WMU: Sustainability in Santiago de Cuba (Faculty-led)

This study-aboard enhanced version of ENVS 3000 will explore sustainability through the lens of recent history, and in the ongoing transformation of Cuba. It will examine how long-term material scarcity and routine shortages of consumer goods prompted Cubans to engage in conservation practices that generated very little waste.  And it will examine how these practices are in the process of changing for some Cubans, with the dramatic opening of Cuba to the United States.

This course will meet four times in Kalamazoo, before Spring Break and then travel to Santiago de Cuba for a week.  It will reconvene two more times after the trip to process and reflect on how the trip enhanced learning about the peculiar Cuban challenges to sustainability.

During the field trip, students will view first hand routine Cuban conservation practices. For comparison’s sake, before and after the field trip, students will study other economies that have transitioned out of state-socialism to consumerism and examine what makes them “sustainable.”

For the field experience portion of this course, students will investigate what makes Santiago, Cuba’s 2nd largest city, sustainable (or not).  They will learn the limits of its existing public works infrastructure, the challenges and benefits of its food provisioning system and about local perceptions of “nature” from religious specialists in Santeria, Voodoo and other spiritual traditions.