Historic Background For Csm's Nature And Human Values

Since no university operates in a vacuum, developments in the academic community and society generally always stimulate changes in curricular emphases of specific institutions. Ecology is one of those “ideas in the air” that in recent years has fostered many new programs and courses. A few key dates and their major impulses are ♦ 1969, the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency; ♦ 1972, the first United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (in Stockholm); ♦ 1987, the year of “Our Common Future,” the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the “Brundtland Report”); ♦ 1992, the second United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (in Rio de Janeiro, the “Earth Summit”). The purpose of this paper is to examine ideas in the broader community that led CSM’s Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies (LAIS) to formulate a new freshman core-curriculum course entitled “Nature and Human Values.”