MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Joseph P. Burzynski
Candidate for the Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
______Jason Palmeri, Director
______Katharine Ronald, Reader
______John Tassoni, Reader
______Roxanne Ornelas, Graduate School Representative
ABSTRACT
GLOBAL WARMING AND COMPOSITION STU DIES: THE CASE FOR I NTERVENTION
by
Joseph P. Burzynski
C omposition studies has failed to offer any field - wide conversation acknowledging global warming or the part that our normalized pedagogical and theoretical orientations play in propping up the status quo. To be sure, composition studies did not create the United States' (or the world's) energy, manufacturing, or economic infrastructures. The field does, however, participate and benefit from these structures , and our disciplinary goal to exist at the forefront of composing — which includes b oth technological and cultural practices — means that we have a level of complicity that we have yet to acknowledge meaningfully. Composition studies’ history is littered with aspirational forays into epistemologies that expand ou r thinking toward ecology (Coe, 1974; Cooper, 1986; Dobrin and Weisser, 2002), the environment (Herndl and Brown, 1996; Killingsworth and Palmer, 1991), and sustainability (Owens, 2001). T hese respective offerings did not necessarily compel different theor etical or pedagogical paths, nor were they necessarily directly responding to resource consumption, environmental degradation, or global warming . Our field needs a more robust, resource - conscious line of inquiry that t heorize s the relationship between text s and resource consumption, recognizes that s ustainable composition is concer ned about production (of texts), understands that s ustainability should be considered situationally, not as a God term , and rethinks the resource cost of composing . Shifting compo sition studies’ framework from its dominant epistemological orientation (specifically social - epistemology) toward an ontological line of inquiry that emphasizes writing’s material and resource choices can provide a path forward for compositionists who want to contribute to global warming amelioration side - by - side with disciplinary goals. Applying ontological lenses around the concepts of material lifecycles, coexistence, and our interconnected world can allow composition to contribute to global warming disc ussions without sacrificing disciplinary objectives. While a shift in composition’s research, theory, and pedagogy can reorient the field toward a more active participation in global warming conversations, important disciplinary structures and hierarchies also need scrutiny. While cultural conversations around race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and disability (among others) have been addressed by leading disciplinary organizations like the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication, there has been no leadership on questions of resource consumption or the environment. Applying these inquiry - based pressures simultaneously from the individual teacher/scholar up and from leadership down can improve our contribution to global warming amelioration across the board.
GLOBAL WARMING AND COMPOSITION STU DIES: THE CASE FOR I NTERVENTION
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Faculty of
Miami University i n partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
by
Joseph P. Burzynski
The Graduate School Miami University Oxford, Ohio
2016
Dissertation Director: Jason Palmeri
©
Joseph P. Burzynski
2016
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ------iv Acknowledgments ------v Chapter 1: Composition and the Environment: An Overview ------1 Chapter 2: The Intersection of Sustainability and Composition Studies ---- 37 Chapter 3: Resource Awareness and Composition’s Materiality ------68 Chapter 4: Disciplinary Leadership on Global Warming ------93 Chapter 5: Composition and Global Warming: What’s Next? ------117 Works Cited ------136
iii DEDICATION For Carrie: It’s a bare and simple fa ct. Without you, none of this was possible.
iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to offer thanks to the following: Jason Palmeri: You stuck with me and improved this project at every turn. More import ant, perhaps, is that you make me want to take it forward. Kate Ronald and John Tassoni: Your advice over the years has a loud echo in my professional life. Grandpa Art: Thank you for reminding me that finishing this mattered. Steve Piatt: 15 hours a week. Bird by bird. Mary and Scott: For provisions of all kinds, but especially the spaghetti sauce. The creatures in my life who helped me understand a greater connection to the world: JP, Fru, Maggie, Tori, Duchess, Little, Francy, Brownie, Momma, Big Twin, Twinnie, Triplet, Nellie, Bessie, Daphne, Big Suss, Pinkie, Sue Buck, Buffy, Roy, Chuck Chuck, and, I guess, the Wyandottes (who I didn’t particularly like, but what the heck.) Finally, Mom and Dad: Every ounce of persistence that I needed to get though th is I learned from you both. This never gets off the ground without that. I’m here, now, at the end, because of that.
v Chapter 1: Composition and the Environment: An Overview
The Modern United States Environmental Movement and Composition Studies
In September 2013, the fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a
working group convened by the United Nations, released “Climate Change 2013: The Physical
Science Basis,” a meta - analysis of “independent scientific analyses from observations of the
climate system, paleoclimate archives, theoretical studies of climate processes and simulations
using climate models” (1). The IPCC reports that atmospheric concentrations of carbon diox ide,
methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000
years, and human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean. As a
result, our planet's climate system is changing in ways unpre cedented in the last 2,000 years.
Unabated, these trends will continue, and as near - term as the mid - 21 st century, our planet is very
likely to experience, according to the IPCC, weather patterns and changes to the composition of
our land, sea, and air that are significantly different from what we experience today. By 2050, humanity will have an entirely different relationship with the Earth.
I offer the report's conclusions to emphasize that this project — an effort to explore the
intersections of global war ming, sustainability theory, and composition and rhetoric — begins by
accepting the peer - reviewed findings of reports like Climate Change 2013. Global warming is
real, ongoing, and human caused. No region, country, or individual will exist unaffected, let
al one the thinking and working of higher education and its constituent disciplines. Engineers,
chemists, and fossil fuel based industries alone have not led us to our present circumstances. Any
attempted redress must be cultural, and, accordingly, humanities have a big part yet to play.
Like other humanities disciplines, composition and rhetoric is enriched by the dynamics
of disciplinary transgression, those moments when we, as scholars, are forced off piste, onto
1 paths that to our eyes look wild but to t he eyes of our colleagues in departments across campus appear well trod. Our field would operate differently without the subjects, methodologies, and methods offered by folks who were unlikely to have composition and rhetoric among their utmost thoughts as they set to their research and theory, to say nothing of the innumerable scholars who came over from another corner of English, like literature or creative writing. For instance, composition and rhetoric would be poorer without the examples set by Shirley Brice
Heath’s qualitative linguistic research in Trackton and Roadville or Mike Rose’s writing on education and literacy. How much poorer would we be without Judith Butler’s or bell hooks’ feminisms? How limited or underdeveloped would our work b e without Michel Foucault’s
History of Sexuality or Jaques Derrrida’s Of Grammatology ? Our disciplinary lines of inquiry reach out to non - composition and rhetoric research, pedagogy, and theory all the time.
Considering the rewards of this interdisciplina rity, then, it is all the more striking that for the bulk of composition and rhetoric's modern history our field has rarely ventured on the paths offered by disciplines that study humanity's relationship with the natural world. 1 This lack of inquiry is conspicuous, though perhaps not altogether surprising. Whereas discussions around economics, class, ethnicity, race, gender, and technology can be developed as lenses through which to view a writer or reader's relati onship with a text, discussions about the natural world and resources are, at first glance, merely atmospheric or prioritized only when 'nature' is a text's subject. The recognition that a text's particular context can inform analysis has been long underst ood. That every text’s context is also an interaction with a complex network of consumable resources in a finitely resourced world is yet to be explored.
1 Even ecocomposition, a mov ement I will address later in this chapter, made a deliberate decision to confound the archetypal binary 'nature/culture' by defining eco not as anything particularly environmental but insisting that it “must be understood specifically as a study of relati onships” (10).
2 Those of us in composition and rhetoric are particularly faced with a double - bind when
considering ou r disciplinary relationship with the natural world and its resources: To be at the
forefront of textual production is to be at the forefront of economic, social, and ecological
resource consumption. Reconsidering consumptio n priorities on a warming planet that is
changing because of humanity's imbalanced resource choices necessarily leads us to questions:
Are productivity and growth always good and essential? Are values and skills gained by
consumption and expanded knowledge and technology always good, and what values and skills
do they replace? Does maintaining relevance mean that teaching and scholarship concerning new
composition tools and media must trump older tools and media? What are our durable, lasting
values? If we choose to be among those who want to participate and contribute to this vital
conversation, and, perhaps more importantly, act from these conversations, then we will
meaningfully enter a conversation that has gone on for decades without us.
Modern environ mentalism and ecological awareness in the United States have been
shifting from the fringe to the mainstream of society since the late 1960s. 2 Popular momentum
and widespread environmental advocacy developed around the first Earth Day, a national teach -
in on the environment, on A pril 22, 1970 (“About Earth Day Network ” ). In the same year the
country's legislators negotiated an expansion of the Clean Air Act and created the Environmental
Protection Agency, and by the end of 1972 had added the Clean Water Act to its environment -
orie nted legislative accomplishments (“Laws and Regulations”). Together, this expanded
environmental advocacy into cultural and political life marked the beginning of the United
States’ contemporary environmental movement, a movement that today comprises innum erable
causes, campaigns, and organizations dedicated to educating the country about humanity's
2 The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 expanded this conversation in important ways. The book was a phenomenon that spurred grassroots environmental activism and created a populist call for environmental reform.
3 profound, persistent, and destructive impact on the natural world. During this same period,
composition studies developed and flourished, and despite this conte mporaneous development,
there was little conversation between the two disciplines. The last 50 years of composition
scholarship reveals little prolonged inquiry attempting to configure an environmental or
ecological lens to composition studies. While envir onmentally oriented terms, particularly
ecology and the prefix eco , have appeared sporadically in composition scholarship, there has
been little broad or lasting environmental influence on theoretical, pedagogical, or analytical
inquiry in composition stud ies. While I consider the inconsistent composition - environment relationship unfortunate, I would submit that even had the conversation become more central to the field, it would not have prospered or persisted. Inquiry for inquiry's sake — in this case the i dea that we have looked at other 'composition - ' connections and so we must look at composition - environment — does not foster the type of long - term inquiry that meaningful contributions to the environment or ecology require. Indeed, I argue that today's admix ture of widely researched and acknowledged human - caused global warming and composition and rhetoric's continued inquiry into the wide array of dynamics that comprise composing situations presents an ideal moment to consider the relationship anew. Acknowled ging human induced global warming presents the most compelling reason in generations to engage with our rhetorical and compositional place in the natural world.
We are experts at teasing out complex rhetorical dynamics, and we must now have the will to ac knowledge that our theoretical and pedagogical decisions — whether explicit or tacit — are not always environmentally equitable. For the past 50 years our field has welcomed and engaged social and economic considerations to, in part, invigorate our conversatio ns. Today, near and far term consequences of humanity's relationship with the natural world are beyond
4 doubt: human influenced global warming 3 is happening. Our field can no longer afford to be climate change avoiders.
In the following sections I will consider the myriad ways — both beneficial and problematic — that the natural environment has intervened in the past 40 years of composition and rhetoric scholarship. Here, I am less interested in the relative success or failure of a particular intervention, and I am more interested in the various reasons why composition and rhetoric scholars f ound value in the environment/ecology and composition conversation. For instance, ecocomposition, a mid - 2000s movement to raise ecological awareness articulated in
Dobrin and Weisser's Natural Discourse offered the most high profile crossover. But ecocompo sition had little to do with the natural world. What, then, is the value of an ecological or environmental lens? Why have these moments come and gone? Why has there been no persistent ecological or environmental line of inquiry running through the history of modern composition and rhetoric? I will argue that these efforts had little cause to persist because they did not offer compelling environmental arguments to meaningfully extend ecology or the environment to the localized writing environments in which w e exist every day, everywhere, everywhen. As writers and readers of texts we are always consuming. This is inescapable, ineluctable. Why, then, have we avoided delving into the full implications of our relationship with the natural world?
The Environment D uring Composition's Adolescence: 1960s to the early 1980s
One disciplinary narrative of composition and rhetoric in the 1960s and 70s is the story of an expanding field, a discipline loosely organized around writing instruction finding its feet amongst o pen admissions enrollment, diversifying student bodies, and an increased call for
3 I prefer the term global warming to climate change, as climate change has widely been appropriated by those whos e goals minimize the phenomenon's importance or existence.
5 composition and rhetoric classes, particularly first - year composition. In her reading of this era,
Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change” interpreted the field as having go ne through a paradigm shift, while Louise Weatherbee - Phelps’ “The Domain of Composition” used a growth metaphor to describe the field as having matured to adolescence. Appropriately, then, pedagogy was the dominant line of inquiry throughout this period of composition scholarship. What, exactly, were the expectations and goals of first - year composition, a course that an overwhelming majority of students had to take? This was, of course, important within the discipline, but the changing state of higher educa tion connected the class to student preparation, retention, and political questions: who in the United States deserves higher education and what should that education look like? Out of this particular environment came a number of prominent commentaries on composition pedagogy: Albert Kitzhaber's Themes, Theories, and Therapy:
The Teaching of Writing in College (1963), Donald Murray's A Writer Teaches Writing (1968), and Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers (1973). Against the backdrop of this pedagogical conversation appears the first few direct 4 references to environment , ecology or eco in the pages of English journals for purposes other than literary criticism .
The aims and expectations of these first few, tentative scholarly English - environment intersections are telling. First, enviro nment and ecology are used metaphorically to enrich approaches to English classroom pedagogy and content. There is no effort to materially or actively link the English classroom to other cultural movements, let alone environmental advocacy. The outside wor ld may influence the classroom and be reflected in the classroom's
4 The natural world is a peripheral subject in several pieces relating to Native American literature. See Thomas Sanders' “Tribal Literature” and Michael Dorris' “Native American Literature in an Ethnohistorical Con text.”
6 makeup, but this influence is unidirectional: the English class is not meant to intervene in the
outside world. 5 Second, these pieces tend to be speculative speeches and opinion heavy ar ticles. 6
Roger Sale's 1973 “On Not Being Good Enough” can be viewe d from today’s vantage as representative of the early, limited -- even stunted -- interactions between an environmental sensibility and composition and rhetoric. Sale delivered his speech to the California Association of the Teachers of English, and he suggest s that the figure of John Muir and the conceptual distinctions between frontier and wilderness could be productively applied to the changing
English department. Sale applies these metaphors to the way that he sees English pedagogy reacting to changing educ ational politics, ultimately suggesting that the writing course exists in and should embrace the wilderness:
But in writing courses the sense of wilderness is everywhere and needs only small
encouragement and politeness from any decent teacher to get to th e surface. To survive,
one travels light, which means forgetting comma faults or remembering them only at
those very rare moments when some wilderness voice wants them explained. (509 - 10)
Sale's metaphors are indicative of a period in which writing faculty were attempting to come to grips with the changing content and methods of higher education and the composition and rhetoric field. He offers the environment as a metaphorical lens, but his objectives are not oriented to the natural world, but as a better way to understand our field. While this was not a
5 One characteristic of environmental articles from the 1960s and 70s seems t o be the lack of scholarly dialogue. That is, articles tend to have short reference lists. Richard Coe's “Eco - Logic” contains seven references, with three being the author himself. 6 A small sample of environmental articles and opinions for the high school English education and literature audience include Carolyn Peterson's 1972 English Journal article, “The English Teacher and the Environmental Crisis,” The North American Review 's 1972 position statement on the environment, Gerald Haslam's 1973 English Journal article, “Who Speaks for the Earth,” Richard Lillard's 1973 English Journal article, “The Nature Book in Action.” Among articles using ecology as a wor king conceptual framework include Neil Postman's 1974 English Journal article, “The Ecology of Learning” and Gerald Grant and David Riesman's 1975 Daedalus article, “An Ecology of Academic Reform.”
