parts of Helena’s recently completed book on war and peace-making, called Fragile Peace. Throughout this period, we will be developing field study skills too. We will watch Anna Deveare Smith’s video Twilight Los Angeles (narratives of the Rodney King riots) and read her Talk to Me. An anthropologist/actor who has done "field study" of communities in crisis, Smith has also been doing field study if interactions between politics and the media in Washington DC. Thus, we will have developed a conceptual basis for understanding adaptive behaviors, disturbance patterns in nature and social reactions in crisis, and a sense of the value of diversity in stressful conditions.

Mid-quarter, we will begin a program-wide research project, and also read Acts of God a study of the ways in which politics, insurance systems, engineering and real estate priorities combine to weaken societies hit by hurricanes etc. The research will entail a study of a small local natural disaster, the Carlyon beach 1999 earth-slide, which made a community of about 30 homes uninhabitable. Lest we imagine that crisis is always a result of modernization, will then read parts of The Ecological Indian, to look back in time at ecological "disasters" that were happening before white people even knew this continent existed.

Lastly, we will return once more to more modern times, reading parts of John McPhee’s Control of Nature, and Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery about the psychology and physiology of human responses.

For the program-wide research project, students will divide into groups to look at the following topics:

Properties of organisms and ecological communities that allow stress tolerance and recovery from disturbances -- earth, the ice age and soil -- climate patterns and extraordinary rain fall ? insurance and disaster -- road development and real estate development -- media coverage -- personal responses to disaster -- legislative debates
The final class day will be devoted to presenting and compiling a comprehensive report on the Carlyon beach disaster.

Assignments: In preparation for seminar, students will write 1-2 page reflections on the readings.  Each student will also be responsible, once during the quarter, to write a post-seminar, "synthesis" paper to be shared with the rest of his/her seminar group.

Late in the quarter, each student will write a 5 page (approx) individual paper explaining how the various disaster response mechanisms fit into an overall framework.

Each student will contribute a piece of writing to the program-wide research report, and will contribute tangibly to the whole program presentation on Carlyon beach on the last Saturday of the quarter.

Final credits will depend on the research group selected, but all students will end up with credits in both  social science and natural science. For those students with background in either area, it will be possible to earn upper division credit.