This course is designed to improve written and verbal academic and language skills, with emphasis placed on thesis-driven writing and semi-formal presentations and discussions. Students will interact critically through discussion and written tasks with diverse texts in varying genres (articles, reports, websites and newspaper/magazine items) linked to the theme of Human Impacts On Our Natural World - namely, how humans, intentionally or accidentally, are changing the nature (in both senses) of the world in which we live. Throughout the course, students will explore the influence of scientific progress and real/envisaged pre/post facto human error on the natural world. Students will attempt to answer questions such as: In what ways do or should we wield change on our environment – on the air we breathe, the weather we experience, the terrain in which we grow or food and gather useful and useable resources essential to life, and to the composition and extent of the very earth upon which we tread? What aspects or elements could or should be altered and by what means and to what justifiable ends? Answers to such questions will be explored and developed, based on class discussions of ideas/concepts generated through shared interpretations of the course materials related to the module themes of Weather Wizardry, Creative Cartography and Altering Agriculture. This course is aimed at the lay rather than expert participant – students with an intellectual and/or emotional interest in climate change and our environment now and for future generations.