University of Connecticut |Environmental Studies : Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America's Kettle Lakes and Ponds. The tipping point toward greater environmental awareness during the first decade of the 21st century” was precipitated not by new scientific findings, but by a shift in the social fabric of our society. The cause of such shifts and the policies that result are explored by this discipline, which overlaps with science and engineering. College seminars and and senior electives in high school often use the "case method" pedagogy of teaching, using books such as Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, Barbara Freese’s King Coal, and David Montgomery’s Dirt, which support this type of teaching & learning. My hope is that Beyond Walden will be used similarily in lake states.
Everything human in the environment results from some sort of policy tradeoff, whether reactive or proactive. Plastic bottle pollution reflect the cheap price of plastic and lax enforcement of litter laws. Bill McKibben: "Thorson writes with intelligence and pleasure, and you will come away understanding your place in a new way." Beyond Walden: “Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854, gave rise to a uniquely American way of thinking about nature that erupted a century later into a political movement called environmentalism. ‘No parallel tract or body of water or place,’ the historian W. Barksdale Maynard writes, “has so captivated the human imagination.’ Walden has beome ‘an international shrine.’” [pages 4-5] Related Links PHOTO BANNER : Cattails (Typha latifolia) are important wetland plants on the edges of many, if not most, kettles. Sunrise at the lake in norhtern MInnesota manifests the physics of light and heat, which influence many processes in the air, water, and lakeshore life. Humans wastewater remains a serious threat to lake systems, especially near cities, where the sewer systems are usually defective (photo from property adjacent to Silver Lake in St. Paul, Minnesota). These abandoned cars in Wishek , North Dakota, were NOT driven out on the ice and left to sink, as many were prior to the 1980s.
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