Extinctions, Choices, and Consequences

Poster Presentation by the students of IAH 206: Self, Society, Technology
Tuesday April 22, 2008, 4:30-6:30 pm. @ MSU museum

Coordinated by:
Professor Joel Geffen, Geffen@msu.edu
Michael Leeds, TA & Sophie Vick, TA

Species around the world are becoming extinct at a high rate. Not since the Age of Dinosaurs ended has anything like this occurred. We talk about this contemporary extinction. Our focus, as the course title suggests, is not limited to those species. We seriously consider what this current, mass extinction might mean for humans. As a humanities course, IAH 206 emphasizes questions of meaning. It highlights the ways that people interpret situations (give them meaning), express those interpretations, and even act upon those interpretations.

Humans have developed and applied technological solutions to environmental challenges for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. Some of these solutions worked extremely well. Others were disastrous. Most probably fell in the gray zone between these two, being more or less successful, and being more or less damaging to species and habitats. In this course we examine current interactions between ecological crisis, technology, and choice. We refer here to the choices made by societies, organizations, and individuals concerning how to deal (or not to deal) with actual and impending environmental crisis. Choices have consequences. This is unavoidable. In this course we consider potential psychological impacts affecting people as a result of species loss, habitat degradation and destruction, and, increasing alienation from direct interaction with those things we loosely group together and call "nature."

150 students of sections 7-12 of IAH 206/SS08 will display posters that express their engagement experience with community partners of the state of Michigan.