Feet to the Fire First Year Matters

First Year Matters Program

This year’s Feet to the Fire/First Year Matters program explores the challenges we face as a result of global climate change with a focus on the increasing scarcity of water and its impact on cultures and ecosystems around the world. Over the summer, First Year students were sent a link to readings that explore the issue of water scarcity from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (see list of readings below). They were asked to complete the reading before arriving on campus.

These readings served as a shared frame of reference during the Feet to the Fire seminars and discussions that took place during their first week on campus. One seminar featured a discussion between two professors, a humanist and a scientist, who talked about issues connected to water contamination, ground water depletion and rising sea levels in the context of sustaining human and animal life on earth. Another seminar focused on the critical nature of fresh water in the western part of the United States, and explored possible responses to long-term problems there that range from the prolonged drought in the southwest to the mega forest fires in California. The third seminar explored the historical role that water has played in human development, focusing on the challenges that large bodies of water presented to early humans and how those barriers were eventually exploited for growth and economic expansion. The fourth seminar explored water’s role in modern development from a legal and economic perspective and discussed the consequences of property and ownership rights for the natural environment.

Later that evening students gathered in their residence halls and were joined by a faculty or staff member who facilitated a discussion of the readings and the seminars that students had attended. Students then took a survey which asked two questions: “What are the greatest threats to the availability of freshwater on our planet?” and “What are the most important actions we can take to decrease water consumption in the U.S.”

The next day, Friday, September 4, 2009, students were invited to Foss Hill to join in the Common Moment for the class of 2013. Produced by the Center for the Arts, students were led in a dance warm-up by Chair of the Dance Department Nicole Stanton. They were then divided into six groups led by master teachers from six different cultures where the power and preciousness of water is an important part of their dance and music traditions: Korean, Cuban, West African (Ghanaian), Japanese, Irish and South Indian. Assisted by Peer Advisors, students spent twenty minutes learning a dance from those traditions and then had the opportunity to perform the dances for each other. They were then assembled at the baseline of a huge histogram drawn on the field which represented the results of the survey they had taken the night before. Led by Director of the Environmental Studies Program, Barry Chernoff, they danced into the histogram, cheered for a class photograph, and then were entertained by the student fire-dancing group, Prometheus.

Over 400 students attended the lectures, 580 attended the residence hall discussions and completed the survey and over 550 attended the Common Moment on Foss Hill.