7 work with lasting resonance, it does act as an historical marker for the relationship between the environment or natural world and composition and rhetoric: because we are a text driven field, we have no pu rchase in the physical, natural world. Productive interactions between these realms begin (and inevitably) end with metaphor.
Richard Coe's 1975 “Eco - Logic for the Composition Classroom” is uniquely situated, as it is an attempt to both call for new content in the first - year composition classroom and an early attempt to outline the theoretical benefits of an ecological framework. In the very first sentence,
Coe asserts that his “article is not about a new way to teach composition; it is rather about new content that belongs in contemporary composition courses however they may be taught” (232).
Coe is sensitive to the “ways to teac h composition” debates that were certainly fierce in the
1970s and 80s, and here it appears that he hopes the field will be more receptive if he frames his argument as a new content suggestion rather than a new way to teach. He observes a contemporary comp osition classroom dominated by modes of discourse operated by analytic logic, which teaches students to observe, think, and express in discrete steps:
These modes are highly appropriate to a particular type of subject: phenomena in which
the whole is rough ly equivalent to the sum of its parts. They are, however, inadequate for
discussing the more complex phenomena which are increasingly relevant to
contemporary realities. (232)
While Coe does not advocate abandoning this instruction, he sees modal analytic instruction 7 as incomplete for a modern world in which our “traditional perceptions, logic, and rhetoric are no longer as well adapted as they once were” (237). They can, he suggests, lead to errors in
7 Analytical thinking, of course, is not only a feature of the modes of discourse. A curriculum developed out of the more expansive notion of rhetorical context is, nonetheless, often observed, thought of, and expressed according to constituent parts (eg, author's relationship with audience).
8 thinking, which, as writing teachers, falls within our courses: “The process of writing often
forces recognition of faulty thinking or inaccurate perception. That is why it is such an important
part of humane education” (233). By way of example he offers an eco - logic read ing of Western food relief to India that anticipates what we call today systems literacy. Here, he emphasizes his main principle: that all meaning is relative to context. Western observers to India's 1970s food shortages made an analytically logical argume nt against food aid, as India's abundance of cows, a food source for the Western world but off limits to Hindus, could feed the subcontinent. Surely a fed, impious populace would be preferable to a pious, starving existence. Because analytical logic, as Co e offers it, emphasizes observation, thinking, and expression of the food problem's discrete steps, important details about the whole of Indian society are missed, and the argument, while logically appropriate, is wrong. To be sure, cows are sacred to Indi a's majority Hindu population, but cows also provide fertilizer and fuel. If the food problem were to be solved by eating cows, it would create the need for expensive, petroleum based fertilizer and wood, coal, or some other resource and infrastructure to power Indian households. For India in the 1970s, hunger — even if religious dogma was ignored — was a more easily managed problem than devising alternative farming or energy plans. This example leads to Coe’s central challenge for composition and rhetoric: “wh at logical and rhetorical modes will lead people discussing this type of situation to ecologically valid conclusions” (234)? An eco - logic that opens inquiry to broader systemic dynamics paired side - by - side with an analytical logic would better prepare stud ents to the arguments found in an expanding, changing world. Coe’s call for an expansive eco - logic did not neatly fit into the field’s prevailing conversations, and it remained dormant until recovered by the ecocompositionists at the turn of the century.
9 The dearth of environmentally or ecologically oriented articles between the 1960s and early 1980s fits composition and rhetoric's emerging field narrative. During this volatile and expanding period, scholarly energy tended to concentrate on interrogating a nd communicating disciplinary history, boundaries, expectations, and goals, and the minor, esoteric distinctions represented here by Sale and Coe were never going to make inroads in these bigger debates.
Indeed, the decade following the modern United State s environmental movement's expansion into public discourse produced no meaningful or lasting lines of inquiry within composition and rhetoric.
Ecology and Composing Process Theory
Marilyn Cooper's 1986 College Composition and Communication article, “Ecolo gy of
Writing,” is commonly cited as the earliest and most well known scholarship viewing composition and rhetoric through an ecological lens. Included at the beginning of the article is, perhaps, the most famous line in composition - ecology scholarship: “T he term ecological is not, however, simply the newest way to say contextual” (367). Cooper's claim is both novel
(ecological thinking presents an opportunity to examine the variety of systems that come together as composing happens) and problematic (how do we begin to understand, account for, and say something meaningful about the seemingly infinite factors that come together for textual production). Cooper's introduction of ecology and its contribution to the field cannot be fully understood without recall ing that the 1980s were a period of intense debate over composing process theories. Predictably, this conversation sprung from the preceding disciplinary conversations around course content and disciplinary objectives. In essence, the conversation moved fr om composition's ends to the question, how does a writer really create a text?
Cognitivists, represented by Linda Flower and John Hayes in articles like “A Cognitive Process
10 Theory of Writing” and “The Cognition of Discovery,” used think aloud protocols to document
writing as a messy, reflexive process to provide insight into how actual writing happens. For
cognitivists, the writer's thought processes were the major driving force behind textual
production. Those who reacted against an emphasis on an individ ual writer's cognition held that
there were a variety of external factors and forces that were just as important to textual creation.
In a significant way, Cooper's “Ecology” is an assertive critique of cognitive process theory's utility. If cognitive pro cess theory is deeply flawed, then considering the ecology of composing can be one alternative. “Ecology” offers an extension of what James Berlin called social - epistemic rhetoric that understood the real to be “located in a relationship that involves the dialectical interaction of the observer, the discourse community (social group) in which the observer is functioning, and the material conditions of existence” (672). Cooper asserts that theory and pedagogy employing cognitive process theory have been unqu estionably important to composition’s development, but that the model masks a fundamental problem: conceiving of writing as a cognitive process “abstracts writing from social context” (367). While cognitive process theory “describes something of what write rs do and goes some way toward explaining how writers, texts, and readers are related,” the strict connection that it makes between thinking and writing obscures the notion that language and texts are “dependent on social structures and processes not only in their interpretive but also in their constructive phases” (366). For Cooper, ecology offers a way to broaden composition beyond cognition, and to shift focus to the many factors at work in the production of texts. She suggests an ecological model “whose fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems” (367). Importantly, Cooper's ecological call is an over - correction from the errors inherent in cognitive process theory. That is, the vast, complex dynamics that
11 would need to be accounted for to understand a writer or text's ecology are diametrically opposed
to the limited, flawed inquiry into a writer's cognitive processes. Cooper introduces ecology as a
broadenin g, complicating force, one that places importance on a writer or text's environment.
Here, it is worth noting that in her early work environment does not mean 'natural world.' For
Cooper, everything external to the writer comprises 'ecology.'
Relevant to understanding this particular strain of the ecology - social turn intersection is
Cooper's recent work, which is an important update to her earlier attempts to create a composition - ecology worldview. Her 2001 Foreward to Dobrin and Weisser's Ecocomposition p resents an exploration of scholarship that has occurred along the permeable boundary between ecology and composition (and also ecology and other fields). Cooper’s early work treated writing ecology as a metaphor, as a useful lens that could overlay any dis cursive situation. Approaching her work from the vantage 25 years affords, Cooper recognizes her early limited thinking:
I remember very clearly reading [“Ecology of Writing”] over some years after it was
published and realizing that the systems that cons titute writing and writers are not just
like ecological systems but are precisely ecological systems, and that there are no
boundaries between writing and the other interlocked, cycling systems of the world.
(Dobrin and Weisser xiv)
Here, Cooper’ s thinking is updated through Frijtof Capra’s analysis that places systems theory —
within which composition’s loose sense of ecology productively fits — at the forefront of Western
thought. According to Capra, a systems view asserts that the essential propert ies of a
living system are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from
the interactions and relationships among the parts. These properties are destroyed when
the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into iso lated elements. (29)
12 Today, Capra’s thinking leads Cooper's ecological compositionist to see a discursive situation, for example, as a total of the properties of its parts (e.g. writer, text, audience, exigence). That is, understanding the discursive situa tion does not come from analyzing or reducing the parts’ properties to arrive at smaller, more finely tuned understandings. Capra’s bold — and deceptively obvious — claim is that analysis does not help us better understand systems, and that parts cannot be sep arated from the whole: “the properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole” (29). In this way, then, ecological composition thinking is concerned for principles of organization, not di screte parts. This systems thinking is opposed to analytical thinking. Analysis needs to extract a part from the whole to understand it, but systems thinking needs to understand how the part works to make the whole function. For Cooper, the realization tha t parts cannot be separated productively from their whole reorients her thinking about this most fundamental part of our field: “Writing is not a matter of autonomously intended action on the world, but more like monitoring, nudging, adapting, adjusting — in short, responding to the world” (“Being Linked ” 16). Importantly, Cooper's recent conclusion is that writing is equally a biological and cultural practice, and that “writing is an embodied interaction with other beings and our environments” (18). Cooper’s shift from ecology - as - metaphor to ecology - as - the - real - embodied - world presents an important update that underscores the potential for inquiry in the space between composition and ecology.
If, as Cooper suggests today, writing is an embodied practice that emerges “as people respond to others and to their world,” then writing is not solely a product of any innate cognitive, technical, or linguistic abilities. It is an achievement of the productive dynamics between the writer and her environment. (Here, envir onment means the entirety of the writer’s surroundings, not just the natural world.) Writing as an interaction with surroundings, not “interaction that we
13 habitually misconceive as autonomous action that begins in our minds” and design become the mark of a systems thinking composition (“Being Linked” 22). Language users become language designers who employ tools (from a pencil to a Tweet) to work with and reform language based on their interests, goals, and purposes (“Bringing Forth” 35). In this way, commu nication is always conceived as an ethical act, as designers are responsible for their designs. For Cooper, this is a central question for viewing composition through a systems lens:
How we each respond to this experience — whether we focus forward as desig ners,
transforming resources, making choices, learning from and taking responsibility for our
transformations and choices, or whether we cling to the past, relying on conventions and
stable forms of social power to validate our choices — will determine what we gain or
lose. (37)
Crucially for Cooper, this pedagogical move is also ethical. While this updated ecological - compositional framework asserts that a writer’s first reaction to the world is a responsive move, one that is hardly autonomous, the writer is, in a sense, firmly linked to the design choices that she makes.
At first glance, ecological frameworks like those suggested by Cooper in 1986 and 2010 seem as though they could be particularly fruitful to composition theory and teaching. A shift in orien tation from cognition to ways that writers interact to form systems — with cognition being one of many factors at work in writing — reminds students, teachers, researchers, and theorists to pay attention to writing’s dynamism. However, composition scholarship following Cooper’s
“Ecology of Writing” suggests no immediate mark on the field. Indeed, until the early - mid 1990s and the early 2000s there was only intermittent scholarship bringing together ecology or the environment and composition and rhetoric.
14 M. Ji mmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer's 1992 Ecospeak: Rhetoric and
Environmental Politics in America is the first book - length treatment of environmental rhetoric through a composition and rhetoric disciplinary lens. Killingsworth and Palmer connect
Eco speak to the tradition of “ rhetorica utens , a study of rhetoric in use” (1). From the outset, they suggest that humanity’s awareness of our planet’s vulnerability requires a more practical and immediate rhetorical analysis: “examining the results of humank ind’s technological power has opened a new vein of consciousness, the knowledge that large - scale human action may place the further existence of nature -- including human activity -- in jeopardy” (1). The practical, civic nature of their work affords them the opportunity to claim two audiences: rhetorical scholars and, perhaps more significantly,
people engaged in the effort to adjust thought and action to the changing conditions of
human life -- scientists, government officials, investors, managers, workers, far mers,
environmental activists, nature mystics, and anyone else who puts thoughts on paper with
the intention of changing the way others think and act in the world. (2)
Killingsworth and Palmer note that environmental dilemma is a problem of ethics, epistem ology, and, most important for our purposes, discourse. Here, they build on Bruno Latour’s work on
“the internal rhetoric of discourse communities” and Kenneth Burke’s thinking on identification from Rhetorical Motives to synthesize what they see as the en vironmental discussion’s fundamental rhetorical problem: “the intractability of social problems like the environmental dilemma is due to the inability of concerned discourse communities to form adequate identifications through effective appeals” (7). Most important, perhaps, are Palmer and
Killingsworth’s intentions for this particular rhetorica utens: the optimistic assertion that
15 rhetorical theory can intervene to prevent environmental discourse from becoming just one more intractable social issue.
Car l Herndl and Stuart Brown's 1996 edited collection, Green Culture: Environmental
Rhetoric in Contemporary America , was conceived as an outlet for the volume's “contributors to combine two abiding interests: [their] professional work in rhetorical criticism and [their] concern for the environment” (vii). Whereas Killingsworth and Palmer assert their intention for
Ecospeak to, itself, be a rhetorical work to go beyond composition and rhetoric’s disciplinary boundaries, this collection is a more traditional ex ample of composition and rhetoric scholarship.
Green Culture ’s primary goal is to consider environmental debates and their cultural and historical locations, and their secondary goal is to further environmental advocacy. The rhetorical model for environmen tal discourse that guides this collection is organized around the classical triangle figure. For the editors, the ethos point considers the tendency to view nature as a resource, which is often employed as regulatory discourse by the powerful. The pathos p oint considers the tendency to view nature as a spirit, which is often employed in poetic discourse to indicate nature's profundity. The logos point considers the tendency to view nature as an object, which is employed in the search for knowledge in scient ific discourse (11). Chapter titles like
Waddell's “Saving the Great Lakes: Public Participation in Environmental Policy” and Brown and Herndl's “Beyond the Realm of Reason: Understanding the Extreme Environmental Rhetoric of the John Birch Society” indic ate the environmental advocacy pervading the collected rhetorical analyses. For instance, Brown and Herndl's chapter represents the odd coincidence of activist “rhetoric of” scholarship, which contains no small measure of environmental advocacy, but is sim ultaneously consigned to a niche audience of composition and rhetoric scholars who are interested in the environment, an audience that needs no persuading to care for the rhetorical
16 workings of environmental discourse. In short, this type of scholarship is focused disciplinarily
inward on rhetorical dynamics. There is little outward focus on composition and rhetoric's
potential to transform interactions with the environment. Brown and Herndl consider the
apocalyptic narrative — in works like Rachel Carson's S ilent Spring and Paul Ehrlich's The
Population Bomb, among others — in environmental discourse. One of their important, insightful
conclusions is that the apocalyptic narrative is less a predictor of a literal end - of - the - world and more a marker of an offensi ve rhetorical strategy to grow a like - minded population. While this is an important observation of environmental rhetorical dynamics, the observation is, appropriately, framed for the collection's audience: the composition and rhetoric community.
