There are two changes to EA majors' senior year that will take effect in the 2009-2010 academic year.  Next year seniors will have the option of completing their theses over the course of the entire year, rather than only in the fall semester.  In addition, Green Urbanism will no longer be the “mandatory” Senior Seminar for Environmental Analysis. Instead, it will be offered as a stand-alone course for any interested juniors and seniors. Senior Seminar will take place in the spring semester as a once-a-week evening seminar course. We are experimenting this semester with the seminar format (including possibly bringing in outside professionals to teach research based team-modules) and more information will be provided toward the end of this semester or possibly at the beginning of the Fall, so “watch this spot.” In any event, the Senior Seminar, meant to be both a capstone course for seniors and a helpful transition to the Real World, will be required of each of EA major.

There will also be two new tracks added to the EA Major. The Physics, Engineering, and the Environment track will develop skills in environmental problem solving. Students will be prepared for advanced degree work in environmental engineering, while the Environmental Design track will prepare students for future work in architecture, community planning, landscape design, or urban studies.

Finally, a new class, EA 70: Nature, Culture, and Society, will be required for all EA majors and minors with the publication of the 2010-11 Course Catalog, and is especially targeted for sophomores and juniors. It will employ case studies to help analyze some key contemporary environmental dilemmas. Topics will vary, but will draw on an interdisciplinary array of sources in the humanities and social sciences, including history, philosophy, and literature; religion, art, politics, and sociology. The course’s objectives are to help students better understand how we imagine, interpret, value, and engage with nature (and “Nature”); and how those responses shape the human condition and planetary health. Beginning next semester, this course will be offered every fall.

With the help of buses, a car, and my own two feet I had spent the last three weeks of my Fall semester navigating the San Gabriel River from the Sheep Mountain Wilderness to where it meets the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach. The journey culminated into a photographic essay on the river – its architecture and dams, its people, and its journey from a mountain stream to a concrete drainage canal. Exhausted after processing film and sorting through a mass of digital images, I sat down at the photo lab computer to check my email and browse through the Pomona Student Digester. My eyes glazed over notices for lost Ipods and $10,000 grants, and settled on a peculiar posting which read:

STUDENTS NEEDED to work with artist Michael Hebb
At sunrise on Sat. 1/24/09 Hebb will be leading a short 32 mile expedition through the neighborhoods of Pomona and over the chino hills to ultimately arrive at the interstate 5. At the interstate, Hebb and fellow voyagers will prepare dinner from the foodstuffs 'harvested' along the way. Students will film, photograph, and write about the journey walking through the hinterlands of the interstate. The artifacts and documentation of this journey will be on display in the Pomona museum through mid-April as part of the exhibit entitled Suddenly: where we live now.