The two "big ideas" informing this assignment are: (1) The importance of a mindful, self-reflective assessment of our own environmental impacts, and (2) The difficulties and complexities of meaningful personal and social change toward sustainability.

This activity was designed for an introductory class in environmental studies taught at Pacific Lutheran University entitled "Environment and Culture." This is one of two foundational courses in Environmental Studies at PLU, which emphasizes the humanities as an integral part of and portal into the study of environmental issues. The other foundational course, "Conservation of Natural Resources," emphasizes the natural sciences and has long included a "Lifestyle Project" in which students monitor, measure, and make changes to their behavior and its environmental impact. This assignment adapts the lifestyle project to be more relevant to a humanistic approach to environmental studies. With changes, I think that this activity could be successful in any environmental studies class that integrates a range of disciplinary approaches to learning.

Students in "Environment and Culture," and indeed in most of environmentally focused classes I teach, frequently want to move quickly from study to action, hoping to apply what they are learning and to do something about the problems they are studying. I have two responses to this tendency: On one hand, I am delighted by the fact that students recognize the seriousness of environmental problems and want to be part of the solution. On the other hand, I am worried that they frequently do not want to take the time to understand the complexity of environmental problems and reflectively ponder their own role in the problem. This lifestyle project assignment allows students to do something about what they are studying, but also encourages them to pay attention to the challenges of such action and the complexity and difficulty of real change, even on a small scale.

The assignment takes place over the middle six weeks of the course. It begins with a broad, in-class discussion of three ways in which every person potentially impacts the environment -diet, transportation, and meditation/spiritual practice. Based on this discussion, students are asked to keep a journal for one week reflecting on their own choices and habits in each of these areas. Following another in-class discussion, they choose one area in which to attempt a change and turn in a written commitment form in which they set a goal for one of these areas, articulating something they would like to do differently for one month (see the assignment guide). I check-in on how this process is going both formally and informally, and at the end of the process we spend another class day unpacking and reflecting together on the experience.

Because they must enforce their own commitment, I allow students a great deal of freedom in choosing what area they will work on and what they will commit to do. By far the most popular area of focus has been on meditation/spiritual practice, which may be because there is strong emphasis on the study of religion in the course or because students assume that such changes will be easy. Common commitments include: meditating outdoors for one hour, three times a week; praying for environmental healing on a daily basis; reading a sacred text and seeking out environmentally-relevant wisdom. The second most common area of focus is around food, and students have committed to such things as: giving up all meat for the month; eating two meals a day solely of local food; reading the ingredient list of everything eaten out loud. Transportation is a less popular choice, but students have committed to things like driving half as many miles per week and biking any destination within six miles.

The success of this activity obviously depends on the level of commitment students bring to it, and they will learn a wide range of different things depending on how they choose to use their time and how seriously they take the project. However, I structured the assignment in the hopes that all students would learn two key ideas: (1) Self-aware and mindful reflection is an essential part of any genuine change in one's habits, and (2) Changes in one's life or one's society are immensely complicated and can be successful only in a supportive and constructive context.

Learning Activities

1. Broad Context: In the weeks before the project begins, class time is spent with instructor-led and then small-group discussion reflecting on the potential impacts of choices about diet, transportation, and spiritual practice. Basic facts and statistics about each issue are shared and discussed.
2. Initial Monitoring: Students spend the first week of the project attending to all three areas of their own life with particular attention to environmental impacts, and then turn in a one-page, typed summary of what they learned from the process.
3. A Month-Long Commitment: Each student chooses one of the three areas on which to focus his/her attention, and commits to a concrete change s/he plans to make in that area of life. Students must then monitor and record their experiences with only that aspect of their life for four weeks, chronicling successes and failures in living up to the goals they have set. A one-page "Midstream Progress Report" is due at the end of the second week.
4. Final Reflection and Self-Assessment: In the week following the commitment (at which time students are freed from their self-imposed goals), each student writes a six page, formal report chronicling what s/he did, how it went, and what (if anything) has changed in how they think, feel, or act now that the project is completed.

