Spring 2022
GREEN RHETORIC
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: https://greenrhetoric.blogspot.com/2022/01/our-syllabus.html
Meeting: January 18-May 6, 2022, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 10-11am
Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies --
Participation/Attendance, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Midterm Toulmin/Precis, 2-3pp., 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final Project/Keyword
Map, 40%.
Course Description
Of what does "Greenness" consist? In what does "Greenness"
abide? Just what is "Greenness" good for? In this course we will
survey a range of key vocabularies of environmental thought and activism --
Deep Ecology, eco-socialism, eco-feminism, environmental justice, anti-civilizationism,
permaculture, sustainable development, disaster capitalism, and futurological
geo-engineering -- as well as engage with more specifically and indicatively
American traditions, from Transcendentalism to wilderness conservation (or
exterminism), the land ethic, and consumer lifestyle ecology. We will also
delve into what seem to be prevalent rhetorical strategies to communicate the
urgency of environmental crises and mobilize sufficient constituencies to
address them. What is compelling or not about current forms of environmental
journalism? What delights lie in store for the reader of international
agreements on climate change and policy papers available from the Environmental
Protection Agency? Does the scientificity of statistics lend force to
environmental claims or alienate people from narratives of lived distress and
shared threat? If liberal governance is inadequate to address environmental
catastrophe are efforts to circumvent the political via macro-design strategies
or micro-mindfulness lifeways more likely to succeed? Does the proliferation of
environmentalist identities and subcultures facilitate necessary political
organization or undermine it or simply reveal its ineradicable intersectional
stratification? We will even ponder why so many environmentalist websites make
recourse to similar color palettes and fonts and images. Our focus will never
drift far from current dilemmas, but the premise of the course is that these
dilemmas are illuminated by critical vocabularies just as the critical
vocabularies are substantiated by the dilemmas to which they are applied. At
the end of the term, each student will create a conceptual-keyword map tracing
their own course through the course materials and finding their own settlement
within them, however unsettling it may be.
Provisional Schedule of Meetings
January
Week One: Introductions
Wednesday, January 19 {Course Introduction}
Thursday, January 21 {Personal Introductions}
-- Hazel Johnson, A Personal Story
Week Two: Crises of Representation
Monday, January 24 {Doing the Math}
-- Bill McKibben, Global
Warming's Terrifying New Math
Wednesday, January 26 {Hyperobjects and Slow Violences}
-- Timothy Morton, The
End of the World, pp. 99-106 (more as you like)
-- Rob Nixon, SlowViolence, Introduction, at least pp. 1-14 (more as you like)
Friday, January 28 {Looking Up}
-- Peter Kalmus, I'm a Climate Scientist and Don't Look Up Captures the Madness I See Every Day
-- Ketan Joshi, Fiona Harvey, Nina Lakhani, Damian Carrington, Don't Look Up: Four Climate Scientists on the Polarising Film
Week Three: Transcendentalism and Nature Writing
Monday, January 31 {Thoreau}
-- Henry David
Thoreau, from Walden,
Where I Lived and What I Lived For
February
Wednesday, February 2 {Mary Austin}
-- Mary Austin, The
Land of Little Rain, Preface, The Land of Little Rain, and The
Little Town of the Grapevines
-- Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like A Mountain
-- Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Week Four: Ah, Wilderness!
Monday, February 7 {Muir and Racism}
-- John Muir, Save the Redwoods
-- Alex Fox, Sierra Club Grapples With Founder John Muir’s Racism
-- Lisa Campbell, National
Parks and Environmental Racism
Wednesday, February 9 {Wilderness Trouble}
-- William Cronon, The Trouble With Wilderness
Friday, February 11 {America’s
Best Idea?}
-- PBS Site for the Ken Burns Miniseries, America's Best Idea
-- Alan Spears, No,
National Parks Are Not America's "Best Idea"
Week Five: Deep Ecology
Monday, February 14 {Deep Ecology}
-- Arne Naess, The
Shallow and the Deep
-- Arne Naess and George Sessions, Deep Ecology Platform
Wednesday, February 16 {Rachel Carson}
-- Rachel Carson, Silent
Spring, A Fable for Tomorrow, The Obligation to Endure
Friday, February 18 {Murray Bookchin}
-- Murray Bookchin, Social
Ecology Versus Deep Ecology
Week Six: Eco-Feminism
Monday, February 21 {Administrative Holiday, No Class}
Wednesday, February 23 {Eco-Feminism and the Sacred}
-- Rosemary Radford Reuther, Ecofeminism
-- Catherine Keller, Dark
Vibrations: Ecofeminism and the Sacred
Friday, February 25 {Queer Ecofeminisms}
-- Greta Gaard, Toward
A Queer Ecofeminsm
-- Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Unnatural
Passions? Notes to a Queer Ecology
Monday, February 28 {Eco-Socialism}
-- John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of
Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism
-- Joel Kovel and Michael Lowry, An
Ecosocialist Manifesto
Wednesday, March 2 {The Cheaps}
-- Jason Moore, The End of Cheap Nature; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About "The" Environment and Love the Crisis of Capitalism
-- Saul Landau, Reagan
and Bottled Water
-- Vandana Shiva, Controversy
Over Biopiracy in India and the Developing World
-- Astra Taylor, Who Speaks for
the Trees?
