English 5583 Environmental Writing

Spring 2001
Dr,Denise Tillery
Office: Morrill 302-A
Phone: 744-6217
Office Hours: MW 10:30-11:30, W 1:30-2:30, T 1:00-2:00, and by appointment
Email: tillery@okstate.edu

Course Requirements

What is environmental writing, and why should we be studying it? Many technical writing jobs involve some form of environmental writing: environmental impact statements, public documents requesting public input on environmental issues, public relations documents for organizations whose business involves some form of environmental impact. For future environmental professionals, writing for the public and for regulatory agencies is a crucial aspect of the job. We will study different methods of analyzing environmental discourse, read some popular science works that raise environmental issues, and study some actual environmental documents. The class will discuss different philosophical notions about the environment and humans’ relations to the natural world, which color different approaches to environmental control.

Textbooks

Ecospeak, Killingsworth and Palmer

Green Culture, Herndl and Brown

Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

Ecoscam, Ronald Bailey

Various readings on reserve

Assignments

This is a writing class, and will involve writing assignments every week. You will write weekly informal papers that respond to the readings (I call them "response papers), that should be 2-3 pages long. The papers should summarize the important issues from the weekly readings and raise any issues that you would like to discuss further. I will also put you in discussion groups. Each week, one group will lead a discussion based on an article or chapter from one of the supplemental books or an article or book chapter that your group has found and provided to the class the week earlier. Everyone will participate in the discussion, but it is the responsibility of the group to summarize the important elements of the week’s reading and to organize the discussion.

In addition to the readings, you will select an environmental problem, dispute, or controversy that you are aware of, and analyze some set of documents that relate to this controversy. I’m assuming you are all in this class because of a personal interest in environmental matters, and probably some of you are familiar with an issue that is near and dear to your hearts. I want you to analyze some writing from the two (or more) opposing sides of the issue—newspaper articles or editorials, letters to the editor, public information documents, environmental impact statements, and so on. Examples of issues can be big national issues like President Clinton’s recent plan to protect some 16 million acres of Forest Service land from logging and road building, or smaller local issues like a development in previously pristine land, a nuclear waste repository or Superfund site in an area you are familiar with, a bridge or other major public project that has been viewed as an environmental threat, and so on. Possibilities are endless. The idea is for you to identify who the opposing sides seem to be (developers versus an organization of individuals who use an area for recreation, for instance, or the government versus independent environmental groups), and show how each side constructs the issue from their perspective. We’ll read some examples of this in the Green Culture book and in some articles.

Note: I will not accept any late response papers.

Course Schedule

Week 1 Jan 17

• Course Introduction, in-class writing assignment (response paper 1) and discussion

Week 2 Jan 24

• Ecospeak Intro and chapter 1 (1-48), "Rhetoric and the Environmental Dilemma," and "Varieties of Environmental Activism." response paper 2

Popular Science Writing About the Environment

Week 3 Jan 31

• Ecospeak ch 2 (51-100), "The Rhetoric of Scientific Activism," and Leopold, "The Land Ethic" and "Wilderness" (237-280). response paper 3

Week 4 Feb 7

• Silent Spring, intro and chapters 1-8
• Green Culture, chapter 1, "Millenial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming." response paper 4

Week 5 Feb 14

• Silent Spring, chapters 9-17
• Green Culture, chapter 3, "Epistemology and Politics in American Nature Writing." response paper 5

Environmental Discourse and Public Policy

Week 6 Feb 21

• Ecospeak Ch 5, "The Environmental Impact Statement and the Rhetoric of Democracy"
• Schmidtz, "Natural Enemies: An Anatomy of Environmental Conflict" (on reserve). response paper 6

Week 7 Feb 21

• Green Culture ch 5, "Saving the Great Lakes"
• Patterson and Lee, "The Environmental Rhetoric of ‘Balance’" (on reserve). response paper 7

Week 8 Feb 28

• Livesey, "McDonald’s and the Environmental Defense Fund: A Case Study of a Green Alliance" (on reserve)
• Green Culture Ch 7: "Landscape, Drama, and Dissensus"
• Abstract due (1-2 pages proposing research question for final project)

Week 9 Mar 7

• Green Culture ch 4: "The Low-Level Radioactive Waste Siting Controversy." response paper 8
• short individual presentations on environmental issue

Week 10 Mar 14

• short individual presentations continue; rhetorical analysis due (5-8 pages)

Week 11 Mar 21

• Spring break

Anti-Environmentalisms

Week 12 Mar 28

• Green Culture ch 8, "Beyond the Realm of Reason: Understanding the Extreme Environmental Rhetoric of the John Birch Society," and Ecoscam, ch 1-5
• proposal for final project due (5-8 pages)

Week 13 April 4

• Ecoscam, ch 6-10
• Ecospeak ch 4, Transformations of Scientific Discourse in the News Media"
• Annotated bibliography of at least 10 sources for your final project and a brief explanation of how you will use each source.

Ecofeminism and Ecotopianism

Week 14 April 11

• Stearney, "Feminism, Ecofeminism, and the Maternal Archetype: Motherhood as a Feminine Universal" (on reserve)
• Shiva, "The Impoverishment of the Environment: Women and Children Last" (on reserve)
• Mies, "Feminist Research: Science, Violence, and Responsibility" (on reserve)
• Draft paper due

Week 15 April 18

• Ecospeak, ch 6 "Rhetoric and Action in Ecotopian Discourse"
• response paper 9

Week 16 April 2

• Final paper due

Finals week May 1-5

• response paper 10 (evaluation of class)