Summer 2018
Rhet 153: GREEN RHETORIC
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: https://greenrhetoric.blogspot.com/2018/05/our-syllabus.html
Meeting: July 3-August 11, 2017, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 2-4.30am, 151 Barrows Hall
Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies -- Participation/Attendance, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Object Reading, 1-2pp., 10%; Toulmin/Precis, 2-3pp., 15%%; Presentation, 15%; Final Project/Keyword Map, 30%.
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
Week One
Tuesday, July 3 {Introductions}
Wednesday, July 4 -- Holiday
Thursday, July 5 {Inconvenient Truths}
-- Screening and discussion of film, "An Inconvenient Truth" (1-2pp. Object Reading due Tuesday)
-- Bill McKibben, With the Ascent of Trump Is It Game Over for the Climate Change Fight?
Week Two
Tuesday, July 10 {Hyperobjects, Slow Violences, Number Soup, Intersections}
-- Timothy Morton, The End of the World, pp. 99-106 (more as you like)
-- Naomi Klein, Climate Rage
-- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence, Introduction, at least pp. 1-14 (more as you like)
-- Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
-- Brentin Mock, Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?
Wednesday, July 11 {Transcendentalist Precursors and Successors}
PRESENTATION: Nick S.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature, Read the Introduction, Nature, Commodity, Beauty (more as you like)
-- Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, Where I Lived and What I Lived For
-- 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
Thursday, July 12 {Ah, Wilderness!}
PRESENTATION: Raina C.
-- PBS Site for the Ken Burns Miniseries, America's Best Idea
-- Alan Spears, No, National Parks Are Not America's "Best Idea"
-- Lisa Campbell, National Parks and Environmental Racism
-- William Cronon, The Trouble With Wilderness
-- John Muir, Save the Redwoods
Week Three
Tuesday, July 17 {Deep Ecology}
PRESENTATION: Raul M.
-- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, A Fable for Tomorrow, The Obligation to Endure
-- Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep
-- Arne Naess and George Sessions, Deep Ecology Platform
-- Stephen Harding, What Is Deep Ecology?
-- Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology
Wednesday, July 18 {Eco-Feminism}
PRESENTATION: Hollis P. and Taylor S.
-- Rosemary Radford Reuther, Ecofeminism
-- Cathleen and Colleen McGuire, Ecofeminist Visions
-- Catherine Keller, Dark Vibrations: Ecofeminsm and the Sacred
-- Mary Halton, Margaret Atwood: "If The Ocean Dies, So Do We"
-- Greta Gaard, Toward A Queer Ecofeminsm
-- Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Unnatural Passions? Notes to a Queer Ecology
Thursday, July 19 {Eco-Socialism}
PRESENTATIONS: Lis G.
-- Joel Kovel and Michael Lowry, An Ecosocialist Manifesto
-- John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism
-- Vandana Shiva, Controversy Over Biopiracy in India and the Developing World
-- Systems Change Not Climate Change, What Is Ecosocialism?
-- Sarah Jaffe interviews Jason Moore and Raj Patel on The Ideology of Cheap Stuff
-- Astra Taylor, Who Speaks for the Trees?
Week Four
Tuesday, July 24 {Environmental Justice}
Your Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema due at the beginning of the hour.
PRESENTATION: Elijah-Brian D.
-- Robert Bullard, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism
-- Laura Pulido, Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism
-- Sarah Lazare, From Fracking to Coal Waste, NAACP Confronts Environmental Racism in North Carolina
-- Larry Buhl, The Color of Pollution
-- Rio Declaration
-- Johannesburg Declaration
Wednesday, July 25 {Permaculture/Polyculture}
PRESENTATIONS: Tiffany R.
-- John Zerzan, Agriculture
-- Malcolm Scully, The Destructive Nature of Our Bountiful Harvests
-- Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, A 50-Year Farm Bill
-- Wes Jackson, Becoming Native To This Place
-- 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.)
Thursday, July 26 {Green Eats} (Potluck Brunch)
PRESENTATIONS: Sam M.
-- Clara Jeffery, Michael Pollen Fixes Dinner
-- Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels
-- Claudia Deutsch, Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change
-- John Vidal, Ten Ways Vegetarianism Can Help Save the Planet
-- Marc Abrahams, Food for Thought
-- Gretel Schueller, The Truth Behind Food Labels
-- EPA, Food and Pesticides
-- Tom Philpott, Trump's EPA Greenlights A Nasty Chemical
Week Five
Tuesday, July 31 {Standing Rock}
PRESENTATION/S: Lauren M., Joseph S.
