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the syllabus (pdf)
This course will follow Jonathan Raban's remarkable
travelogue Passage to Juneau on a tour through the human
and natural history of the Pacific Northwest coastal waters. We'll
discuss chaos theory and the circulation of Puget Sound; coastal
ecology and climate change; the art and mythology of the Northwest
tribes and the problems of ethnography; the Vancouver expedition
and the Romantic Sublime. The unifying theme is the interplay between
order
and chaos, and how we cope (in science, in literary criticism,
in political decision-making) with the limits of rationality and
the limits of our knowledge. How do we, and how did the indigenous
cultures on
this coast, deal with natural unpredictability and
all the dangers that result--from navigating a turbulent channel
to managing a salmon fishery?
