ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING

ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING  In this course we will researching and discussing a host of environmental topics, everything from the historical debate between Conservation and Preservation, to Eco Worldviews past and present, Global Warming, Wildlife Extinction, Sustainability, and Environmental Ethics.  We will also examine our deep connection to nature through evolutionary theory, dealing with issues ranging from DNA to neuroscience to gender, and how all of these play into our thinking about ecological concerns.  Students will engage in the rhetorical analysis of writing and media in relation to the environment, and they will create and critique their own work through various papers and media presentations.

ENVIRONMENTAL WRITING can consist of many different genres and styles, from the nature writing of Gary Snyder, to technical scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, to the kind of writing done by working scientists such as E. O. Wilson, who attempts to communicate ideas to the larger world as well as write papers for fellow scientists.  In the world of science, the only thing that counts is discovery: those who discover new things are rewarded, not those who write about discoveries.  This may help to explain why most scientists are not good communicators when it comes to getting the news of their work to the public.  Yet, scientific work depends upon funding, so it is essential that scientists become better at promoting themselves to raise money to do their work.  It is also extremely important as we move into the growing environmental dangers on the planet that science leads the way by bringing us the news.  We need scientific news instead of economic and political propaganda.  If we do not face the facts of species extinction, global warming, and energy depletion—we will pay a huge price in terms of quality of life on this planet.  Much is at stake.Many scientists have begun to realize that scientific ideas can quickly lose ground in the media and that public opinion can be shaped by money interests and loud voices not trained in science or critical thinking.  The way people vote and the policies that elected leaders enact will determine what happens in the next few years, as we live in what National Geographic has called “The Sixth Great Extinction,” one caused by us.  If we going to save what’s left of “nature” (here meaning the earth rather untouched by humans) it must be done soon, for there is no time to waste.  Scientists cannot do the job of changing public opinion.  It is up to those of us who work in the media as writers, filmmakers, singers, and poets to get the work done.  The raison d’être of rhetoric is to persuade, and we need all the tricks of rhetoric at our disposal.

The ancient Greeks, of course, set the foundation for rhetorical studies over 2,000 years ago, and the teaching of the Sophists (those employed to teach the arts of persuasion) set the foundation for rhetorical studies today.  We have all studied the Greek terms: pathos, ethos, enthymeme, logos, and learned how to employ these ideas in writing and argument.  Of course, what the Greek teachers came upon were just names for explaining the kind of things we all do everyday.  To be a social animal we must know how to behave and interact, and the human mind has evolved over the course of the last few hundred thousand years to be attentive to others.  Neuroscience has allowed us to scientifically examine the way the brain works for the very first time, due to advances in technology.  Questions that heretofore were answered through armchair speculation are now being answered through scientific analysis, as we learn that many old assumptions were wrong.  Theory of Mind is one of the new discoveries about how we think—showing we evolved to know how others think and feel—though we don’t always get things right.   It is also the force at work that makes us see intent in the natural world.  Confirmation Bias is another aspect of the human mind that gives us the tendency to see what we want and not what evidence might provide.

All this shows that the brain is flawed, an instrument of survival for the whole body, and not something separate from it.  Hence, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s title for his famed book, DesCartes’ Error.  Mind and body are not split.  As a matter of fact, everything we think has a component of emotion.  There is no such thing as pure logic.  For example, the long-held assumption, on which much economic theory rests, that we are logical in our decision making, is wrong.  We usually act on emotional impulse, whether it comes to purchasing a product, voting for a politician, or believing or disbelieving what the state of the world really is.

For these reasons it is extremely important that those of us who write about the condition of the planet know something about how the brain works.  To be effective communicators, it is time we embrace science ourselves, integrating the lessons of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which must form the basis of a new rhetoric.  The humanities and sciences have been divorced from each other for too long, but in this age such a division cannot be sustained.  In the following weeks we will learn about and write on aspects of science and draw scientific analysis into the study of literature and human behavior.  We will also try to take the lessons of neuroscience to become better at communicating scientific findings.