-- History
-- Nick Estes, Fighting For Our Lives
-- Nick Estes, This Land Was Made for Decolonized Love
-- Wikipedia, List of Pipeline Accidents in the 21st Century
-- Julian Brave Noisecat and Ann Spice, A History and Future of Resistance
-- Anna J. Willow and Sara Wiley, Politics, Ecology, and New Anthropology of Energy: Hydraulic Fracking
Wednesday, August 1{Peak Everything}
PRESENTATIONS:
-- James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency
-- Michael Klare, Are Resource Wars Our Future?
-- Maxwell, Fuller, Brooks, and Watson, Biodiversity: The Ravages of Guns, Nets, and Bulldozers
-- Saul Landau, Reagan and Bottled Water
-- World Wildlife Fund, Deforestation
-- Kate Kelland, Antibiotics Overuse Threatens Modern Medicine
Thursday, August 2 {Green Capitalism/Disaster Capitalism} DEBATE!
-- Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism
-- Michael Albert, Natural Capitalism?
-- Richard Stroup, Free Market Environmentalism
-- Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend, Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem
-- The Economist, The Triple Bottom Line
-- Bruce Watson, The Troubling Evolution of Corporate Greenwashing
-- Naomi Klein, Get Ready for the First Shocks of Trump's Disaster Capitalism
Week Six
Tuesday, August 7 {Green Urbanity}
PRESENTATION: Ally M.
-- Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
-- Mike Davis, Sinister Paradise: Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
-- Stewart Brand, How Slums Can Save the Planet
-- Bob Berwyn, To Keep Cities Cool We Must Green Them Right
-- Joshua Leon, What Broadacre City Can Teach Us
-- Annalee Newitz and Emily Stamm, 10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future
Wednesday, August 8 {Tech Talk}
PRESENTATION: Gloria M.
-- John Zerzan, Against Technology
-- Kirkpatrick Sale, Lessons from the Luddites
-- Bryan Walsh, Your Data Is Dirty
-- Aaron Labaree, Our Science Fiction Apocalypse
-- Marc Stiegler, The Gentle Seduction
-- Naomi Klein, Geoengineering: Testing the Waters
-- Karl Mathiesen, Is Geoengineering A Bad Idea?
Thursday, August 9 {More Inconvenience} (Hand in Final Project, Keyword Map)
-- Screening and discussion of the film, "An Inconvenient Sequel"
Rhet 153: GREEN RHETORIC
Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: https://greenrhetoric.blogspot.com/2018/05/our-syllabus.html
Meeting: July 3-August 11, 2017, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 2-4.30am, 151 Barrows Hall
Rough Basis for Final Grade, subject to contingencies -- Participation/Attendance, 15%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Object Reading, 1-2pp., 10%; Toulmin/Precis, 2-3pp., 15%%; Presentation, 15%; Final Project/Keyword Map, 30%.
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
Week One
Tuesday, July 3 {Introductions}
Wednesday, July 4 -- Holiday
Thursday, July 5 {Inconvenient Truths}
-- Screening and discussion of film, "An Inconvenient Truth" (1-2pp. Object Reading due Tuesday)
-- Bill McKibben, With the Ascent of Trump Is It Game Over for the Climate Change Fight?
Week Two
Tuesday, July 10 {Hyperobjects, Slow Violences, Number Soup, Intersections}
-- Timothy Morton, The End of the World, pp. 99-106 (more as you like)
-- Naomi Klein, Climate Rage
-- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence, Introduction, at least pp. 1-14 (more as you like)
-- Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
-- Brentin Mock, Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?
Wednesday, July 11 {Transcendentalist Precursors and Successors}
PRESENTATION: Nick S.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature, Read the Introduction, Nature, Commodity, Beauty (more as you like)
-- Henry David Thoreau, from Walden, Where I Lived and What I Lived For
-- 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
Thursday, July 12 {Ah, Wilderness!}
PRESENTATION: Raina C.
-- PBS Site for the Ken Burns Miniseries, America's Best Idea
-- Alan Spears, No, National Parks Are Not America's "Best Idea"
-- Lisa Campbell, National Parks and Environmental Racism
-- William Cronon, The Trouble With Wilderness
-- John Muir, Save the Redwoods
Week Three
Tuesday, July 17 {Deep Ecology}
PRESENTATION: Raul M.
-- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, A Fable for Tomorrow, The Obligation to Endure
-- Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep
-- Arne Naess and George Sessions, Deep Ecology Platform
-- Stephen Harding, What Is Deep Ecology?
-- Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology
Wednesday, July 18 {Eco-Feminism}
PRESENTATION: Hollis P. and Taylor S.
