Teaching the American Wilderness

Lest you think that my life in Beirut is an endless series of vacations and cooking experiments, I wanted to share some reflections on my first week of second-semester classes. As I've mentioned before, the academic calendar here is a bit out of sync with the U. S. schedule. Our second semester just started mid-February, and will continue into June. I'm teaching some good courses this semester: one on the novel as a genre, a reprise of my fall-semester American literature survey course (read: no new prep!), and a new course called "The American Wilderness."
 
The wilderness course is a new one I'm developing, and I'm told that nothing similar has ever been offered at AUB, which is neat. It is listed in the catalog as both an English and an American Studies course. We're covering a lot of ground, so to speak: The first part of the course investigates the intellectual, legal, and literary history of the wilderness idea in the U. S.  The second part of the course will focus on the way wilderness is managed as public land. This will include lots of conversation about the Park Service and a case study or two about the dilemmas faced by park management. The third part of the course will look at the ways in which wilderness is simulated and represented in 21st-century popular culture.
 
I am also trying to get students to compare the role of wilderness in the U.S. with the role of natural spaces here in Lebanon. To that end I've invited a guest speaker from a local conservation non-profit to talk to the class about conservation efforts in Lebanon. It's really interesting to see the very recent emphasis on hiking trails and nature preserves and think about how important peaceful natural places must be to a country used to decades of war.
 
So far, students have been engaged and enthusiastic in class. We started off talking about the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. No, that's not a typo--it is a former chemical weapons factory and Superfund site that the U.S. Army handed over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2004. It is now billed as "the nation's most ironic nature preserve." As you might imagine, it provided lots of fodder for discussion. Some students mentioned the oil spills and environmental degradation that resulted in Lebanon from the civil war, which was a good reminder for me of how wilderness and natural areas are often-overlooked casualties of violence.
 
Of course, not everything has gone smoothly in class. For one thing, I assigned the Thoreau's classic "Ktaadn" section of his book The Maine Woods. I'd forgotten that the passage I assigned begins with him breakfasting on "some raw pork" along with a "wafer of hard bread." In a city where getting pork products of any kind can be quite a challenge, I imagined students throwing down the essay in disgust when they read that Henry David was chowing down not only on the flesh of swine, but the RAW flesh of swine. Surprisingly, though, no one brought it up in class.
 
Even though I myself had not been dining on raw pork or anything similar,  I had a mild stomach bug earlier in the week (I'm fine now--it was just a 24 hour thing). In an uncanny replay of my first week of fall semester classes, I taught my American Wilderness class while feeling like my stomach was a wilderness of its own. I made it through 40 minutes of my 50 minute class before I hastily dismissed the students and then...well, let's just say that I was very glad there was a trash can in the corner of the classroom. Talk about embarrassing teaching moments! As I stood there in the corner clutching the trash can I heard one student say, "Oh, I wondered why we were getting out early." Ha!
 
Aside from that little incident, though, I must say that I'm pleased with my classes this semester. I'm glad to have the opportunity to see what the American wilderness looks like through the eyes of my Lebanese undergrads. And when I get some free time, I'll work on my baba ghanoush technique and start thinking about where to travel during Easter break!