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Saturday, June 24, 2017

Green Rhet This Summer

Summer 2017
Rhet 153: GREEN RHETORIC

Instructor: Dale Carrico: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com
Course Blog: http://greenrhetoric.blogspot.com/2017/06/our-syllabus.html
Meeting: July 3-August 11, 2017, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 9-11.30am, Rhetoric Conference Room, 7415 Dwinelle 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 4 -- Holiday

Wednesday, July 5 {Introductions}

Thursday, July 6 {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 11 {Hyperobjects, Slow Violences, Number Soup, Intersections}
-- Timothy Morton, The End of the World
-- Naomi Klein, Climate Rage
-- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence
-- Bill McKibben, Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
-- Brentin Mock, Are There Two Different Versions of Environmentalism, One "White," One "Black"?

Wednesday, July 12 {Transcendentalist Precursors and Successors}
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature
-- Henry David Thoreau, from Walden
-- Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain
-- Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like A Mountain
-- Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic

Thursday, July 13 {Ah, Wilderness!}
-- 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
-- John Muir, Save the Redwoods
-- Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Chapters 1-3
-- Astra Taylor, Who Speaks for the Trees?

Week Three

Tuesday, July 18 {Deep Ecology}
-- Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep
-- Arne Naess and George Sessions, Deep Ecology Platform
-- Stephen Harding, What Is Deep Ecology?
-- Joanna Macy, The Ecological Self
-- William Cronon, The Trouble With Wilderness
-- Murray Bookchin, Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology

Wednesday, July 19 {Eco-Feminism}
-- Rosemary Radford Reuther, Ecofeminism
-- Cathleen and Colleen McGuire, Ecofeminist Visions
-- Catherine Keller, Dark Vibrations: Ecofeminsm and the Sacred
-- Nick Estes, This Land Was Made for Decolonized Love
-- Allison Kilkenny, 5 Reasons You Should Care About Environmental Justice If You Care About Women
-- Greta Gaard, Toward A Queer Ecofeminsm
-- Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Unnatural Passions? Notes to a Queer Ecology

Thursday, July 20 {Eco-Socialism} (Precis/Toulmin)
-- John Bellamy Foster, The Four Laws of Ecology and the Four Anti-Ecological Laws of Capitalism
-- John Bellamy Foster, Trump and Climate Catastrophe
-- Vandana Shiva, The US Patent System Legalizes Theft and Biopiracy
-- Systems Change Not Climate Change, What Is Ecosocialism?
-- Jason Moore, The End of Cheap Nature
-- David Schwartzman, From Climate Crisis to Solar Capitalism

Week Four

Tuesday, July 25 {Environmental Justice}
-- 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
-- Melissa Harris-Perry, Being Black on Earth Day
-- Larry Buhl, The Color of Pollution
-- Rio Declaration
-- Johannesburg Declaration

Wednesday, July 26 {Permaculture/Polyculture}
-- 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, August 27 {Green Eats} (Potluck Brunch)
-- 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
-- Sarah Henry, Former Black Panther Launches Urban Farm to Give Ex-Prisoners a New Start
-- 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, August 1 {Standing Rock}
-- History
-- Nick Estes, Fighting For Our Lives
-- Wikipedia, List of Pipeline Accidents in the 21st Century
-- Julian Brave Noisecat and Ann Spice, A History and Future of Resistance
-- Black Lives Matter, Solidarity With Standing Rock
-- Anna J. Willow and Sara Wiley, Politics, Ecology, and New Anthropology of Energy: Hydraulic Fracking

Wednesday, August {Peak Everything}
-- 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 3 {Green Capitalism/Disaster Capitalism}
-- 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
-- IPCC, Thirty Years To Climate Calamity If We Carry On Blowing the "Climate Budget"
-- Harvey Wasserman, King CONG vs. Solartopia
-- 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 8 {Green Urbanity} (Last of the Presentations)
-- 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 9 {Tech Talk}
-- 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 10 {Final Symposium} (Hand in Final Project, Keyword Map)

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