In a simi lar way, Nancy Coppola and Bill Karis' edited collection Technical
Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental Discourse: Connections and
Directions provides an opening for technical communicators. Coppola and Karis’ collection’s scope is simil ar to Brown and Herndl, but pointed toward the technical communication community. Optimistically, M. Jimmie Killingsworth’s foreword hints at a prospective tide turning: scholars in rhetoric seem to be turning to environmental discourse “with energy that f or many years they had reserved for traditional political rhetoric and for sociopolitical topics like race, gender, and class” (ix). He goes on to assert that environmental issues present an important challenging question for technical communicators: “how to make the highly specialized and inscrutably difficult technical information generated by environmental scientists and engineers usable in public decision making” (x). Coppola and Karis note that connections between environmental discourse and deliberati ve rhetoric are particularly complex, as the interdisciplinary nature of the conversation brings in scholars and practitioners from “rhetoric, technical communication, speech communication, communication studies, philosophy,
17 sociology, and journalism” (xvi ii). As such, there is no single approach or orientation that can lead the way, but there is a single, “complex goal of promoting environmental health and preventing environmental deterioration throughout the world” (xviii). To begin this conversation, the collection has three parts: environmental discourse theory and models, visual rhetoric in environmental communication, and environmental rhetoric case studies. While I will discuss
Craig Waddell’s case study of sustainability definitions in the chapter tw o, Nancy Coppola’s
“Rhetorical Analysis of Stakeholders in Environmental Communication” provides a glimpse into the collection’s scope. Coppola synthesizes environmental communication theory from different fields: James Cantrill, discourse scholar; Killing sworth and Palmer, rhetorical specialist; Niklas
Luhmann, social theorist; and Daniel O’Keefe, constructivist. Coppola’s synthesis produces a stakeholder analysis specifically for environmental communication. First, Coppola asserts that environmental disco urse stakeholder analysis requires setting aside technical communicator’s traditional audience heuristics in favor of one that better accounts for the perspective of others
(29). Second, direct attitude measurements should take priority over conventional d emographic placement. Finally, Coppola asserts that an “active knowledge - gathering paradigm” should supplant the static information - transfer model” (29). In short, Coppola’s chapter -- and by extension the collection -- affirm that technical communicators cann ot approach environmental discourse in customary ways.
These works represent an important dynamic of the intersections between the environment and composition and rhetoric. Namely, that we rarely contribute to a broader community of environmentally concerned teachers and theorists. In these conversations our f ield tends to come up short when it is our turn to contribute outward, and each of these works, in their way, acknowledge that gap. Of course, there are appropriate reasons for this. Our disciplinary
18 structures and values, within our higher education struc tures and values, value an insular
organization. We value contributions to our field before we value contributing to other fields.
But where does that leave us, for instance, when the conversation is about something as profound
and world challenging as glo bal warming? How can we contribute more than merely adding to
the breadth of topics our field considers for our own ends? These questions still demand our
attention.
Environmental and Ecological Interventions in Activist Composition Pedagogy
At the turn o f the 21 st century, two books appeared that would foreshadow an emphasis shift in the conversations around composition and rhetoric and ecology. Prior to Margaret
Syverson's 1999 The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition , ecology or the environment and composition intersected at a theoretical level informing composing process theory. The
Wealth of Reality is widely cited as the earliest book - length treatment of ecology and composition, and its influences are not ecology in a natural world sense; rath er, ecology is employed to describe the distributed cognition of composing processes. That is, cognition
is not simply a matter of logical processing neatly managed by a brain in splendid
isolation but as a complex ensemble of activities and interactions among brains, hands,
eyes, ears, other people and an astonishing variety of structures in the environment, from
airplane cockpits to cereal boxes to institutions. (xiv)
Syverson, like Cooper, was interested in an ecological framework informing inquiry into as wide
and deep a view of composing situations as possible, including the varied interactions among
readers, writers, texts, and their environment. Unlike Cooper, however, Syverson's goal was not
to rebut cognitive process theory. Syverson is already wor king from a social - epistemic perspective. Rather, her goal is to formulate and model a practical, working ecological - rhetorical
19 lens through which everyday composing processes could be understood and their cultural and
cognitive processes revealed. Ecology here, then, is not applied to merely be one more variation
of process theory. Inquiring into ecologies of composing situations reveals actors, forces, and
dimensions that are otherwise muted or missed, and it demonstrates that cognition is distributed
amo ng various actors and forces in composing situations.
Whereas Syverson's book approaches the ecology and composition intersection to inform
rhetorical and compositional analysis (and by extension classroom instruction), Derek Owens'
2001 Composition and S ustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation 8 approaches the intersection to inform classroom instruction (and by extension students' interaction with their world). Here, Owens asserts that escalating environmental crises compel sustainability — like multiculturalism in the 1980s and 90s — to become a ne w paradigm through which we view our work, whether it be “as a metaphor, a design problem, a cultural imperative, [or] a social and ecological necessity” (1). Because higher education is organized around specialized disciplines, attempts to intervene with a cross - disciplinary ethic or world view like sustainability — no matter
its value — are difficult to maintain. Owens suggests that composition studies' encouragement of
cross disciplinary inquiry makes it uniquely suited for a curriculum oriented toward prom oting
sustainability, as sustainability exists across fields as wide and varied as “ecology and
economics, architecture and education, planning and sociology, philosophy and marketing” (4).
Composition studies can maintain its disciplinary goals while prov iding a space for students to
grow as writers and readers while also serving the greater public realm: “composition studies can
thus be reconceptualized as a disciplinary vehicle that, in developing the intellectual and cultural
arts of writing, reading, a nd talking, promotes sustainability - conscious thinking” (7). To this end,
8 Here, I offer Owens to indicate where he lies in the overall environmental - composition timeline. I will take up Owens sustainability argument in more detail in chapter two .
20 Owens encourages us and our students to consider place, work, and the future through a
sustainability lens. Here, he suggests that we encourage a ‘chameleon vision.’ Owens suggests
t hat, like the chameleon, we can work to become one with our environment (i.e., sustainability
should be our primary cultural concern): “we need to pay more attention to how external or
‘outside’ conditions are never really completely outside us at all, but inextricably woven into our
own health and behavior” (8).
The second reason Owens introduces the chameleon is its unique eyes that rotate independently and can simultaneously hold a gaze one two different subjects, visions, or thoughts. For Owens, sustain ability inherently calls for competing impulses. The optimistic eye
is constructive and sees the possibilities we have at our disposal to influence positive change.
The pessimistic eye acknowledges the extent of our world’s problems and sustainability. Whi le
Owens’ approach is significant because it begins the sustainability conversation in composition and rhetoric, it also takes the first difficult step toward acknowledging that our curricula and pedagogy have material consequences that continue beyond our classroom walls and disciplinary boundaries.
Owens’ assumptions — that composition studies maintains a unique multidisciplinary opportunity in higher education from which broad ethics (e.g. multiculturalism, sustainability) and multiple, contesting viewp oints, can and should be examined, taught, and encouraged — persist in today's composition and rhetoric pedagogy. At the time, though, Composition and
Sustainability created a pedagogical and theoretical rationale that, in part, helped make way for the most sustained inquiry into the intersection of composition and ecology or the environment: ecocomposition.
Ecocomposition: The High Water Mark for Composition and Rhetoric and the Natural World
21 In addition to the publication of Syverson's and Owens’ ecologica lly oriented work, the
early 2000s saw the rise of ecocomposition, the only ecological framework that has successfully
created a distinctive niche in composition theory and pedagogy. Ecocomposition is best known
from two works: Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin’s 2001 edited collection, Ecocomposition:
Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches , and their 2002 book, Natural Discourse: Toward
Ecocomposition . Dobrin and Weisser’s work is significant to the larger ecological - composition
picture because it outlin es a pedagogy and theory that sets ecocomposition apart from other
ecological - humanities hybrids like ecocriticism: while ecocriticism “looks toward textual
interpretation,” ecocomposition “works from the same [critical intersection between environment
and texts], but is concerned with textual production and the environments that affect and are
affected by the production of discourse” ( Natural 24). Dobrin and Weisser also make an effort to distinguish ecocomposition pedagogy from mere environmental writing, or “writing about trees”
(10). For the pair, ecocomposition is not simply asking students to write about nature; it is about enabling students to think about their place in systems and “their relationships with living beings and environments” (117). They propose two pedagogical branches for ecocomposition: ecological literacy and discursive ecology. Ecological literacy teaches environmental awareness in the writing classroom, which they see evolving from Freire's critical consciousness, as
“environment and nature are the subjects about which students write, and developing a better understanding and a critical awareness of these subjects is the goal of the course (116). Their other branch, discursive ecology, asks “students to see writing as an ecological pr ocess, to explore writing and writing processes as systems of interaction, economy, and interconnectedness” (116). While environmental texts and issues may become the subject of this
22 classroom, the emphasis is on helping students “think more ecologically” and “see
communication, writing, and the production of knowledge as ecological endeavors” (117).
If Cooper's ecology - is - not - another - word - for context sensibility set one direction for composition - ecology inquiry, then Dobrin and Weisser set another with the ir claim that post - process composition — in fact all of contemporary composition studies — “is already ecological”
(7). For these theorists, the “eco” in ecocompostion should not be “understood as environmental, but as the study of relationships” (10). In thei r 2002 article, “Breaking Ground in
Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment,” they offer a more full definition, which, for its ambition and scope, is worth quoting at length:
Ecocomposition is the study of the relationshi ps between environments (and by that we
mean natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse (speaking, writing,
and thinking). Ecocomposition draws from the disciplines that study discourse (primarily
composition, but also including literary studies, communication, cultural studies,
linguistics, and philosophy) and merges their perspectives with work in disciplines that
examine environment (these include ecology, environmental studies, sociobiology, and
other “hard sciences ” ). As a result, ec ocomposition attempts to provide a holistic,
encompassing framework for studies of the relationship between discourse and
environment. (572)
Together, these definitions and claims for ecocomposition both illuminate composition and ecology conversations (ec ocomposition is concerned for the relationships that come together in textual production and not only the environment or location they occupy) and distract (if composition is already ecological, why is there a need for the field to consider an ecocompositi on theory). Similar to Cooper’s and Syverson's intentions for an ecology of writing,
23 Dobrin and Weisser position ecocomposition as post - process, as part of the movement in composition studies when the field began to “focus on issues of social construction rather than on issues of the individual writer working within an individual process” (17). Their eco intentions, then, are a corrective remedy to textual analysis that dissects for the sake (or ease) of explanation.
One benefit that ecocomposition provid es the greater composition field is the demand for more interdisciplinary work, especially the impulse to delve into a ‘hard science’ like ecology.
By recognizing a parallel between composition and ecology, between discourse and the material environment an d conditions of discourse, Dobrin and Weiser do not mean to extend composition into the hard sciences to simply extend intellectual territory, but to “improve our understanding of the connections between these related disciplines, discourses, and epistemol ogies” (4). This thinking assumes that each of the disciplines has something to share with the other.
Overall, there are several dueling ideas that make ecocomposition problematic. First, that composition is already ecological echoes the similarly problema tic line “everything is rhetorical.” If it is accurate to suggest that composition is already ecological, then compositionists have no real need to delve into ecology (as we are already doing it). Simply worry about what we already know, orient ourselves t owards the study of discursive relationships, and we will maintain our ‘ecological’ thinking. Further, ecocomposition presents no benefit for those who want to infuse the discipline with a concern for conserving, preserving, and improving the interaction b etween textual creation and the natural world. Ecocomposition’s relational orientation provides little satisfaction for environmentally minded compositionists. By holding the natural world as simply one more part of a text’s existence, ecocomposition main tains a separation that echoes, for instance, the problematic binary nature v. civilization
24 outlined by Timothy Morton. In his Ecology Without Nature , Morton argues that conceiving
nature as something 'out there' and forever external to our experience nece ssarily inhibits any
move to change environmental opinions in a fundamental way. In Natural Discourse ,
ecocomposition is always conceived as the study of relationships between writers, the discourse
they produce, and their natural environment. Dobrin and Weiser’s two - part description of ecocomposition pedagogy always places understanding natural environment as fundamental to understanding discourse. The move from ecological literacy (the ecocomposition class should mediate between students and their natura l environments) to discursive ecology (once students understand how they interact with their natural environment they will now better understand that their writing takes place in systems) maintains Morton’s separation. Taken together, ecocomposition’s posi tion as our field’s environmental arm becomes untenable.
Rather than speculating why ecocomposition did not establish a longer - lived line of inquiry in composition studies, perhaps the more positive question is, What form of inquiry did develop from ecoco mposition? Assorted environmentally oriented readers were published mid - decade, the most representative of them being Dobrin's Saving Place: An Ecocomposition
Reader . However, inquiry into place informs ecocomposition. Dobrin and Christopher Keller publish ed Writing Environments in 2005, which was a collection of interviews delving into the interdisciplinary nature of inquiry into place:
a good deal of this work examines not only how place - related metaphors and concepts
function but also how various kinds o f texts are able to shape places . . . and, additionally,
how different models of place and space limit or expand our understandings of diverse
texts, disciplines, peoples, cultures, and the world in general. (2)
25 This thinking blended with, among others, N edra Reynolds' novel approach to location and place in her 2004 Geographies of Writing , Lisa Ede's Situating Composition , and Danielle Nicole
DeVoss et al.'s 2005 College Composition and Communication article, “Infrastructure and
Composing.” In 2007, Kelle r and Weisser published The Locations of Composition , an edited
collection that mirrors the impulses of Saving Place by applying inquiry into place to
composition studies. It is worth noting that particularly environmental or ecological impulses
were not e mphasized in this spatial line of inquiry. Devoss et al.'s piece, for example, offers
'infrastructure' as an analytical tool to consider teaching and composing new media, and they
suggest it should be understood as “more than material, is never static, and is always emerging”
(22). Central to this thinking is time, as an infrastructure comes to exist as a tool for composers
to respond to as a given rhetorical task or situation ensues. They offer an extensive list of
infrastructural components, including com puter networks, interfaces, operating systems,
curricula, room design, students, and audiences. Here, their goal is to shine light on the
dynamism of new media composing, and particularly its contingent nature. Noticeably absent
among the infrastructural f actors that they consider are consumable resources of any kind (eg,
money, energy, labor). But there is no inherent reason why this inquiry is limited. This line of
inquiry — and inquiry into composition's location and place more broadly — could (always) go
fu rther. The benefit and drawback to this dynamic inquiry is the same: Where do we begin or
end? If we are going to consider computer interfaces, should resource consumption enter the
conversation? If software is a consideration, should there be a discussio n between proprietary
and open source? The signature of inquiry into place is dynamism and temporality, and its
mapping and description does not come at the expense of ethical or ideological questions. On the
contrary, it invites them. But how do we procee d when we reach these questions? In our work as
26 composition and rhetoric teachers and scholars, how far can our critique go? We have the
mandate to point out rhetorical tension, concern, and conflict, but do we have any standing to go
further, to say, for instance, that we should always work to consume no more resources than we
need?
