As the Sustainable World Turns: A Serialized
"Ecothriller" of Life in Stevens Point, 2050
Coming this spring (2009) is
the first installment in a serialized novel (collaboratively
written by students in Professor W. John Coletta’s
“Literature and Ecology” and “Environmental and Science
Writing” classes) of campus life at UWSP in the year 2050.
Part soap opera and part novel, As the Sustainable World
Turns is an “ecothiller” with a strong message of the merits
of social and environmental justice as well as of economic
and ecological sustainability. Each semester, students,
faculty, staff, citizens, and all denizens of the bio- and
blogospheres can expect a thrilling cliffhanger and a new
online installment or chapter.
This serialized ecothriller’s “message” will be positive
and hopeful (as well as instructive, we hope), but there
will be significant dramatizations of personal encounters
with issues and events that may be derived from the
reasonable (but not always comfortable) extrapolations from
the kinds of trends we see today in the social, political,
economic, and ecological spheres. Installments or chapters
will explore, in the context of an exciting plot, (1) the
inner, psychological dimensions of living in a more
sustainable culture, which is to say, within a culture whose
assumptions may be somewhat different from those that are so
familiar to us all ; (2) the complex social and
institutional changes that sustainability may require; and
(3) the shifting nature of the political, economic, and
ecological systems that are redefining our lives. At the
same time, the values that our university has fostered for
more than a century will be seen as increasingly relevant to
a humane and sustainable future.
UWSP and the City of Stevens Point will be presented as
leading edges in both the academic and cultural dimensions
of sustainability, with UWSP still a leader in a range of
environmental initiatives and programs and the
Ecomunicipality of Stevens Point a top ecotourism
destination as well as a renowned teaching and demonstration
Center for the Promotion of Renewability (CPR).
