Ithaca College

Faculty in Environmental Studies and Sciences collaborated with co-instructors from Primitive Pursuits to publish a paper in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences about the Environmental Sentinels (ENVS 120) course. 

Jake Brenner, Jason Hamilton, Tim Drake, and Jed Jordan have been teaching this course for several years as a partnership between Ithaca College and Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County.  The course is an innovative, hands-on learning experience in which students use wilderness awareness and survival skills to learn local natural history and ecology.  The idea behind the course is that undergraduates today are estranged from their local environment, yet they are called on to manage it.  To build the local environmental knowledge necessary for environmental management, students undertake activities such as tree identification, tracking, shelter-building, fire-building, navigation, and mapping.  For more information you may find the paper here:

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13412-013-0145-9#page-1