Ecology as a M etap horical L enses
The early 2000s movement to use ecological or environmental lenses to ground theory
and pedagogy to particular bound locations and practices g ave way in the latter part of the
decade to employing these lenses as metaphors to inform theory and research. A representative
articulation is Fleckenstein, et al.'s December 2008 College Composition and Communication
article, “The Importance of Harmony: An Ecological Metaphor for Writing Research.” In this piece, the authors assert a compatibility between an ecological framework that emphasizes interdependence, diversity, and feedback “with the complexity and messiness of twenty - first
century meaning maki ng” (389). Here, there are two important concerns about ecological
frameworks for composition and composition research. First, the authors suggest — in ways that
locate their ecological thinking somewhere in the lineage of Cooper and the
ecocompositionists — t hat an ecological lens is valuable to composition studies, particularly
composition studies in the new millennium. They offer the following partial list of compositional
concerns that an ecological focus highlights:
The co - evolution of writers, texts, and environments as relationships; the conditions
necessary for the stability of a writing ecosystem; the “economies” that limit or increase
the multiplicity of options within an ecosystem and affect the feedback loops by which an
ecosystem shapes itself. (393 )
27 This thinking leads to the second point to extract from their ecological framework: the need for metaphoric harmony in research methods. That is, Fleckenstein et al. begin their thinking about composition research with one central value in mind: “the metap hors by which researchers orient themselves to the object of study affect the research methods they choose and the nature of the knowledge they create” (389). For these authors, the subject studied and the metaphors they use to conceive their research must be harmonious. If the subject studied and the research methods do not “resonate,” then “the knowledge create[d] and the applications derived from that knowledge are flawed: limited, reductive, and subject to misleading clarity” (389). To produce harmoniou s research, then, it is incumbent upon composition researchers to use complex and messy research methods to match the “complexity and messiness of twenty - first century meaning making” (389).
There are three key resonant characteristics around which the au thors conceive ecological research thinking (and its corresponding writing ecology): “ecology is predicated on the belief that biological and social worlds are jointly interdependent, diverse, and responsive to feedback”
(394). Interdependence focuses the researcher on relationships, and calls for the researcher to “be immersed in a multileveled, multifaceted environment” (395). Feedback calls attention to writing existing in stable, but not static, relationships. As writer and writing are “created through the feedback — the communication — among the various loops/levels of a system,” so, too, does the
“researcher as well as the elements of the research process come into existence because of the integrative role of feedback” (396). In short, feedback pathways ar e the limiting characteristics: they offer the researcher the opportunity to draw a “mutable and permeable circle” around her subjects. Finally, diversity recognizes the situated nature of knowledge:
28 To flourish, writing studies must generate individual re search projects that focus on a
wide array of contexts, form the bodies of individual writers to classrooms, workplaces,
clubs, churches, neighborhoods, virtual environments, and historical moments. (401)
Together, the ecological characteristics that the a uthors underscore hint at the benefits of the coming together of ecology and composition in research. Even in summary, their core characteristics point to a large number of subjects to study, trace, and account for. 9 The benefit, then, for composition research in this ecological frame, is its rhetorical quality that allows researchers to “devise and argue for a systematic account of reality in ways that others find persuasive, useful, and wildly applicable while remaining sensitive to the incompleteness and the distortions of a s ingle account” (389). This orientation recognizes that there will be limits regardless of method. What becomes important, then, is finding a consistent balance between method, methodology, and study subject.
Byron Hawk’s 2007 A Counter - History of Compos ition contributes to the re - vitalization of composition history in a spirit similar to that of Fleckenstein et al.'s reconsideration of research methods. While both location/place and ecology - based thinking have sought to expand the ecological materiality of composition, Hawk argues against composition’s prevailing historical narratives in favor of a counterhistory that will relate the complex, ecological intersections of technology and rhetoric and composition. Hawk reads Richard Young's 1978 - 79
NEH post - d octoral seminar, “Rhetorical Invention and the Composing Process,” as a limiting moment in the history of composition. It is at this point that Hawk locates James Berlin’s
9 The authors illustrate this complexity by hypothesizing what a researcher would have to contend with when studying how a blind person walks: “the scope of the study must include the pathways forming the ecosystem of blind - person - walking - on - the - street - with - cane: communication among the man, the street, and the cane. The circumference of the research circle is drawn to include all the feedback pathways of the organism - in - the - environment” (397).
29 conception of an epistemological - rhetorical framework — and the mis - location of vitali sm — as a move that has limited composition and rhetoric to simple dichotomies, particularly the current - traditional, expressivist, and social - epistemic epistemologies around which Berlin’s histories revolve. Hawk argues that dichotomies proved useful to fur ther disciplinarity and composition’s proliferation of knowledge in the 1970s and 80s, but
the old typology has closed down the conversation, [and] a new paradigm is needed to
open it up again. A new model can provide a conceptual starting place outside th e old
typology that allows the more multidisciplinary and eclectic directions the field is taking
to be connected to the merging practices that do not fit within the old borders. Many of
these new practices are responses to a changing technological and rhe torical landscape
that could not have been anticipated by a typology developed in the 1980s. (93)
Hawk calls for a complex vitalism that “merges scientific theories with work in the humanities in an attempt to understand and map out the complexities of con temporary life” (6). For composition, this means moving towards pedagogies that account for the complexity of invention and writing. While Hawk notes that Cooper’s ecological thinking aligns with his sense of complex vitalism, they both see problems with c omposition’s ecological lineage that keeps an ecological - composition partnership from realizing its full intended complexity. First, both assert that the field is still “struggling to see relationships as primary rather than continuing to think in terms of a static subject operating on a static object” (Hawk 224). Second, Hawk suggests that an ecological pedagogy must “put more emphasis on the material and affective ecologies that exist in and link to their classrooms and start inventing methods and heurist ics out of these complex ecologies” (224). Hawk’s goal to bring composition history’s dynamism into stark relief is, perhaps, overdue, and his intent to embrace complexity presents an important counterpoint to our
30 anthologized historical narratives. We are still able to productively talk about our contemporary work in, for instance, Berlin’s social - epistemic terms. However, such applications retrofit the theoretical lens, a move that may not encompass the scope of modern composition and rhetoric’s economic, social, or ecological components.
While Hawk produces a compelling rationale for ecology as a potentially rich research
perspective for exploring the connections that have come together to form prevailing
composition history, Nathaniel Rivers and Ryan Weber's 2011 College Composition and
Communication article, “Ecological, Pedagogical, Public Rhetoric” recalls ecocomposition's call
for ecology to be relational and not natural (or even necessarily material). Rivers and Weber
suggest that ecology fits pr oductively with recent public rhetoric scholarshipand has been
successfully deployed to describe relational forces, but it has yet to fully cohere into a “holistic
statement about rhetorical ecologies [that] have not yet fully migrated to pedagogies of pub lic
rhetoric” (189). To demonstrate their thinking, they produce an ecologically rhetorical reading of
the Montgomery bus boycott “that highlights the affective, social, distributed, and coordinated
guts of public rhetorical action” (202). From this, they propose a pedagogy that replicates “in a
small and admittedly artificial way, the interaction among multiple texts and people required for
effective public advocacy in an ecology” (203). Rivers and Weber’s impulse to capture the
complexities of public rhet oric does well to place them in a more ‘vital’ tradition, as Hawk might
suggest. Using ecology metaphorically produces an interesting rhetorical history, but, as I will
discuss in chapter two, divorcing ecology from a greater material world in which texts exist tells
only one part of a much bigger story.
Conclusion
31 The past 40 years of environmental or ecological thinking in composition and rhetoric scholarship has produced brief movements that have sought to explore the fields' boundaries in one way or an other, but no one thread has succeeded in moving the environment or ecology beyond a niche community of composition and rhetoric scholars. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of these conversations is significant because it suggests something unfinish ed or unaddressed within the field. These conversations loom larger today and are well worth greater attention, particularly since all doubt has been removed from the relationship between humanity's resource consumption and global warming. Historically, co mposition and rhetoric scholars who have considered environmental or ecological relationships have used — and quite rightly so — environmental or ecological thinking to inform textual creation and production. In short, we selected thinking from outside our di scipline to inform our discipline. There is nothing odd about this, necessarily. This unidirectional interest, however, becomes problematic when the larger societal issue — in this case environmental degradation, resource waste, and an increasingly unstable world meteorology — outstrips disciplinary concerns. To paraphrase John Kennedy, perhaps it is time to stop asking what the environment can do for textual production and analysis and, instead, ask what textual production and analysis can do for the environme nt. Perhaps it is not necessary for disciplines to cross borders, but I would argue that engaging with other disciplines obliges reciprocity. A one sided borrowing is necessarily limiting and unproductive.
In the following chapters, I will consider sustain ability principles that can usher global warming , resource consumption, and the environment into everyday writing and teaching. The focus for chapter two, then, will be to consider approaches to sustainability, both from within composition studies and with out. The central question will be, if narrow, separately considered ecological — not to mention economic or social — goals cannot be the way forward, why might
32 sustainability? After all, sustainable values — privileging durability over unfettered growth while
be ing mindful of economic, social, and environmental factors — have not substantially influenced composition and rhetoric. If, however, our field is to acknowledge global warming , our complicity, and begin the tough work of figuring out ways to balance our eco logical footprint, then we are likely to come to one important conclusion: that viewing our field through a sustainability lens must change our approaches to teaching and scholarship. Truly, we are in a double - bind. As with any other discipline, compositio n and rhetoric must exist on the vanguard of ideas and technology. To be conversant and relevant is to have a handle on the changing nature of textual composition. This creates a conflict with a slow - growth, balanced sustainability ethic.
In chapter three , I consider the question, where does composition and rhetoric's global warming conversation begin? The world's climate — on which the US has arguably the biggest impact, both culturally and materially — is changing as rapidly and as fundamentally as are our l iteracies. This is no coincidence, as technology and the environment have always been at loggerheads. Technological advancement — from the wheel to the Large Hadrion Collider — necessarily occurs as a result of natural resource consumption. In the past generat ion this relationship has featured increasingly in United States higher education as popular attitudes toward technology have moved from skeptical, when economic costs were prohibitively high and pedagogical enhancement seemed slight, to mandatory, as econ omic costs have lowered and pedagogical enhancement has come to be seen as nothing short of limitless. In The Pleasures and
Sorrows of Work , Alain de Botton articulates a glaring problem that our specialized world creates: “We are now as imaginatively disc onnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of
33 myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt” (35). Similarly, Wendell Berry, in his
2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture: “The discrepancy between
what modern humans know and what they can imagine — given the background of pride and self -
congratulation — is amusing and even funny. It becomes more serious as it raises issues of
resp onsibility. It becomes fearfully serious when we start dealing with statistical measures of
industrial destruction.” Rethinking composition's material connection to textual creation can
offer one way forward from de Botton and Berry's warnings.
While the prevalence of digital, electronically mediated curricula may be one obvious
area of inquiry, it is by no means the only target for sustainability. I would argue that too much
focus on composition's materials ignores larger questions of equity. It is our jo b to go further, to
consider and instruct on systemic connections that the workaday world and popular culture
cannot or will not consider. How might a guiding sustainability ethic influence pedagogical
theory and practice? A sustainability lens quickly rev eals that material and economic conditions
are merely the signposts of inequitable, unsustainable practices. A sustainable composition and
rhetoric curriculum would address both material and rhetorical concerns. Our field is in the midst
of an increasing a nd overwhelming adoption of digital literacy, but, aside from occasional concern about digital technology adoption and environmental waste (Apostel and Apostel, 2012) there has been little work regarding material consequences. Of course, the effort to keep up with
technological change is both vital and necessarily as unsustainable as the technology itself.
Humanists, particularly those of us who use and ask students to use these unsustainable tools to
complete disciplinary objectives, must address social, e conomic, and ecological inequalities
inherent in meeting our objectives. Otherwise, we are acting irresponsibly.
34 Chapter four’s guiding question will be, how do we meaningfully bring sustainability to the field of composition studies — to not merely appreci ate but to re - connect to a world desperately trying to keep our goals and interests separate and specialized? Here, my thinking is not necessarily new. In many ways, sustainability is a conservation value system, and it is a value system rooted in knowing how our relationship with the world works so that we may more consciously understand a more full range of our choices. As sustainability has become a catch - all term for ' global warming responsible,' more bodies and institutions endeavor to show that they a re up to date. Accrediting bodies and institutional organizations have created position statements to lead the way for their membership, but to what end? What type of sustainability are they encouraging? Our increasingly quick and specialized world has all owed us to disconnect from the consequences of our social, economic, and ecological choices. If we do not know these consequences, then we are not making choices informed by the concerns of a finitely resourced world. To regain this connection, a sustainab le composition position statement should foster inquiry into the ways that our rhetorical choices are social, economic, and ecological choices.
Since we cannot ever physically see the all of the consequences of our choices, then we must develop practices t hat will afford us the ability to construct our imagined worlds.
Finally, chapter five will consider the larger implications for sustainability - composition work. One of the overall goals of this project is to consider how sustainability education can inte grate with disciplinary objectives and curricula. Of course, we have innumerable disciplinary goals and objectives, but how do we infuse sustainability's principal goal of making us more aware of the many and varied implications of our everyday decisions? Indeed, should we? As the
International Sustainable Campus Network notes, much attention is already being paid to two principal areas in higher education - sustainability conversations: 1) resource consumption by a
35 campus' physical plant and the energy needs of a campus' infrastructure, and 2) campus - wide resource consumption goals and planning for students and campus staff. The part of higher education life largely ignored is integration of sustainability principles in research, teaching, and outreach — and by extension individual departments and disciplines. Of course, this makes a certain amount of sense. Resource use, infrastructure, and consumption goals often fall under the purview of traditionally hierarchical decision making. Inviting disciplines, let al one individual departments, to consider injecting sustainability goals into the professional lives of individual faculty invites arguments over academic freedom and autonomy. Our professional lives exist between the particular management of our schools and the movements of our disciplines, so what ways can sustainability enter our conversations without our becoming sustainability teachers who happen to focus on composition and rhetoric?