Week Eight: Environmental Justice
Monday, March 7 {Environmental Justice}
-- Robert Bullard, Environment and Morality: Confronting Environmental Racism
Wednesday, March 9 {Environmental Racism}
-- Naomi Klein, Climate Rage
-- Laura Pulido, Flint,
Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism
Friday, March 11 {Public Declarations}
-- Johannesburg
Declaration
-- Green New Deal
Week Nine: Permaculture
Monday, March 14 {Permaculture/Polyculture}
-- John Zerzan, Agriculture
-- Malcolm Scully, The
Destructive Nature of Our Bountiful Harvests
Wednesday, March 16 {Salt of the Earth}
-- Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, A 50-Year Farm Bill
-- Wes Jackson, Becoming
Native To This Place
Friday, March 18 {Design for Living}
-- The Land
Institute, Vision and Mission
and Our
Work
-- David Holmgren, Permaculture Design
Principles
-- UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Agroforestry,
Basic Knowledge (By all means, dig deeper.)
Week Ten: Spring Break
Week Eleven: Green Eats
Monday, March 28
{Green Eats}
-- Clara Jeffery, Michael
Pollen Fixes Dinner
-- Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating
Fossil Fuels
Wednesday, March 30 {Vegetarianism}
-- Claudia Deutsch, Trying
to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change
-- John Vidal, Ten
Ways Vegetarianism Can Help Save the Planet
April
Friday, April 1 {Food Systems}
-- Marc Abrahams, Food
for Thought
-- Gretel Schueller, The
Truth Behind Food Labels
-- EPA, Food and
Pesticides
Week Twelve: Standing Rock and Peak Everything
Monday, April 4 {Standing Rock}
-- History
-- Nick Estes, FightingFor Our Lives
-- Nick Estes, This Land Was Made for Decolonized Love
-- Julian Brave
Noisecat and Ann Spice, A
History and Future of Resistance
-- Wikipedia, List
of Pipeline Accidents in the 21st Century
-- Anna J. Willow and Sara Wiley, Politics,
Ecology, and New Anthropology of Energy: Hydraulic Fracking
Friday, April 8 {Peak Everything}
-- Michael Klare, Are
Resource Wars Our Future?
-- Maxwell, Fuller, Brooks, and Watson, Biodiversity:
The Ravages of Guns, Nets, and Bulldozers
-- World Wildlife Fund, Deforestation
-- Kate Kelland, Antibiotics
Overuse Threatens Modern Medicine
Week Thirteen: “Natural” Capitalism
Monday, April 11 {Greening
Capitalism?}
-- Paul Hawken, Natural
Capitalism
-- Stewart Brand, How
Slums Can Save the Planet
-- Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
Wednesday, April 13 {Greenwashing}
-- Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend, Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem
-- Bruce Watson, The
Troubling Evolution of Corporate Greenwashing
-- The Economist, The Triple Bottom Line
Friday, April 15 {Debating
Capitalism’s Green Future}
Week Fourteen: Tech Talk
Monday, April 18
{Luddites}
-- John Zerzan, Against
Technology
-- Kirkpatrick Sale, Lessons from the Luddites
-- Bryan Walsh, Your
Data Is Dirty
-- Naomi Klein, Geoengineering:
Testing the Waters
-- Karl Mathiesen, Is
Geoengineering A Bad Idea?
Friday, April 22 {Science Fictions}
-- Aaron Labaree, Our
Science Fiction Apocalypse
-- Marc Stiegler, The Gentle Seduction
Week Fifteen: Ministry of the Future, a novel
Monday, April 25 {Ministry of the Future}
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry of the Future, pp.[1]-180
Wednesday, April 27 {Ministry of the Future}
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry of the Future, pp. [183]-[385]
Friday, April 29 {Ministry of the Future}
– Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry of the Future, pp. [387]-563.
May
Week Sixteen: RRR
Monday, May 2: office hour marathon
Wednesday, May 4: office hour marathon
Friday, May 6: final projects due
