English R1B

Other Readings and Media

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac; J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals; David Sibley, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America; and a course reader with poems, essays, and/or excerpts by William Wordsworth, Bill McKibben, David Owen, Elizabeth Kolbert, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, David Owen, Wendell Berry, William Cronon, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Pollan.

Description

In this class, you will become ecologically literate, and learn to write clear argumentative prose. You will learn to identify birds and trees, and keep a journal to practice writing about the environment. As exemplars, we will look at how other writers—Thoreau, Leopold, Steinbeck, McKibben—have written about their environments. In the meantime, in several short papers, you will synthesize your own observations into ecological hypotheses, and revise and perfect them in response to criticism and peer review. In this class, I hope to move together from nature writing to environmental justice. Ultimately, you will be encouraged to reflect on your own place in nature: at the end of the semester, you will present your final paper on “The Future of Nature” at an in-class conference. By the end of the term, you will also be able to tell a Red-Tailed Hawk from a Turkey Vulture from half a mile away.