As I have noted already, composition and rhetoric has considered susta inability, but it has been most easy to discuss in terms of economy and energy. More important, perhaps, are the cultural — and by extension disciplinary — values that shape our unsustainable world. As Daniel
Philippon notes,
if we take 'sustainability' as si mply another opportunity to replicate existing disciplinary
practices of writing, publishing, speaking, and teaching, we have missed the point. We
need to bring sustainability into our courses and disciplines as much as we need to bring
the tools of our disciplines to solving the challenges of sustainability. (169)
As a discipline — and as educators who shape the lives of generations who will still be making decisions in 2050 — we need to more fully acknowledge that we cannot separate sustainability from our intellectual and workaday lives. We can no longer justify our avoidance of consumption questions in the theory and application of our professional lives.
36 Chapter 2: The Intersection of Sustainability and Composition Studies
The world's climate — on which the US, at the moment, has arguably the biggest impact, both culturally and materially — is changing as rapidly and as fundamentally as our literacies.
Technological advancement, from the wheel to the Large Hadrion Collider, necessarily occurs as a result of natural resource consumption. In the past generation, the relationship between literacy and technology has made its way from specialist to popular conversations as the consequences of resource consumption have come into stark relief. The United N ations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability,” concludes in cautious, but unequivocal bureaucratic language, “Human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate cha nge poses risks for human and natural systems” (3).
The report's findings represent a narrative bookend to the United Nations' 1987 World
Commission on Environment and Development 10 , a report that brought “sustainability” — in the guise of sustainable economic development — to greater popular use (Brundtland). 11
Sustainability and its variants — not to mention its often simultaneous use as a noun, adjective, verb, and adverb — have come to form a broad, often muddled ethic that considers interactions among economic, environmental, and social goals , the measurement and balance of which can guide humanity's response to global warming. Composition and rhetoric, however, has not yet engaged with the natural world’s challenges -- let alone sustainability's -- in the way that it has so prolifically taken to other major late 20 th and early 21 st century shifts. Of course, composition — particularly first year composition — holds a unique position in United States
10 The committee is also known as the Bruntland Committee, and the report is also referred to as the Bruntland Report or its given title, “Our Common Future.” 11 This project will not wade into debates over “Our Common Future,” “Climate Change 2013,” or “Climate Change 2014.” I present the reports, dates, and findings to mark the conversation's 30 year scope and the popular conversations surrounding global warming and sustainability.
37 higher education as a course taken by nearly every college student, which has forced the field to deal head on with, among o thers issues, open access education, students' language rights, changing technologies, and various power inequities, particularly surrounding race, gender, and sexuality. When compared against these conversations, environmental, ecological, and resource co nscious concerns barely register.
My goal for this chapter, then, is to walk through my approach to sustainability in this project and how these values engage environmental or ecological concerns — particularly energy and material consumption. I think that i t is important to establish my sustainability framework because sustainability without environment or ecology reduces sustainability to merely one more ethic entrenching the status quo. My intention is to fashion an approach to sustainability that can bols ter tenuous composition - sustainability connections. The chapter’s first half will lay out my particular approach to the term's origins and variant definitions. The chapter’s second half will use my approach to sustainability as a lens through which to view composition and rhetoric’s extant sustainability scholarship. From there, I suggest ways to enhance our field’s approach to sustainability.
As outlined in chapter one, composition and rhetoric's attention to the environment has been minimal, and certainl y not widely followed or enduring. Further, even if the field had taken on these conversations, the intersection of any discipline and the environment or ecology does not automatically lead to a conservation or preservation ethic. Indeed, environmental or ecological inquiry, itself, does not automatically value, advocate, or aspire toward sustainability.
While I do not suggest that composition and rhetoric is a field comprised of climate deniers, few have made the case that our field has anything to contrib ute to global warming conversations, let
38 alone that our normalized pedagogical and scholarly practices actively contribute to resource
inequity. 12
First, as a field we must recognize t hat we have gaps in our resource consumption
thinking. We are sustainability neophytes. Couple our nascent conversations with the increasing
awareness that global temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are likely to continue rising, and
we find ourselves p laying a frightening game of catch - up. We cannot expect to make the leap
from our marginalized resource conversations to the nuanced, complicated, and, frankly,
generation - old conversations that other fields have been having. A cursory glance at curricular
resources from the American Association of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) finds
materials and strategies for every field. As worthy as the few composition syllabi posted to this
site are, they ask for little more than writing and reading on th e environment — courses that are
important, to be sure, but do not deal head - on with the impacts of textual creation on resource consumption. In Ecological Literacy , the noted environmental educator and activist David Orr
argues that ecology and the environment already have a presence in most disciplines, but they
need a more broad emphasis and scrutiny, well beyond whatever efforts these disciplines are
engaging wit h at the moment. Orr walks through the wealth of potential environmental
interventions in history, ethics, sociology, political science, anthropology, economics,
architecture, biology/agriculture, world order, natural history, and philosophy. Missing in hi s list,
of course, is rhetoric and composition (and, surprisingly, literature). Speculating why we are left
out may be worth further consideration, but for me the more important question is, what could be
our interventions? What of our work is (and must co ntinue to be) ready to fit hand - in - glove with
environmental or sustainability inquiry? Indeed, how must we think differently if we find no
12 I will cover the latter questions in this paragraph in chapter three.
39 connection opportunities? We must recognize that our disciplinary status quo, however well
intentioned, contributes t o ecological, economic, and social inequity and move to develop a sustainability ethic that establishes that we have an important part to play in resource conversations, which, in turn, recognizes that we have something valuable to contribute to debate sur rounding the growing resource inequality gap. We simply must find a more durable, enduring relationship with resource consumption. What we have been doing is simply not good enough.
Sustainability: A Muddled Ethic
As I step away from composition and rhetor ic's appointed trails I find myself approaching a fraught — though not unexpected — interstice. Why am I extending myself beyond my discipline?
What do I have to gain, and what do I have to lose? Inevitably, these questions reduce to a variation on scholarly c redibility and qualification and begin with the phrase, “I am not an expert in this field, so am I
carefully and conscientiously representing its theory and research?
employing its concepts as accurately as I am able?
avoiding the selective reading trap (s kipping what does not fit and clinging to what
does?)
Because it is impractical to aim for true comprehensiveness across the vast field of sustainability studies, it is all the more important to clearly set down markers, explaining where the I have been an d where I am going. My work here, then, is particularly reliant on the map — the specific ideas and people who have shaped my path to understanding sustainability, itself a discipline among disciplines. The following sections outline this project's orientati on to sustainability. 13
13 Taking this qualifier into consideration, I would be remiss if I did not point out that sustainability is not the purview of any one discipline or school of thought.
40 The United Nation's 1987 sustainable development definition is o ften cited as the variant
from which subsequent sustainability ethics have come 14 : “humanity has the ability to make
development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (para 27). Indeed, the Brundtland
Report's definition a nd use of sustainability foreshadows the term's unwieldy, subjective use over
the ensuing 40 years. 15
In the years following Brundtland, sustainability conversations were implicitly focused
on the ways that sustainability modified economic development, not as its own standalone
concept. In an early critical survey, Sharchchandra Lele cautioned that already there had been
wide and varied uses of sustainable development. On one end of the semantic spectrum were
contradictory or trivial interpretations, often suggesting that sustainable development was
nothing more than sustaining change forever, a term used “ synonymously with growth and
material consumption” (609), an approach that may comfort marketplaces but indicates nothing
about inequity. Today, this is either thought of as good public relations and marketing or
greenwashing, depending on your perspective . 16 On the other end of Lele's spectrum were
definitions that sought to achieve traditional economic growth objec tives while adding ecological
and social considerations. In Lele's view,
The major contribution of the environmental - development debate is. . . the realization
14 Simon Dresner notes sustainability's other early uses, including 'sustainable society' from a 1974 World Council of Churches conference and Dennis Pirages' 1977 The Sustainab le Society . 15 Both then and now, the Brundtland Report has many supporters and detractors. For a sense of contemporary critiques see Huetig's 1990 article, “The Brundtl and Report: A Matter of Conflicting Goals.” 16 Greenwashing, like whitewashing, is an effort to hide something from your audience. Greenwashing is the effort to hide bad environmental practices behind marketing or advertising that claims good practices. For a business greenwashing index, see the Un iversity of Oregon and EnviroMedia Social Marketing's website: http://www.greenwashingindex.com/ .
41 that in addition to or in conjunction with these ecological conditions, there are social
condit ions that influence the ecological sustainability or unsustainability of the people -
nature interaction. (609 - 610)
Though Lele's thoughts naturally lead him back to his disciplinary concern for development, poverty, and natural resources, he offers questio ns that resonate for those who want to contend with sustainability in their own disciplines: “Any discussion of sustainability must first answer the questions “What is to be sustained? For whom? How long?” (615). Indeed, these questions are meant to begin a dialogue that “generates operational consensus between groups with fundamentally different answers to these questions” (615). In this way, sustainability thinking is generative, productive, and, ideally, meant to be used as a way to frame a conversation that considers the balance between ecological and social considerations and traditional objectives.
While Lele note s that the three fundamental objectives at the core of the sustainable development paradigm are removing poverty and fostering sustainability and civic participation
(614), policy prescriptions that are meant to enact these objectives cannot help but be “ seriously flawed and reflect personal, organizational, and political preferences” (Lele 617). The difficulty, of course, comes from two competing impulses: the desire to take a strong stand on fundamental concerns, and the practical need to gain broad poli tical acceptance and support (618). Lele’s warnings serve as an important reminder that there is no one ideal sustainability policy or application. Enacting sustainability is always a contextual exercise and constrained by the actors and ambitions present in any given situation.
Following these particular tensions, Marino Gatto, in a 1994 address to the Italian
Ecological Society reprinted in Ecological Applications , suggests that sustainability has three different definitions based upon a particular discip linary view:
42 1) Sustained yield of resources that derive from the exploitation of populations and
ecosystems (applied biologist's definition); 2) Sustained abundance and genotypic
diversity of individual species in ecosystems subject to human exploitation, or, more
generally, intervention (ecologist's definition); and 3) Sustained economic development,
without compromising the existing resources for future generations (economist's
definition). (1181)
Across disciplines, sustainability proponents may have co mmon ends, but their emphases and
moves to accomplish those ends may pull in different directions along the way to meeting those
common ends. Gatto asks, what is the goal of sustainability as a principle? Gatto suggests — less than a decade removed from Brun dtland — discarding the idea of sustainability policies, recognizing that different sustainability notions “reflect different priorities and optimization criteria, which are notoriously subjective” (1183). To replace the drive to define a common sustainabili ty , Gatto suggests his own heuristic:
A) Is it possible to outline a path in the development of humanity. . . that is an acceptable
compromise for all parties (environmentalists and economic investors, developed and
developing countries, old and new genera tions, etc.)? B) Is it possible to devise and
implement policies and plans that carry out the compromise? (1183)
For Gatto, sufficiently answering these questions would emphasize a common dimension or impulse across sustainability thinking: forecasting or anticipating future objectives and needs and the wide variety of possible directions to achieve them. Gatto’s forecasting move provides an important temporal dimension that leads to a type of ‘sustainability pluralism.’ The primary focus should be on commo n objectives: where do we want to be eventually? By individually looking first to an end and then considering how we (as individual disciplines) achieve that end,
43 our concurrent work can each make its own way toward the goal. Forecasting common ends is a p articularly pragmatic and valuable dimension when considering sustainability strategy.
Julian Marshall and Michael Toffel's sustainability hierarchy offers a perspective that supplements the line of questioning that produced Lele and Gatto's descriptive m otives. In their
2005 “Framing the Elusive Concept of Sustainability,” Marshall and Toffel assert that adopting any particular sustainability framework does not necessarily equate with needs . That is, formulating sustainability for a particular context doe s not address priority. They propose that a hierarchy of sustainability needs (think Maslow) should provide an additional perspective. They suggest four levels:
Level 1: Actions that, if continued at the current or forecasted rate, endanger the survival
of humans. Level 2: Actions that significantly reduce life expectancy or other basic
human indicators. Level 3: Actions that may cause species extinction or that violate
human rights. Level 4: Actions that reduce quality of life or are inconsistent with othe r
values, beliefs, or aesthetic preferences. (675)
For instance, a level two concern would be the forecast that global warming will increase infectious diseases, and a level four concern would be urban sprawl's congestion, reduced open space, and air po llution. Accounting for sustainability’s contextual cues, as Lele suggests, or various approaches to common goals, as Gatto suggests, still does not consider that some interventions are more important than others and require more determined, immediate atte ntion.
Approaching sustainability through these lenses can generate a sustainability conversation in which we can all participate. We need to look for approaches that help us as individuals or constituent groups (eg, disciplines) describe a path to sustain ability, and avoid prescriptive paths that expect and require no contribution or participation. Top - down sustainability ‘box - checking’
44 requires no underlying changes to world views that maintain the status quo. The goal should be
to bring an interactive, v ibrant sustainability to our disciplinary thinking.
To be sure, I make no claim that I am accounting for the entirety of sustainability
conversations over the past 40 years, but I do suggest that sustainability has been, is, and will
likely continue to be a contested ethic. Indeed, sustainability has no one definition, and Lele,
Gatto, and Marshall and Toffel offer dimensional descriptors that are mean to be filled in — to be
accounted for as humanity moves forward — and not to reach some ideal state or to hav e sustainability dictated from above. In “Democracy's Sustainability Transition,” Timothy
O'Riordan notes that sustainability's undercurrent of equitable care now and in the future
has staying power because most people want to believe in it. It sounds comf orting —
human well - being and ecological security in a world of peace, goodwill, and cultural
tolerance — not brought to heel by ecological collapse, militaristic anarchy or debilitating
greed. (144)
There are no guarantees that a sustainability ethic — however that may look — will be able to roll
back the inequitable relationships between social, ecological, and economic elements in our
larger society. In fact, I argue that transforming a whole society in some top - down way is
unwieldy and too close to confirming t he fears of anti - environmentalists and global warming deniers: that sustainability is just another step (by the government or any structured hegemony) to interfere with individual liberty. Here, I consider sustainability not for its potential influence on society writ - large, but for its potential to transform composition and rhetoric theory, research, and pedagogy. If that work should coincide with a broader influence, that would be fine. But I am more immediately concerned with getting our own house in ord er.
