Title: All good ideas are welcome, please. How about: The Earth: A History! or Bacteria to Dinosaurs to Homo Sapiens.
Summary.
Please note that the content of this course has not yet been fully discussed by the committee; this will be a task for an all-volunteer subcommittee which should inolve the people who would teach this course or who have a genuine interest in its development. The summary below is therefore not completely blessed by the committee in detail, although the general concept has support. Thus, nothing is writ in stone.
This course is proposed to replace Historical Geology, although it might not cover the same ground. Here the desire is to draw attention to the incredible diversity of life that has and that continues to flourish on the Earth, including aspects of human civilization, colonization, etc.
This is clearly an enormous amount of material, and again we would propose that the approach be to carefully select very specific topics that illustrate general concepts. For example, students might learn quite a bit about the evolution of the horse (it's a particularly full paleontological record, and the story contains a good North America component) but perhaps less about something else. Dinosaurs might figure well, perahps at the expense of brachiopods (an illustration only!). And again, we might take a page from the approach taken by Gould in his popular science books.