GEOGRAPHY, RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT OF LATIN AMERICA: A LOWER DIVISION COURSE DESIGNED FOR NON-MAJORS TO INTEREST STUDENTS TO WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR SOUTHERN NEIGHBORS AND HISPANIC STUDENTS TO BE MORE INTERESTED IN OUR SCIENCE

We need to do a better job teaching undergraduates about the remarkable and increasingly important region south of the USA known as Latin America. We also need to try harder to interest LatinX students in our science. For these purposes, we updated a course we developed in the 1990s with NSF. There is no suitable textbook so course content is based on 22 lectures on different topics. The course begins with an overview of the region, focusing on nations and important physical features of Latin America, followed by a test over this material. The next four lectures explore the region's cultural and physical geography, introduces Plate Tectonic concepts, and outlines the geologic evolution of Latin America. After this, four more lectures explore how and when people came to the region, leading to the great Inca and Aztec civilizations, how metals were used by these cultures, the Spanish conquest, and how especially silver mining dominated the colonial economies of Mexico and Peru. These 8 lectures are followed by the first midterm. The next 5 lectures focus on the resources of Latin America: nitrate and copper mining in Chile, geothermal energy in Mexico and Central America, oil and gas basics, oil and gas in Latin America, and lithium mining in the Altiplano. These are followed by two lectures on natural hazards of earthquakes and volcanoes, then the second midterm. The last 7 lectures mostly deal with the Latin American environment: El Nino, glaciers and climate change, the Amazon River, rain forests, coral reefs, and US-Mexico water issues emphasizing the Rio Grande. The final lecture is an overview of the Antilles/West Indies, and this is followed by the third midterm. The course ends with a review session followed by a final exam. The modular nature of the course makes it easy to update and customize. We are happy to share the materials we have developed with others who might want to offer a similar course at their university or community college.