45 What I am suggesting, then, is that my approach to sustainability recognizes its inherent
risks, as noted by Donald Worster in The Wealth of Nature : sustainability, particularly as
sustainable development, resembles “a broad, easy path where all kinds of folk can walk along
together, and they hurry toward it, unaware that it may be going in the wrong direction” (142).
My overarching goal for the sustainability and composition conversation is that it be generative
and work to open and explore new paths. To this particular end, many commentators have found comfort in approaching sustainability as a worldwide movement.
There are a number of examples of sustainability - as - movement thinking. In The
Sustainability Revolution Andres Edwards' suggests that over the past two generations the umbrella term sustainability has come to represent a worldwide paradigm shift made up of seven common themes:
1) Stewardship emphasiz[ing] the importance of establishing an ecological ethic for
managing and preserving the biol ogical integrity of ecosystems. . . 2) Respect for
limits [, which] calls for living within nature's means by preventing waste, pollution and
unsustainable resource depletion. . . 3) Interdependence [, which] covers not only the
ecological relationships betw een species and nature but also economic and cultural ties at
the local, regional and international levels. . . 4) Economic restructuring [, or] fostering
sustainable practices [based] on a new economic model based on cooperation and
optimal efficiency rat her than competition and waste. . . 5) Fair distribution [, which]
speaks to the importance of social justice and equity in areas such as employment,
education and healthcare. . . 6) Intergenerational perspective [,which] emphasizes the
need for a longer te rm rather than a short term view to guide the critical choices facing
society. . . 7) Nature as a model and teacher [, which] acknowledges the 4.5 billion
46 years of evolution of living systems and nature's significance as a reservoir of 'expertise.'
(189)
Together, Edwards' themes offer more traction to delve into sustainability beyond the often overly general call to balance competing resource objectives to provide for an uncertain future.
Unfortunately, as Lele warned, Edwards' outlined values are still s ubject to interpretation.
Further, one theme that seems to be a dissonant outlier: the somewhat romantic theme of “nature as a model and teacher.” Nature as model and teacher calls for a departure from a human focus, and it echoes a strain of deep ecologic al thinking that has persisted since Arne Naess' work in the
1970s, particularly his 1973 “The Shallow and the Deep, Long Range Ecology Movement: A
Summary.” Naess asserts that the first principle of deep ecology is a rejection of the man - in - the - environmen t image in favour of the relational, total - field image ” (95). Indeed, humanity's present destructive and harmful relationship with the natural world begs the question: As long as we persistently focus on our own ends — which are necessarily narrow — without recognizing our position within the wider world, how can we ever affect broad, lasting, and sustainable change?
Another attempt to account for the breadth of sustainability’s values can be found in the
1987 Environmental Management article “Global Sustainability: Toward Definition” Brown et al. conduct a meta - analysis of sustainability studies and compile a list of sustainability themes:
1) The continued support of human life on earth, 2) Long term maintenance of the stock
of biological resources a nd the productivity of agricultural systems, 3) Stable human
populations, 4) Limited growth economies, 5) An emphasis on small - scale and self -
reliance, 6) Continued quality in the environment and ecosystems (717).
Brown et al., like Edwards, frame characte ristics that make up a broad movement. While I do not think that either definition suggests that sustainability should act as an a la carte menu, the lists
47 seem, at first glance, overwhelming. Are these lists the catechism for the Church of
Sustainability? I would hope that the answer is no, but it is not unreasonable to ask, What can I,
an individual who has a part to play in various economies, societies, and ecologies, do to
meaningfully adapt my thoughts and deeds to this world view?
Sustainability As Mo vement
Thus far, my goal has been to establish how the ground shifts beneath sustainability,
depending on the context, goals, and necessity. In the same way that Latour 17 argues about the
term 'socia l' in Reassembling the Social , sustainability runs the very real danger of becoming a
signifier whose meaning and application fades as its use becomes more frequent, even
ubiquitous. Sustainability proponents can speak about sustainability as an over - corre ction on behalf of the environment to a narrow concern for economic stability. Sustainability opponents can speak of humanity's inexhaustible technological, material, and inventive qualities to the - earth - is - broke - we - can't - fix - it crowd. We cannot afford to become bogged down in semantics when application is long overdue.
While definitions are not problems, as such, they do indicate how sustainability proponents' arrive at their usual strategy: The report, position statement, or agreement to which all partie s can agree. Sustainability's progress is marked by these moments, some of which I will mention in the following section: Brundtland, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, the Rio Declaration, the Kyoto Protocol, to name a few. To be sure, mission or position statements are important. They provide a map marking Point A (the start) and Point B
(the end), often relying on the individual constituent's judgment on how to get from A to B.
Subjective positions are always important, but su stainability conversations cannot occur without accounting for What is to be sustained? For whom? For how long? I contend that considering
17 I will consider Latour in more detail in chapter five.
48 sustainability as a movement in the manner of Edwards, Brown, et al. and other top - down,
movement perspectives is fin e for a monograph, but offers no foothold for bringing the
discussion to a local level, which is th e place where the answers to What? For whom? and H ow long? can be found.
Here, I want to propose a seemingly minute departure from those who find value in th inking of sustainability as a movement. Here, I take my cue from Richard Rorty’s Achieving
Our Country and his distinction between movement thinking and campaign thinking. There is an important, productive difference between thinking of sustainability as m ovement and thinking of sustainability as a series of campaigns. While sustainability - as - movement described in Edwards' book is geared toward an interdisciplinary audience and Brown et al. for an Environmental
Studies audience, it is clear that their broad movement thinking is moving in a similar direction.
Indeed, the common characteristics they report have persisted since sustainability's resurgence in the 1980s. The commonalities represented across the spectrum of sustainability thinking indicates that s ustainability is a type of social, ecological, and economic movement. However, positioning sustainability as a movement indicates its inherent limitations as an operating concept.
Movements, as Rorty suggests, indicate important societal shifts, but they are not long lived: “Movements . . . neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and amorphous to do anything that simple” (114). Rorty sets campaigns as a counter to movements: “By ‘campaign,’ I mean something finite. Something that can be recognized to ha ve succeeded or to have, so far, failed”
(114). 18 Rorty suggests that the ability to assess change is vital to any type of society wide cause
18 A note before moving on: I do not mean to assert that these broad categories represent an either/or binary; rather, I place these on opposing sides of a continuum, with application occurring somewhere there in. In the space between these metaphors lie innumerable positions from which to operate.
49 or advocacy. Without a position from which to assess success or failure, a cause is just another
noise among the din of cultural conversations. Rorty values assessment a nd real, proved change,
but movements lack assessment mechanisms because they succeed or fail on all - or - nothing terms. The virtue of movements is that they do not need to back down. They stand for absolute positions. They have the luxury to push for a more pure vision, one that, if we take Edwards’ sustainability movement description, adheres to each of his characteristics. Campaigns, however, are ends driven. Campaigns can compromise, and they expect to be constrained by the vagaries and necessities of rea l - world practice. Ultimately, value comes from the facility to ask, was the goal that precipitated and drove the campaign fulfilled? While the answer to such a question may sometimes be unclear — and is certainly situated and negotiated — it is the space to as k the
question that becomes vital to any ability to assess change. Only goal - driven campaigns allow
for a structure by which to measure forward progress. In short, campaigns have the facility to as
ask, “Are we done?” or “What other directions do we need t o pick up?” Recasting an approach to
sustainability thinking through a 'campaign' lens would offer an important productive approach
to, for instance, Edwards' list of sustainability's broad characteristics.
Rorty’s metaphorical hierarchy of movement over campaign is important, as a movement
is made up of many campaigns. For example, a campaign for a university to divest from fossil
fuel industries can be conducted with little care for history or context. The campaign ends when
the effort is measured to hav e succeeded or failed. However, a movement brings in other areas to
craft a “larger context within which politics is no longer just politics, but rather the matrix out of
which will emerge something new” (115). For Rorty, this ideological matrix “assumes t hat
things will be changed utterly, that a terrible new beauty will be born” (115). In the context of
our divestment campaigners, the divestment movement is concerned with correcting the
50 incompatibility between higher education's mission and resource stewa rdship. Until this is politically, economically, and socially corrected and the world is transformed accordingly — which may or may not happen anytime soon — the movement will continue, independent of the success or failure of this one campaign.
Considering su stainability as a movement also has implications for who can participate in a movement or campaign. Membership in a campaign combines the “contemplative and the active lives . . . [and] combine[s] this ambidexterity with a sense of finitude and an ironic r ecognition of impurity” (117). In essence, campaigners recognize a movement’s high ideals, but they recognize the presence of an e nd . When one campaign fails, another campaign can reflect on the errors and quickly replace the failed: “such impurity is just what one expects of something finite and mortal” (119). Movements, however, view the world through the possibilities of their matri x, through perfection in unity. Members of movements see “everything as part of a pattern whose center is that single thing” (117). If a movement fails — if its matrix does not hold — then the members of the movement are lost. The processes of purification and surrender to the movement’s totalizing, absolute center are rigid. For members of a movement, there is no slack in these absolutes. There are no partial members of movements.
In this way, movement forces are centrifugal. They rush inward on the single fig ure at its center, which in this case is the ideal Sustainability . Such forces, then, “must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph” (119).
Movements must be maintained. They are continuously s eeking new ways and places in which to insinuate their matrix; however, the need for purity makes vitality difficult to sustain. Any sense of impurity irrevocably fractures the movement. In this way, movements can replace movements,
51 but because movements a re large and unwieldy, this occurs infrequently. 19 Rorty suggests that reading political and cultural history thro ugh a campaign framework sees history as a “tissue of chances, mischances, and lost chances — a tissue from which, occasionally and briefly, beauty flashes forth, but to which sublimity is entirely irrelevant” (Rorty 123).
For me, the campaign - movement dist inction is a vital point that strikes at the core of my intentions toward sustainability and composition and rhetoric — and is also my implicit criticism of work that has been done in our field to this point: when our field has entered the interstice with su stainability, we do not theorize composition sustainability, sustainable composition, or however it is that we can configure the relationship. We tend to consider sustainability as a static concept, one whose definition is left to ecology, economics, or so me other part of our campus, which does not allow us to take up local, campaign - like goals. We have not asked ourselves,
What is to be sustained? For whom? How long? Unless we work toward building capacity that measures against these generative questions, we cannot communicate or measure sustainability across the far and wide contours of our field. Trying to deduce how to work toward meeting a list of sustainability characteristics is unwieldy and likely to be unsuccessful, which is likely to drain support for the cause. A more pragmatic sustainability impulse would value measureable results and inductive thinking.
Orienting Our Sustainability Thinking
Considered together, the line of sustainability thinking outlined in the previous sections brings us to su stainability's central problem. Sustainability has no shortage of theories or perspectives, but there is a problem of making it manifest. If sustainability is an ethic, then how can I, as an individual ever have the ability to influence, to take one exampl e, my ecosystem? I
19 Think grand, unifying terms: Modernism replaced by postmodernism. Current - traditional replaced by expressivist replaced by social - epistemic.
52 live in a home that is powered by coal. I drive a car that is powered by oil. I buy food from a
grocery store that is supplied by an economically efficient but ecologically destructive supply
chain. To change any of these parts of my lif e — parts that I share with countless millions of
United States citizens — would involve costs that I might be able to manage, but certainly could not be managed by the majority of my community, even if they were inclined to change. While this project does not intend to answer these individual questions, I offer these rather universal conditions to reflect the barriers to widespread individual acceptance of sustainability. 20
Here, Lele, Gatto, and Marshall and Toffel's dimensional questions come into stark relief:
What is to be sustained? For whom? For how long? What are our common goals? How do we
prioritize? For sustainability - influenced discussions and actions to take pl ace, some person or group must have a will to sustain something for some period of time. For sustainability to happen, people must want it to happen, and they must want it to happen in similar ways. I argue that this is the location from which to begin a d isciplinary dialogue about sustainability. What can a discipline like composition and rhetoric sustain?
I see two major branches at the intersection of sustainability and composition and rhetoric: sustainable disciplinarity and sustainable composing. One q uestion is, do we want a
sustainable composition and rhetoric discipline? What would we need to do to make our
organizations, publications, and structures sustainable? A sustainable Conference on College
Composition and Communication might involve a more r obust infrastructure for satellite
participation to cut down on travel expenses, both economic and environmental. Our flagship
disciplinary publications might not only consider economic and environmental impacts of
publication, but the intellectual benefit of removing paywalls and encouraging more open source
20 Of course, I have not — nor do I intend to — address sustainability's ideological barriers.
53 publication. What would a sustainability position statement include, or what might special interest groups or committees want to achieve? The second important question is, do we want to foster sustaina ble composing? How can we shape the materials, decisions, and rhetorics to foster sustainability? In an age when writing has a default digital component, how can we encourage writers to make maximum use of their technologies instead of buying new hardware and software every year? How can we better teach writers to recognize that their composing choices involve an interconnected web of contextual, material, and temporal decisions, all of which are rhetorical? Depending upon the order of 'sustainability' and 'composition,' the aims can be quite different, and this inquiry, save a few outlying texts, is all in front of us.
As I have already discussed, there is no capital S sustainability. Lower case s sustainability is adaptable and relative to the situation in which it is employed. In the Brundtland
Report, sustainability is meant to describe a particular quality of an economic development goal
(eg, if we desire economic development, then we should work to make it sustainable 21 ).
Sustainability, however, has come to be used as an attainable state, in and of itself (eg, sustainable farming, sustaina ble communities). How, then, can we think about sustainability as a lens that helps us to see the ecological, economic, and social inequities in our discipline?
Sustainability in Composition and Rhetoric
In this section I turn to composition and rhetoric' s relatively few collaborations with sustainability ideas, consider their value, and build an orientation from which to consider in the following chapters the prospects for, as I briefly outlined in the previous section, sustainable composing and creating a sustainable composition and rhetoric discipline. In the first chapter I reviewed ecological and environmental composition and rhetoric literature, work that over the
21 Again, this footnote marks a ve ry, very large debate: Can any development be sustainable? If development is, in part, growth, how can it ever not be unsustainable.
54 last generation represents the closest thing our field has come to addressing resource
c onsumption, and, by extension, the relationship between our discipline, resource consumption,
and global warming. I also claimed that composition's inquiry — and any discipline, really — into
ecology or environment does not automatically suppose either resourc e conservation or
preservation ethic s . What has been missing is an ethic like sustainability that guides our
approaches to resource management. Here, I want to call particular attention to our field's
previous inroads into sustainability.
