Our Syllabus

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

Friday, February 4 {Aldo Leopold}

-- 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

Week Seven: Eco-Socialism

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

March 

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

Friday, March 4 {Pirates and Trees}

-- 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} 

-- Rio Declaration

-- 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

Wednesday, April 6 {Two Futures}

-- 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

Wednesday, April 20 {Geo-engineering}

-- 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