A Lifestyle Project for the Humanities Assignment Guide (Microsoft Word 60kB Nov10 11)
Lifestyle Project Assisngment Commitment Form (Microsoft Word 28kB Nov8 11)

• Students have been very receptive to this project, and most showed admirable commitment to their projects and to learning from and reflecting on their progress. I have had students make significant changes and reflect on how good they feel about what they have done, and others who failed to achieve their goals but learned a great deal from reflecting on why they failed. Of course, some students failed to achieve their goals and did not reflect on it very well, but these have been a minority.

• While this assignment is going on, I regularly devote some time in class to informal discussion of it as a class and in small groups. Given the range of options for commitments, open class discussion of what they are learning seems crucial so that students can compare notes and learn from one another. Students who choose to look for environmental themes in the Bible need to learn from and share with students who are practicing yoga and other who have no spiritual practice of their own, and students who can't imagine giving up their cars or hamburgers need to hear from others who are trying such commitments.

• I carefully review all the changes students propose to make in their own lives and talk with students who propose anything that might potentially endanger them. Students who want to travel in ways that might be unsafe, who want to engage in radically new practices, and especially those who want to strictly control their diet raise flags for me, and I do my best to ensure that they are responsible and do not take undue risks. I also share my concerns about this when I am first explaining the assignment, in hopes that students will be self-aware and careful in the choices they make.

• I make this project optional; students can choose to write a research paper instead. This is because I want there to be a way out for students who (a) are not comfortable sharing their personal reflections, (b) do not feel comfortable making a change for health or other reasons, or (c) get halfway through the project and clearly are not taking the time to learn from it. Of 60 students who have taken this course, two have exercised this option. They researched environmental activism, and so were exposed to the same basic learning objectives through different means.

The course emphasizes that the humanities involve critical reflection on human experience, and so the grade for this assignment is determined by how well students pay attention to their experience, analyze it, and write about it. The writing done during the project is given full credit as long as it is done on time, and the majority of the grade comes from the final report, which is evaluated based on the quality of students' thinking and writing in response to the questions posed about their experience.

From the first discussion of this assignment, I stress that the grade is not based on the students' ability to live up to their commitments. They must demonstrate an ongoing attention to the project, but whether this ongoing attention results in a great success in meeting their personal goal or a complete failure, their grade is determined by writing and reflection. This hopefully prevents students passionate about environmental issues from ignoring the reflective and written components of the assignment while also discouraging ambitious students from choosing a project in which they are not

No particular materials are absolutely necessary for this set of assignments, as the central subject matter is students' own lives. However, it has proven important to relate the materials of the course to the lifestyle project so that students do not consider this activity to be disconnected from the academic study of environmental issues.

Some examples of the ways course materials for "Environment and Culture" might be helpful:

1. The class begins by reading essays from Wendell Berry's Sex, Economy, Community, and Freedom. Key themes in this work include the importance of local communities and local agriculture, which clearly relate to student projects concerning transportation and food. Berry's most fundamental argument is about the importance of small local communities in nurturing health relationships to the natural world, which some students connect to their experience when they struggle to make a change that is not accepted by their friends or family.
2. The next reading is Roger Gottlieb's A Greener Faith: Religious Environmentalism and Our Planet's Future, which focuses on the unique power of religious communities to speak for and about environmental issues. Students tend to be particularly interested in Gottlieb's description of an assignment from his own courses, in which students are asked to develop an ongoing relationship with a plant (pp 188-9).
3. The other readings in the course, which were conducted during the lifestyle project in 2008, are Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught. These readings can offer students who choose spiritual practices two very different approaches to meditation. Both emphasize what I broadly refer to as "mindfulness," and so help to teach one of the key ideas of the assignment.