I will begin with something of an (unfortunate) outlier. The spring 1974 issue of
Freshman English News published the winner of its annual essay contest, Richard Coe's
“Rhetoric 2001.” The contest's judges were Edward Corbett, Mina Shaughnessy, and Peter
E lbow. The millennial title appropriately reflects the article's future - oriented thinking. Coe finds
exigence in the then current conversations around The Limits to Growth , a 1972 report written by
Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists Donella Me adows, Jorgan Randers, and Dennis
Meadows that modeled population and resource trends into the 21 st century. 22 Coe takes the
positive feedback loop of concerns expressed in the report — that technological progress increases
population, which leads to increasing resource consumption, which leads to technological
progress to solve resource problems — and wonders about the humanities' place in the process.
Coe argues that composition and rhetoric's place in the humanities as teachers of communication
(and by extension of process and thinking) affords us entry into the ecological crisis
conversation.
While Coe has particular pedagogical cues attuned to his day, what stands out is his
attempt to open our disciplinary conversations to systems theory as a way to approach
22 Limits to Growth would go on to be translated into 28 languages and sell 9 million copies (Dresner 26).
55 communication that we know to be overdetermined. While he says that we can still teach
communication's causality (I said X, and she did Y), we must recognize that in addition to saying
X, there are likely to be innumerable material factors that are worth recognizing: technological,
biological, ecological, and on. Further, Coe calls for attention to the nonsummativity of
communication — “the whole being greater than the parts” (10) that he will go on to develop in
“Eco - Logic for the Composition Class , ” an article that I addressed in chapter one. Coe concludes that rhetoric taught in first - year composition classes should reflect the world in which we live , and, in a few sentences that are interesting if for no other reason than their publication year, he says,
It should be a rhetoric for an age approaching the limits of material growth. It should not
hinder, but help people to understand, cope with, and co ntrol the social and technological
changes of our times. It should, moreover, be sufficiently holistic and integrative of a
world on the brink of ecological disaster . (12)
For me, what resonates is the long, empty silence that followed. Again, as I have al ready
addressed, the field had other big - picture topics that consumed debate: field direction, discipline
identity, composing models. It is worth noting that this article does not appear in the intellectual
lineage of the ecology or ecocomposition schools. For an essay thought worthy of an award by
Corbett, Shaughnessy, and Elbow, this article's lack of influence is worthy of note, I think.
The two earliest, most direct movements between the wider composition and rhetoric
field and sustainability come from the technical writing community. First, M. Jimmie
Killingsworth and Jaqueline Palmer’s 1992 Ecospeak , as I outlined in the previous chapter, is the
earliest, most prominent work on environmental rhetoric. Their final chapter, “Ecological
Economics and the Rhetoric of Sustainability” explores utopian rhetoric in economist Herman
56 Daly’s 1977 Steady State Economics: The Economics of Biophysical Equilibrium and Moral
Growth and the Worldwatch Institute’s Lester Brown’s rhetoric of sustainability. Here,
Killings worth and Palmer engage in a straightforward rhetorical analysis: they focus on two
texts, discuss the proposed audiences, and consider the appeals each author uses to communicate
a sustainable economic worldview. Analyzing Daly’s book on sustainability, t hey point out ways
that his ecologically responsible economics is concerned for bringing to economics “the basic
laws of thermodynamics, . . .[or the] ultimate means of human action, but also the morality of
such action, or ultimate ends” (245). Killingswo rth and Palmer suggest that Daly’s audience
includes fellow economists and environmentalists, but not a hostile audience. The second set of
analyzed works come Lester Brown’s Worldwatch Institute’s publications. Unlike Daly’s
targeted audiences, Brown’s au dience is a more general public who want to be informed about
environmental issues. Key to Worldwatch publications are their accessibility, most easily seen in
their attention to headings, alignment, front loading information in topic sentences, and offeri ng brief, thumbnail essays for easy, quick reading and comprehension. Key to Worldwatch style is active tense and frequent calls to action and activism. Killingsworth and Palmer produce an important analysis that likely has wider applications, but without filtering into our discipline’s other productive avenues, there is no greater contribution to the environmental problems we face.
Perhaps the greatest criticism I have is their final, more - asserted - than - analyzed conclusion about sustainability discourse. T hey offer a characteristic list of favored sustainability narratives:
“democratic[,] open to contributions from diverse sources[,] action - oriented[,] continuous[,] value centered[,] and technically competent” (267). This list is dropped on the chapter’s fi nal page, with little more than a sentence describing each component. This chapter does well to read
57 how sustainability comes through in two texts, but the analysis does not open up more directions
for sustainability in the field or composing.
The second t echnical writing contribution is Craig Waddell’s “Defining Sustainable
Development: A Case Study in Environmental Communication,” which was part of Nancy
Coppola and Bill Karis’ Technical Communication, Deliberative Rhetoric, and Environmental
Discourse , a work whose broader themes I also addressed in the previous chapter. In his chapter,
Waddell sketches the growing demand for environmental communicators and the corresponding
need to “prepare environmental communicators to work effectively and ethically wi th the public
in a democratic society” (4). Waddell considers four models of public participation. First, there is
the technocratic model, which maintains a gap between an expert class and the non expert public:
“technical decisions should be left to ‘expe rts’ in science, engineering, industry, and government and allows no role for public participation or oversight” (7). The One - Way Jeffersonian model transfers knowledge from experts to the public, but ultimate power and control rests with the public. The I nteractive Jeffersonian Model allows for experts to present technical information to the public, but the public presents their values and emotions. This model calls on both participants to adjust to each other. The fourth model -- and the one that Waddell ad vocates for -- is the Social Constructionist model “views risk communication as an interactive exchange of information during which all participants also communicate, appeal to, and engage values, beliefs, and emotions. Through this process, public - policy de cisions are socially constructed”
(9). Ultimately, Waddell is writing to an audience who teach and practice (or both) environmental - technical communication. His advocacy, then, is important for practical reasons, but I find value in the models of public pa rticipation that he offers. Certainly, considering the relationship between experts and the non expert public is central to sustainability discourse writ
58 large, but surely the implications for these models can inform a more broad sustainability
rhetoric.
T he first major sustainability intervention in composition and rhetoric is Derek Owens'
2001 Composition and Sustainability . Coe's article reminds that there are missed chances and
dropped lines of inquiry all the time in every discipline, so there may be a sustainability - related presentation or article that occurred in the interval. Looking at Owens' Works Cited list, however, provides evidence that his landmark work on composition and sustainability took no particular cues from previous sustainability - spec ific composition and rhetoric scholarship. 23 To be sure, there is evidence of environmental and ecological influence — including ecocomposition — but not hing narrowly connecting to sustainability.
My discussion of Composition and Sustainability does not take issue with its intentions.
To be sure, Owens intends to nurture compositions' connections to sustainability. Frankly, I think that this book should have sparked a field - wide conversation, one that could have guided us to be on the leading ed ge of sustainability conversations. If we could go back to 2001 to suggest to
Owens that his book would be the sole, book - length benchmark for sustainability in composition studies, he would likely be shocked. Owens book is not presented to be the end - all conversation on sustainability. In fact, its scope is narrow, as his suggestions focus on the sustainability potential in a first - year writing class. Owens suggests that working with students to turn a critical eye toward their place in the world, working lives, and futures can lead students to consider the need for more sustainable lifestyles. In this way, Owens presents a thorough, unified vision for the first - year writing class to engage in sustainability thinking.
23 Owens also notes the absence by citing the 2000 edition of NCTE's Trends and Issues in Postsecondary English Studies: “race, gender, class, writing assessment, and technology continue to be the expectedly hot topics, while sustainability is noticeably absent” (xiii).
59 I depart from Owens in two fundamental ways. First, I would assert that sustainability’s
value to composition and rhetoric goes beyond a thematic reading and writing sequence. Owens
does not have ambitions for this particular book beyond the classroom, so to expect him to
articulate greater amb itions is unfair. His book acts as a map for other first - year writing classes.
In this way, his intentions are narrow. He does not make greater claims about sustainability in the
field. He does the job that he sets out to do, but I suggest that the ceiling for sustainability is
much higher than the classroom.
My more important departure point is his vision for sustainability’s classroom use and his
approach toward a sustainability definition. In each case, he takes on the top - down, fit - the - movement’s - defini tion approach to sustainability that I have suggested is limiting. His chapter
“Sustainability” provides his own interpretive map of the term and its possibilities. Indeed, the book’s title, Composition and Sustainability , provides an important grammatical hat - tip to his overall direction. As a conjunction, and links. It is a relational connection, but it does not necessarily integrate the two terms.
Owens' sustainability map is largely directed by sustainability's light - switch moments, the conferences and publications that have come to stand for a significant change in sustainability thinking or popularity. At the very outset, he “hastily” defines sustainability as “meeting today’s needs without jeopardizing the well - being of future generations” (1). After this abbreviated definition, Owens relies largely on definitions others supply. In his “Sustainability” chapter,
Owens begins with the Oxford English Dictionary, cites Bruntdland and the many consequent
United Nations' conferences, and turns to important sustainability works, including Lester
Brown's 1981 Building a Sustainable Society that, he notes, never explicitly defines the term. He notes important criticisms, particularly the distinction between weak sustainability — a modifier
60 for continuous, predict able economic growth — and strong sustainability, which demands including social and environmental factors in growth decisions. Owens approach to sustainability is well informed and covers literature that you might find in any sustainability article across t he
disciplines. His location for sustainability in Composition and Sustainability , then, is somewhere
amongst a more broad sustainability definition. However, fitting somewhere amongst
sustainability’s wide swath of definitions offers little direction or s ense of purpose toward
something greater than the mere idea sustainability. Owens expects that his place , work , and
future themes will lead students to something within this broad definition spectrum. Without a
more contextual sustainability, Owens’ approa ch relies on the alchemy of reading and writing
about the three to produce something meaningful for the student, course, university, and
community.
Owens’ approach to sustainability is at its most open ended when he offers six tenets
around which to ground a strong sustainability ethic (and by extension the sustainable
composition curriculum that he proposes through his book).
• A sustainable society cannot be created without sustainability - conscious curricula.
• A pedagogy of sustainability would call attentio n to “social traps” of unsustainability,
leading teachers and students to begin imagining means by which to avoid them.
• A pedagogy of sustainability should be antigrowth and pro development.
• A pedagogy of sustainability would promote an ethic of sustainabi lity.
• A pedagogy of sustainability would reject many conventional notions of work and labor,
recognizing the need to reinvent the nature of business and work as a fundamental part of
creating a sustainable society.
61 • The daily operations of the college campu s must reflect the ethic of sustainability
promoted within the curriculum. (27 - 32)
Though the first and fourth are somewhat circular, I agree with his assertions. In a way, though, I think that is also a problem. These statements would fit well into a peda gogy that is trying to adhere to, for instance, Edwards’ sustainability movement. If you are a sustainability proponent, you would find little to argue with here. My criticism here is not simply about measurement
(although how you measure is a valid questi on). If I read Owens accurately, he wants students to puzzle through sustainability in a writing class. This alone does not necessarily make the class itself sustainable (How much do the books cost? What hardware will they need to buy?). It also does not i nfuse sustainability in the curriculum (What does theorizing sustainable writing mean?). Again, these are not Owens aims, necessarily, so I do not want to take up an argument that is not there. I will, however, suggest that there is more to sustainability’ s potential influence than trying to shoehorn more outcomes onto already crowded syllabi. 24
More recently, sustainability has been presented as a type of economic self - sufficiency in the 2009 collection e dited by Dickie Selfe, Heidi McKee and Danielle DeVoss, Technological
Ecologies and Sustainability . From the beginning, the authors indicate that
ecologies” and “sustainability” are meant to “suggest the important task of maintaining
the richly textured te chnological environments in which composition teachers and
students learn, study, and communicate. These environments -- which include both human
and technological actors -- are akin, as many scholars have suggested, to ecological
systems . . . and deserve to be studied in all their layered, interconnected complexity. (1)
24 This will be covered in chapters three and four.
62 The editors note that their collection’s sustainability goal is more fiscal than environmental or social, and they note that they deploy sustainability and ecology for their conceptual benefit .
While they do well to establish their intentions for their selected terms, sustainability in natural resource terms is missing, a fact that Charles Moran notes in the text’s foreword. Moran notes that one necessary area of inquiry that this generation of composition and rhetoric scholars must address is sustainability “in world terms” (3), and he leaves us with the question, “How shall we cope, personally and institutionally, with the environmental costs of this technology that we love so well” (5)? Indee d, in the editors’ introduction to their section “Sustaining Scholarship and the
Environment” they note that “as a field we have not established a large - scale environmental sustainability initiative. Nor have we looked critically at our own technological f ootprints” (2).
The editors’ choice, then, to maintain sustainability and ecology as operating terms strikes odd. I do not suggest that their use of the terms is malicious, but there is enough wiggle - room in how they describe their terms to cause a less cr itical observer to suggest that they are, in their own words, establishing a sustainability initiative. Just as ecocomposition appropriated ecology, a move that resulted in no real environmental activism or advocacy, appropriating sustainability and ecolog y to address technological self sufficiency is problematic.
Sustainability as self - sufficiency — that is, sustaining ourselves — invariably narrows the conversation to economic and material interests: how long can a program or curricula exist without external funding? Confining sustainability to economic and material considerations holds no regard for ecological or social interests. Economic goals are evident, even easy to articulate. They are revealed in balance sheets and annual budgets. But the difficult an d vital work is considering environmental and social goals. Sustaining only ourselves — programs, curricula, centers — has long been the measure of our growth and progress, and it has been
63 necessary work. Economic sustainability is, after all, the measure by w hich our institutions
operate. How, then, can we reorient our thinking toward the more expanded sense of
sustainability? Indeed, how is it in our interests to expand sustainability when it may limit us in
the higher education marketplace?
Using sustaina bility as mere metaphor, like ecology before it, can be a productive lens
through which we can consider texts. But while metaphors offer additional, expansive ways to
conceive of and discuss composition and rhetoric, they tend to begin and end with a text, and
they do not afford the field an opportunity to extend conversations out into the practical world of
competing social, economic, and ecological objectives. Relegating sustainability to metaphor or
economic concerns produces a weak sustainability ethic when, if our field is to remain rele vant
in a time of global warming , we need to directly and unequivocally address our complicity in
driving economic growth and material goals at the expense of society and ecology.
Before setting this collection aside, it is important to note that Shawn and Kristi Apostel’s
chapter does take Moran and the editor’s suggested step to address environmental consequences
of technology use. In “Old World Successes and New World Challenges: Reducing the
Computer Waste Stream in t he United States,” Apostel and Apostel describe our e - waste stream
and European Union and US government bodies and non - profits’ attempts to handle the problem.
They deal head - on with policy history and its successes and failures. Ultimately, they recommend that until more reliable large - scale, successful recycling programs are offered, “we, as consumers, must take responsibility” (11). Their call is simple: As educators who require instruments that contain highly toxic materials, we should be ethically inve sted in their lifespans.
