De Anza College Environmental Ideologies Review

The National Parks: America’s Best Idea—A Film by Ken Burns—Part 1, “The Scripture of Nature” (1851-1890) (Links to an external site.)

This is a film that is available through the De Anza On Demand library system. You should be able to access it using the same login information that you use to access the MyPortal system.

Take notes and submit them here. You can do digital notes if you like or you can do handwritten (neatly) with a clear photo submission.

Before starting visit: A Note on Note-taking

This is an extremely detailed movie. It is a good example of where notetaking can get overwhelming if you focus too much on details. Because I am going to ask you to take notes for submission I am going to give you the main points that are important to this course. Feel free to follow your interests on the other topics, but if you are the type to get overwhelmed stick to the list:

Things to pay attention to -major themes around:

1. Timeline (try to get dates to put this into a timeframe with other things we will learn in class)
2. What about Native Americans? We’re they here first? (I’ll have more information for you on this later)
3. Perspectives around the environment, land ownership, resources, nature, etc.
4. James Mason Hutchings- He’s not as important as John Muir, but the one historian points out 3 contributions that he made that were extremely important.
5. John Muir (this dude is really important in Environmental Studies). Pay attention to his beliefs around nature, his upbringing, how he lived his life, etc.
6. National Parks- what are these? what does this mean? What exists is nature that is so magnificent that it should be “protected?” Protected from who or what?
7. Other stakeholder groups? Stakeholders are anyone who is involved in or affected by a course of action. So, in this case, we could include tourists, investors, and…can you think of others?