Campus: UC Davis

Instructors:
David Robertson
Virginia "Shorty" Boucher
Laurie Glover
Jeffery Clary
Ann Savageau

Reserves Used:
McLaughlin Natural Reserve
Sagehen Creek Field Station
Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research
    Laboratory (SNARL)-Valentine
    Eastern Sierra Reserve

For More Information:
Transect 21:1 (Spring 2003), pg. 4:
"What happens ... ? when nature meets culture - NRS reserves offer a perspective"
http://nrs.ucop.edu/Transect-McLaughlin.htm

Featured Reserve:
The McLaughlin Natural Reserve, the site of a former gold mine, presents a complex mosaic of natural ecosystems and human intrusions. The 7,050-acre reserve encompasses several geologic formations, two watersheds, rare serpentine habitats, and a variety of vegetation regimes (such as, oak woodlands, chaparrals, and grasslands), that range from relatively pristine habitats to reclaimed mining areas.

Part of what field courses do is create a society, even if it's only for a week. The experience of working together, living together, cooking together magnifies and intensifies what every body learns. These are the kinds of experiences people never forget. It really galvanizes their views of the world. It's phenomenally important.

-Virginia Boucher, UC Davis

Developed from the realization that we need to look for new ways to address our increasingly complex environmental and social problems, the Program in Nature and Culture (NAC) at UC Davis offers an integrated curriculum steeped in natural science, social science, arts, and humanities. NAC 180 is the capstone experience for the major, bringing students from its scientific and humanities tracks together to work on a single site. NRS reserves that have hosted the class include the McLaughlin Natural Reserve, a former gold mine; the Sagehen Creek Field Station, where students investigate Sierra ecosystems and the increasingly developed Truckee river watershed; and the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory  (SNARL), a component of the Valentine Eastern Sierra Reserve near Mammoth Lakes, where students study the impact of development in the High Sierra and California's water issues.

Each course begins with a week of fieldwork at an NRS site. "This work then becomes the basis for the creative and analytical projects the students work on for the remainder of the quarter," explains course co-teacher Virginia "Shorty" Boucher. "It sets the backdrop for looking at the world through an interdisciplinary set of glasses. You have all these layers of geologic and hydrologic history molding the biology. But, on top of that, you have an overlay of trails and roads and water diversions. It's very difficult to look at a landscape and figure out what you're seeing."

As program founder and course co-teacher David Robertson explains: "The natural reserves, without exception, have really intriguing human interests. These are places where we can take students who are interested in nature, in the wild, and show them that what you see on the ground is often fundamentally, crucially determined by what humans have been doing there before they became natural reserves and, in some cases, even while they are reserves."

Complexity is one of the key lessons from the course. "We want to show students that situations are almost hopelessly complicated," Robertson continues, "and that you need to know a lot and understand a lot of different things. Once you do, you can actually begin to get a handle on the problem, which may not allow you to solve it completely, but will allow you to do some things that are genuinely helpful for plants, animals, and humans."

And Boucher adds: "After taking this course, people realize that they don't write the same papers based on the same data, and they don't create the same art work looking at the same landscape. Life is a creative enterprise."