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What is environment? The answer to this question is fundamental to how we teach environmental studies and sciences (ESS). We follow recent scholarly literature in approaching environment as connection, not as some category of reality, and consider pedagogical implications via concept mapping, a new learning technology. Concept maps potentially offer a visually explicit means of representing and analyzing the hybrid connections between actors that define environmental issues. We explore the utility of concept mapping as pioneered by Joseph Novak and others via the Cmap Tools application, in which concept maps (cmaps) consist of concepts connected by propositions; both can include linked resources, and the resultant cmap can be collaboratively edited and shared online. We evaluate concept mapping in the context of a sophomore-level environmental methods course taught annually at Lewis & Clark College. The course includes adaptations of concept mapping drawing on Novak's work and actor-network theory, designed for students to reflect on their environmental perspectives, synthesize course material, and explore a proposed topic for environmental research. These exercises were evaluated in fall 2010 using self-reports, assessment rubrics, and open-ended student responses. Results showed that higher achieving students generally found concept mapping more demanding and attained more sophisticated understandings of connections. This suggests that concept mapping helps facilitate the intellectual struggle that characterizes engaged learning, yet also that not all students embrace this struggle to fully grasp environment-as-connection. In a larger sense, the study illustrates challenges in cultivating new approaches to environment in the ESS community.

Literature on the U.S. Pacific Northwest generally paints the region in exceptionalist stripes, certainly in the deep connection its people maintain with an abundant natural landscape. Is Ecotopia exceptional? We interrogate the empirical basis for this claim, applying results from a mixedmethod study of intentional and other communities in Oregon, and a comparative survey situating the Pacific Northwest amidst other regions of the United States. Our focus was on imagined landscapes, both utopian and dystopian, as expressions of late-modern nature spirituality; we situated this emphasis in larger conversations around contemporary spiritual seeking and dwelling. Though there is no doubt that the biographies of those living in intentional communities and in the Pacific Northwest are tà some extent unique, our results suggest the need to temper this exceptionalist trope, both as a distinctive category of regional and spiritual identity, and as a salutary model of late-modern living worthy of the inordinate amount of attention it has received. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]