Wake Forest University
AC-5: Immersive Experience

Immersive Program in Sustainability: Biodiversity and Nature Conservation in Peru

The summer program in Peru is an immersive sustainability experience that takes students to some of the most important reserves in the Western Hemisphere for biodiversity conservation. Students learn the history of how these reserves are made and the effects of mass human migration, gold mining, and deforestation on the landscape and indigenous peoples. The program combines Tropical Biodiversity with one of two additional courses: either the History of Nature Conservation in Latin America or Science and Environmental Reporting (alternate years).

Tropical Biodiversity is an introduction to the factors that structure biodiversity in terrestrial habitats, and travels from the absolute desert of the Atacama at Paracas, Peru, over the High Andes, to Cocha Cashu in the Amazonian lowlands.

The students are asked this simple organizing question on the first day while standing in the desert at the edge of the Pacific: “How is it that we are standing in the tropics, at ~13 deg S latitude, in a spot where there is zero terrestrial productivity and nearly zero terrestrial biodiversity, yet just several hundred kilometers away, on the other side of the Andes, is the area with
Earth’s highest terrestrial biodiversity and highest terrestrial productivity? What controls terrestrial productivity and
biodiversity? How did this come to be through time? What are the services that ecosystems provide and how are they affected by climate and humans? What can we expect in the future?” As the group moves across this gradient, students see how temperature and rainfall set these strikingly different biomes and set their biotic composition and control ecosystem function. It gives them a visceral understanding of how fine-scale changes in climate can have radical impacts on ecosystem structure and function and the potential impact of human-caused environmental change.

History of Nature Conservation in Latin America leverages these same sites to consider how different societies have used
and conserved these lands over time. From the absolute desert in Paracas National Park to the cloud and rain forests of the
Manu Biosphere Reserve, the group examines how humans interact with nature across the millennia, how and why we
choose to protect areas, and the role of humans in landscapes, as well as the effect of landscapes on humans. Close contact
with indigenous groups gives students powerful insight not only into history, but also the conservation and sustainability
challenges of the future.

One of the powerful aspects of this combination is that the two faculty have structured the two courses in a way that closely parallels the environments the group is in. For example, in the Tropical Biodiversity course students learn about large-scale global climate patterns and ENSO, read primary literature on sea bird foraging in the Humboldt current, and visit guano islands in the Paracas Reserve. The history course then examines the history of the Peruvian economy and the role of
guano, and the innovative conservation strategies employed by Peru to protect its industry, all in the light of larger trends in
the development of Latin American states. This occurs at all of the locations during the course. The students read the
primary literature to see how we have shaped and will shape the very environments that they are experiencing. More than that, it gives them a paired knowledge of scientific and historical/social science views of issues central to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services."

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Ecology and Conservation Biology of Coral Reefs is a 4 hour upper-level undergraduate seminar course. The course is a case-study and immersive experience in the ecology, sustainability, and conservation biology of one of the best preserved coral atolls in the Western Hemisphere. The course covers the geology, oceanography, ecosystem ecology, and autecology of coral reefs, and then transitions into understanding how human activities on local-to-global scales influence the sustainability functioning of marine ecosystems, including private for-profit activities and their effects on reefs. The course is based on readings from the primary literature compiled into an e-book developed at Wake Forest.

The purpose of the program is to give an in-depth view of the various biotic and abiotic components (including human) that come together to structure the biodiversity and ecosystem function in one of Earth’s highest biodiversity environments, and one most threatened by human use and climate change at all spatial scales. We specifically link the on- and off-campus components as they give students a tangible view of the results of certain scientific studies or management components. You can read about marine reserves and the effects on fish and conch recruitment, and then actually going to a marine reserve and looking across the boundaries will drive home the magnitudes and temporal scales of the effects. The same can be said with nearly all of the components from the geology and oceanography to the autecology.

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Ethics of Wilderness: Global Sustainability, Wilderness, and the Anthropocene

In this course students broaden their understanding of sustainability and sustainability studies. By closely examining the history of human interactions with the natural world and the various ways in which different cultures have related to it, students devise several alternative models of living on individual, communal, national, and international levels.

A close study of past human societies that have perished will provide insight into the limits of the Earth’s carrying capacities on regional and global scales. We examine various engineering solutions that enable less energy-intensive urban infrastructures while carefully considering alternative modes of living that rely on greater interpersonal relationships, diminished material acquisition, and stronger physical ties to the natural systems that support human life. In a world with rapidly diminishing natural resources and commensurate growth in human populations, how do we effect changes to the ways in which human societies organize and support themselves?

The course involves a two-week experiential lab in the backcountry of Alaska where students put into practice some of the ideas generated in class.

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The Cherokee Trail of Tears Project: Removal, Resilience, and Public History

Two Wake Forest faculty members travel with a group of students along the Northern Route of the Cherokee Trail of Tears from Cherokee, N.C., to Oklahoma. The westernmost destination for the summer immersion trip is Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, where late Wake Forest President James Ralph Scales served as president before leading Wake Forest from 1967 to 1983. Scales was a member of the Cherokee Nation. A statue of Scales, an OBU graduate, stands on the Shawnee campus.

Faculty who lead the trip are Ulrike Wiethaus, professor of religious studies, and Andrew Gurstelle, assistant teaching professor of anthropology.

The "Biodiversity and Nature Conservation in Peru," "Ecology and Conservation Biology of Coral Reefs," "Ethics of Wilderness: Global Sustainability, Wilderness, and the Anthropocene" and "The Cherokee Trail of Tears Project: Removal, Resilience, and Public History" experiences are just some of the many sustainability immersive opportunities available to Wake Forest students.