Title: Perhaps The Active Earth, or The Earth Now, or The Earth 2. Need help, please.
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 involve 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 a partner to The Earth* and is intended to follow a similar approach. That is: discovery, rather than encyclopedic; specific topics/stories that illustrate a general process or theme. For more general remarks about this approach, please read the summary of The Earth.
This is not intended, however, as a continuation of the The Earth, but as something closer to being parallel and that emphasizes the now, active things. One view expressed in committee (largely in passing) was that it might be tied to the human time-scale. This would allow everything from historical events like Krakatoa and Thera and the effects on the Indonesian/Minoan civilization; the supposed drowning on the Black Sea and human migration (Noah's Flood!); Montserratt (sp?) and the conflict of science and politics in the hazard/risk arena; the change of climate from glacial to interglacial and now and all the difficulties of establishing this, etc. etc.
This could be a tremendously exciting course, tying together earth processes and people in all sorts of ways. This course surely sells itself!
* Or to give it its current full-name: The Earth: A History.