Rebekah Green - Teaching

Department of Environmental Studies, Huxley College of the Environment at WWU

At Huxley College, I teach ESTU 432 (soon to be ENVS 476), Disaster Risk Reduction Planning Studio. This is the final course in the Huxley Disaster Risk Reduction minor. In this course, the students work with a community client to apply their knowledge of disasters, mitigation and social vulnerability to a real world problem. In the most recent year, students worked with the Washington State Tsunami Ready program. Working with four coastal county offices of emergency management, students wrote and designed disaster preparedness guides. These 30 page guides have been printed and distributed as newspaper inserts in several counties. In other years, students have worked with community organizations assisting Haitian recovery following the 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000. View their work on Haiti.

Every other year I also teach a course in Perception of Environmental Risks as an elective for the Disaster Risk Reduction minor. In this course, open to all majors, we look at why people are afraid of some risk and not others and how we can better inform the public about environmental risk.

I am also The Planet magazine adviser. This award-winning student magazine is the longest student-run environmental magazine in the nation. Each quarter, students serve as editors, writers and photographers and bring skills from their journalism, visual arts and environmental studies or science majors to bear on current environmental issues in our region. Magazine issues are distributed throughout campus, Bellingham and local community colleges three times a year. To read back issues of The Planet or order a subscription, go to The Planet’s webpage. We welcome Huxley, journalism and other students to join The Planet team and take one of the university’s most exciting writing courses, ESTU 480 (soon to be ENVS 413).

In the past, I have also taught ESTU 303 (soon to be ENVS 303), Human Ecology and Sustainability, a fascinating look at how we humans have interacted with our environment across time and space. We explore our evolutionary past, our local history, and how our engagement with each other shapes our engagement with our environment.

For the 2011-2013 academic year, I am also co-teaching a series of courses with Dr. Ruth Sofield on the Science and Management of Contaminated Sites. These courses are funded by the Department of Ecology and center on a current cleanup site. Students in the course come from environmental science, studies and journalism backgrounds. View a copy of the first course newsletter.