-- Rosemary Radford Reuther, Ecofeminism
-- Cathleen and Colleen McGuire, Ecofeminist Visions
-- Catherine Keller, Dark Vibrations: Ecofeminsm and the Sacred
-- Mary Halton, Margaret Atwood: "If The Ocean Dies, So Do We"
-- Greta Gaard, Toward A Queer Ecofeminsm
-- Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Unnatural Passions? Notes to a Queer Ecology
Thursday, July 19 {Eco-Socialism}
PRESENTATIONS: Lis G.
-- Joel Kovel and Michael Lowry, An Ecosocialist Manifesto
-- John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism
-- Vandana Shiva, Controversy Over Biopiracy in India and the Developing World
-- Systems Change Not Climate Change, What Is Ecosocialism?
-- Sarah Jaffe interviews Jason Moore and Raj Patel on The Ideology of Cheap Stuff
-- Astra Taylor, Who Speaks for the Trees?
Week Four
Tuesday, July 24 {Environmental Justice}
Your Midterm Precis/Toulmin Schema due at the beginning of the hour.
PRESENTATION: Elijah-Brian D.
-- Robert Bullard, Poverty, Pollution, and Environmental Racism
-- Laura Pulido, Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism
-- Sarah Lazare, From Fracking to Coal Waste, NAACP Confronts Environmental Racism in North Carolina
-- Larry Buhl, The Color of Pollution
-- Rio Declaration
-- Johannesburg Declaration
Wednesday, July 25 {Permaculture/Polyculture}
PRESENTATIONS: Tiffany R.
-- John Zerzan, Agriculture
-- Malcolm Scully, The Destructive Nature of Our Bountiful Harvests
-- Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry, A 50-Year Farm Bill
-- Wes Jackson, Becoming Native To This Place
-- 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.)
Thursday, July 26 {Green Eats} (Potluck Brunch)
PRESENTATIONS: Sam M.
-- Clara Jeffery, Michael Pollen Fixes Dinner
-- Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Eating Fossil Fuels
-- Claudia Deutsch, Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change
-- John Vidal, Ten Ways Vegetarianism Can Help Save the Planet
-- Marc Abrahams, Food for Thought
-- Gretel Schueller, The Truth Behind Food Labels
-- EPA, Food and Pesticides
-- Tom Philpott, Trump's EPA Greenlights A Nasty Chemical
Week Five
Tuesday, July 31 {Standing Rock}
PRESENTATION/S: Lauren M., Joseph S.
-- History
-- Nick Estes, Fighting For Our Lives
-- Nick Estes, This Land Was Made for Decolonized Love
-- Wikipedia, List of Pipeline Accidents in the 21st Century
-- Julian Brave Noisecat and Ann Spice, A History and Future of Resistance
-- Anna J. Willow and Sara Wiley, Politics, Ecology, and New Anthropology of Energy: Hydraulic Fracking
Wednesday, August 1{Peak Everything}
PRESENTATIONS:
-- James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency
-- Michael Klare, Are Resource Wars Our Future?
-- Maxwell, Fuller, Brooks, and Watson, Biodiversity: The Ravages of Guns, Nets, and Bulldozers
-- Saul Landau, Reagan and Bottled Water
-- World Wildlife Fund, Deforestation
-- Kate Kelland, Antibiotics Overuse Threatens Modern Medicine
Thursday, August 2 {Green Capitalism/Disaster Capitalism} DEBATE!
-- Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism
-- Michael Albert, Natural Capitalism?
-- Richard Stroup, Free Market Environmentalism
-- Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend, Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem
-- The Economist, The Triple Bottom Line
-- Bruce Watson, The Troubling Evolution of Corporate Greenwashing
-- Naomi Klein, Get Ready for the First Shocks of Trump's Disaster Capitalism
Week Six
Tuesday, August 7 {Green Urbanity}
PRESENTATION: Ally M.
-- Mike Davis, Slum Ecology
-- Mike Davis, Sinister Paradise: Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?
-- Stewart Brand, How Slums Can Save the Planet
-- Bob Berwyn, To Keep Cities Cool We Must Green Them Right
-- Joshua Leon, What Broadacre City Can Teach Us
-- Annalee Newitz and Emily Stamm, 10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future
Wednesday, August 8 {Tech Talk}
PRESENTATION: Gloria M.
-- John Zerzan, Against Technology
-- Kirkpatrick Sale, Lessons from the Luddites
-- Bryan Walsh, Your Data Is Dirty
-- Aaron Labaree, Our Science Fiction Apocalypse
-- Marc Stiegler, The Gentle Seduction
-- Naomi Klein, Geoengineering: Testing the Waters
-- Karl Mathiesen, Is Geoengineering A Bad Idea?
Thursday, August 9 {More Inconvenience} (Hand in Final Project, Keyword Map)
-- Screening and discussion of the film, "An Inconvenient Sequel"
