October 11, 2001
Course to consider impact of environmental problems
The UW’s budding partnership with the University of British Columbia has produced an ambitious new course this fall probing environmental problems that blithely ignore international borders.
The new course, “Puget Sound/Georgia Basin: Managing an International Ecosystem” brings government, industry, tribal and environmental leaders from both nations to both campuses.
Joining the fray are not only 50 undergraduates and graduate students enrolled in the class, but also members of the general public invited to the companion lectures – held Tuesdays in Seattle, Wednesdays in Vancouver – which also began this week. Next Tuesday’s lecture, at the Faculty Center conference room, will focus on tribal issues and feature leaders of the Duwamish Tribe and Musqueam Nation. More information on the lecture series, which is funded by a gift from Weyerhaeuser, is available at 206-543-6269.
On the agenda for both the classroom and lecture hall are different perspectives from both lands on such tough issues as sewage and logging, tribal sovereignty and economic growth, press coverage and endangered-species protection.
“I’ve found from my field work that on some of these issues the United States and Canada come at the same problems using different measures and different terms and don’t quite understand each other,” said Ann Lesperance, a senior research scientist at Battelle who is teaching the course. “This is one way to address that.”
The course, offered at UW by the Jackson School’s Canadian Studies Center, grew out of last year’s partnership agreement signed by President Richard L. McCormick and UBC President Martha Piper leading to the creation of a joint Canadian-American Studies Program. Western Washington University will also participate as part of a larger consortium.
The goal of the joint program is to examine the increased integration of the two countries with an emphasis on business, trade, e-commerce and environmental issues.
For a half century, Canada and the United States have enjoyed the largest trade relationship in the world, said Nadine Fabbi, assistant director of the UW Canadian Studies Center. Ninety percent of Canada’s exports go the United States, and about one-quarter of U.S. exports are shipped to Canada.
Douglas Jackson, former director of the UW’s Canadian Studies Center and a professor emeritus of geography and international studies, said the growing relationship between two universities in the two nations may be unprecedented.
The first course to be offered by the partnership dovetails perfectly with American students’ growing interest in applying their environmental concerns to global issues, said Craig ZumBrunnen, who co-directs the UW’s Program on the Environment and helped organize the class.
UW students will spend two weekends in British Columbia as part of their coursework, which fulfills the requirements for majors in the Canadian Studies Center, the Program on the Environment and the International Studies Center.
And the class intermixes technical issues with social and political ones in a way that should help train students to analyze complex problems effectively.
“We are concerned about and interested,” said Chuck Findley, regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “in the next generation of environmental decision-makers.”