We should involve ourselves in our own institutions’ waste streams, especially if we have
administrative roles, and we should encourage environmentally responsible purchasing . Apostel
64 and Apostel’s over environmental and material c oncern provides a welcome turn from more
conceptual ecological and resource - conscious conversations. The insight that they offer is an
important reminder that our pedagogical, theoretical, and research boundaries are choices . There
is no natural or compuls ory law that suggests that our material concern begins and ends with the
classroom door. Further, the problem of e - waste, not to mention technology’s (still) high
economic costs, suggests that we should not be allowed to assume that students and computers
arrive in our classrooms as composing packages. Processes that are vital to composing exist in
ways that manifest themselves well before we offer a writing prompt.
Conclusion
In a field that actively concerns itself with society - wide inequity and its inevitable influence on textual creation, environmental considerations -- let alone outright conservation or preservation ethics -- have not developed into lines of long - term inquiry. That global warming is verifiable fact affords us, in a sense, an opportunity to abolish narrow environmentalism — environmentalism as care for wild places and creatures, not to mention our health — in favor of sustainability, an ethic that compels us to rethi nk the material and theoretical ways that composition and rhetoric approaches ecology, society, and economy. For too long we have, at worst, ignored our complicity in resource consumption. At best, we have noticed our resource consumption but done little t o effect change, either because we do not think it is our place or we think someone else is better suited. Today, the results are in. Global warming is real. We can no longer let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We simply must find a way to more meani ngfully and practically enter resource consumption conversations.
Missing in global warming - composition and rhetoric conversations has been a driving purpose, a greater exigency that compels different thinking and acting about the array of textual
65 producti on and consumption objectives that bind our field. The following are sustainability calls
to consider as I move forward in this project.
We need to theorize the relationship between texts and resource consumption.
In his introduction to Sustainability: A Bedford Spotlight Reader , Christian Weisser
hopes that the collection’s essays will help students
develop their own rhetorical abilities as a result of the reading, writing and thinking [on
sustainability] they will do in a course using t his book, and those persuasive skills will
carry over to other aspects of their personal, professional, and civic lives. In that way,
Sustainability is more about helping students to think and communicate than it is about
any particular subject. (vi)
For m e, the latter sentence does not easily follow. I do not think that anyone in composition and
rhetoric scholarship has come close to working through what this means. What values are
communicated? How is thinking shaped? How does that influence writing and a nalysis? Earlier
in the same selection, Weisser notes that sustainability’s “importance is obvious” and “relevance
is clear” (vi). Indeed, we may even need to rethink how we value texts and their production
against the the challenges presented by global wa rming. I am not sure that we have done enough
work to think that these answers are easy or obvious.
Sustainable composition is concerned about production (of texts).
Sustainability is inherently concerned for production -- its processes, methods, materials,
resources. It is not necessarily about withholding or limiting; rather, it is a question of how best
to generate in a responsible way. If rhetoric and composition is about generating texts, then
sustainable composition brings the question of sustainable te xtual production to the fore.
Sustainability should be considered situationally, not as a God term.
66 Earlier in the chapter I offered the idea that any prevailing definitions for sustainability or conception as a movement offers us little to work with. Inst ead, we need to answer questions:
What is to be sustained? For whom? For how long? What should we look to? What is most necessary?
We need to rethink composing’s cost.
There has been a time in each activist wave through our field when an over - correction se emed appropriate. Our delay in making any significant inroads in sustainability discourse should require a period of over - correction toward the environment and sustainability considerations. Just as most - isms can be distilled to correcting past inequity b y drawing attention to power structures, so, too, does sustainability need to over - correct our thinking about ecology, environment, resources.
67 Chapter 3: Resource Awareness and Composition’s Materiality
Until now, I have offered a broad survey of composit ion's intersections with ecology, sustainability, and the environment to demonstrate that we have much left to explore, particularly as we confront the reality of a warming planet. To be sure, moves to rhetorically analyze environmental discourse (Killings worth and Palmer, 1991) or consider texts through a variety of ecological frameworks (Brown and Herndl, 1996) have expanded our conversations. In turn, these conversations have done well to remind us that there is no shortage of environmental discourse to rhetorically analyze, especially when it relates to global warming . This work has also sensitized our field to the potential of a more interrelated, ecology - based (Cooper, 2011;
Dobrin and Weiser, 2005; Syverson, 2000) approach to textual production and te aching, which, in turn, has helped us to better understand that any boundaries placed between the natural world and discourse are artificial and imposed. Our ecological world has no barrier with our textual world.
The premise undergirding this project is a simple reasoning exercise: If disciplinary currency flows from our position as experts in pedagogy, research, and theory of textual production, then moving forward responsibly as a field existing in a time of global warming means that we must face the ec ological, economic, and social costs of our interaction with the natural world. As a discipline and as individual theorists, researchers, and teachers, we must acknowledge our precarious position: The leading edge of textual production requires economic, s ocial, and ecological resource consumption, a location all the more precarious in the age of human induced global warming . At an earlier point in our own history existing on the leading edge would have been an unquestioned good. In a world with a changing view of growth, development, production, consumption, and disposal, our position is murky, at best.
68 Whether or not we co nfront this reality is another matter. In a world coming to grips with global warming, our normalized disciplinary work has not yet compelled actions or thoughts to change, and, at worst, it has allowed for passivity in the face of real, present, and socie ty - wide problems. Exhorting for more environmental rhetorical analysis has scholarly and activist value, of course, but audiences for this scholarship do not tend to go beyond those disciplinary specialists who are already invested in the cause. Indeed, ex panding a text's world to include natural resources and location is vital, but without a lens that can help us come to the heart of the matter — our material relationship with the planet — we have little right to claim that we are actively addressing our role in ecological degradation. The value of awareness and expanding conversations is important, of course, but I suspect that we have more to offer. In the face of global warming, we are obliged to offer more.
The absence of sustainability conversations in ou r day - to - day teaching, administration, and research suggests that there is room to consider how we handle our resources as a discipline or as textual composers. Thus far in our history, we have had little regard for our own participation in ecological ine quity. This is not only important because the Earth's climate is changing, but acknowledging ecological inequity forces us to consider equity anew.
There are, of course, a variety of ways to move the global warming - composition conversation forward. To sug gest that there is only one — and that I can offer it here — would be churlish. For my immediate purposes, however, I use as my departure point literary scholar
Daniel Philippon's thoughts. To begin disrupting accepted norms, our thinking should aspire to thes e intentions:
if we take 'sustainability' as simply another opportunity to replicate existing disciplinary
practices of writing, publishing, speaking, and teaching, we have missed the point . We
69 need to bring sustainability into our courses and disciplines as much as we need to bring
the tools of our disciplines to solving the challenges of sustainability. (169)
I read this as a warning that if within our own departments and disciplines we marginalize sustainability — let alone the underlying problem of global warming — we cannot meet the demands that this challenge requires. For our responses to have a thorough, substantial influence, we need to see our work through a sustainability lens in the same way that we developed lenses around gender, race, class, access , to name but a few of the more important influences on our work. No, we are not engineers, nor does our disciplinary inquiry delve too far into global warming studies and evidence. After all, disciplinary objectives, theory, and methodologies tend to be p articularly situated. But we are concerned for ways that texts are communicated and produced, and as sustainability and global warming become mainstream conversations, we have a vital role to play. Our first step, however, is to accept that we have a role.
While compartmentalizing sustainability is something that we must avoid, marginalizing sustainability also comes from conversations that equate sustainability with economic self - sufficiency or year - on - year budgetary approval (Selfe, 2005; Fadde and Sulli van, 2009) 25 .
Further, our discussions cannot afford to have a resource conscious ethic merely reinforce what we already do. I think we could certainly use more environmental rhetoric analysis and pedagogy that meets the challenge of our modern r hetorical worlds, but it's just as important — maybe even more important — to embody and model responsible theory, research, and teaching of textual production and consumption. We need to push for ways our disciplinary objectives can work toward a sustainable world. Simply adapting our objectives after the fact, claiming that our disciplinary goals take priority (as if everyone doesn't already think that) isn't just a missed
25 Selfe has been concerned for sustainability and composition far longer and more persistently than nearly all compositionists. His 'sustainability' usage has become much more ecologically vital, particularly in the edited Technological Ecologie s and Sustainability.
70 opportunity: it's complicity in neglecting to participate in greater global warming con versations
and remedies.
The direction for this chapter, then, is to consider the possible ways that sustainability
values and composition studies can move beyond the to - date scholarship and inform each other,
particularly at the curricular level as individual teachers and writing program administrators
(WPAs). Here, I am not sketching definitive answers, and I am certainly not suggesting top -
down, authoritarian answers. Rather, I operate from the premise that we have not brought our
resources to bear on global warming, and I offer new directions and descriptions to inform our
conversations.
Acknowledging the Relationship Between Textual Production and Resource Consumption
Refiguring composition studies' relationship with resource consumption is an important
first step toward making the field's relationship with the natural world more intentional. As I have already mentioned, Selfe, Apostel, and Apostel have begun resource conversations around hardware disposal. There is room, however, to expand our conversation both forward and back ward. That is, if we can claim a concern about where our composing tools go when we are
done with them, then we can just as reasonably consider their origin. For instance, consider the
little known elements that form the physical foundation of our electron ic lives. In April 2015,
BBC reporter Tim Maughan travelled to China to witness first - hand the mining and
manufacturing of rare earth elements, which are minerals that are found in “everything from
magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the e lectronic guts of smarphones and
flatscreen TVs.” According to the United State Geological Survey, in 2009 China produced 95%
of the world's total ( Tse ). Maughan travelled to Baotou, the large st industrial city in Inner
Mongolia, with a group of architects and designers who call themselves the Unknown Fields
71 Division . Unknown Fields Division describes itself as a studio compelled to see first - hand our
world's extreme landscapes:
These distant landscapes - the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the
pristine, are embedded in global systems that conn ect them in surprising and complicated
ways to our everyday lives. In such a landscape of interwoven narratives, the studio uses
film and animation to chronicle this network of hidden stories and re - imagine the
complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary
futures. (Mission)
What Maughan and Unknown Fields Division bore witness to was remarkable by any measure.
As Maughan notes, rare earth elements, despite their name, are fairly common. Take
Neodymium: China produces 90% of the global market, but it holds only 30% of global deposits.
What, then, makes mining and manufacturing in Baotou worth shining a light on? The extraordinary environmental impact. Hugely hazardous and toxic processes are needed to produce r are earth elements on a profitable scale: “For example, cerium is extracted by crushing mineral mixtures and dissolving them in sulphuric and nitric acid, and this has to be done on a huge industrial scale, resulting in a vast amount of poisonous waste as a byproduct.” Whether this cost is an overall net positive or negative depends on your subject position, not to mention how you balance economic, environmental, and social goals.
In Maughan's telling, the world's environment is a low priority: “China’s do minance of the rare earth market is less about geology and far more about the country’s willingness to take an environmental hit that other nations shy away from.” Economists would call the environmental impact an externality. That is, a company producing cerium would not have chosen to incur the higher economic cost of toxic disposal. Nevertheless, cerium producers
72 accept that additional cost and dispose of their waste in the cheapest way allowed. From my
perspective poorly disposed toxic biproducts are al ways negative. However, one could make the
argument that Chinese government and manufacturing see these costs positively, as they
represent the very reason why this particular industry economically thrives in China.
What, then, does this externality look like? Maughan tells his story of the 20 minute drive
from the center of Baotou to a lake created by damming a river and flooding farmland. The lake's
sole purpose is as a tailings pond, which is simply an industrial term for a place to dump harmful
manufac turing byproducts. Maughan describes the scene:
We reached the shore, and looked across the lake. I’d seen some photos before I left for
Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight. It’s a truly alien environment,
dystopian and horrifying. The thought that it is man - made depressed and terrified me, as
did the realization that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my
pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so
smugly excited about in the West. Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot
video on my cerium polished iPhone.
What Maughan and Unknown Fields Division witnessed in China should provoke a reaction. As a compositionist who is looking for ways to actively ad dress global warming , I think it should
even provoke a response.
My problem, however, when approaching this as a composition and rhetoric scholar —
someone who cares about texts and the various manners and media through which they are
produced — is, where doe s my expertise come in? What, exactly, can a more material concern add to our understanding of our composing world? Perhaps the answer is articulated by media
73 theorist Jussi Parikka's observation about the complexity of media. In A Geology of Media , he not es that
media materiality is not contained in the machines, even if the machines themselves
contain a planet. The machines are more like vectors across the geopolitics of labor,
resources, planetary excavations, energy production, natural processes from
photosynthesis to mineralization, chemicals, and the aftereffects of electronic waste.
(139)
As a human (and humanist), I am troubled by Unknown Fields Division's account of cerium production in China, but I am unsure that my field has offered me any le nses through which to view this particular and remote atrocity, despite the reality that it involves materials for smart phones, laptops, and nearly every other electronic device we commonly use to compose texts.
The environmental, human, and economic cost s involved in the life cycle of my smart phone, for instance, are far removed from my daily experience, let alone my experience as an end user. I use the phone to message, email, and read, but rarely (if ever) does an image like the one Maughan describes s tanding on the shores of Baotou's tailings pond interfere with my interaction with my smart phone. The path to establishing a line of inquiry that brings to the fore environmental implications of relationships between objects, let alone our relationship to objects, is not obvious or easy, but global warming is forcing our hand.
From Epistemology to Ontology
The story of rare earth elements illustrates how far we in the US are removed — both geographically and intellectually — from the product lifecycles that en able our composing lives.
One goal, then, is to take steps to expand critical inquiry into the materiality of our composing world, and this critical goal is likely to disrupt composition studies' to - date lines of inquiry. The
74 theoretical ground upon which composition's previous ecological and sustainability interventions
stand fits into Berlin's (by now classic) taxonomy as social - epistemic rhetoric. It is not reductionist to suggest that Dobrin, Weisser, and Owens' pedagogical and theoretical recommendatio ns operate from this particular thread of constructivism. That is, meaning does not come solely from the individual or some innate mental process. Meaning is created in the interaction between a writer, an audience, location, and writing tools, to name but a few of the many things that come together to create a text. Composition's interventions into the environment or natural world, then, have sought to carry this idea to a logical end: students will develop a greater awareness for their natural worlds if w e persist in pushing them to more thoroughly consider the interconnected quality of their lives, locations, and texts.
This line of inquiry, like all lines of inquiry, come with limitations. Some ideas are moved to the foreground while others are moved to the background. According to Jane Bennett, when it comes to understanding things (or thing - power, as she suggests) constructivism helps to understand a thing's context at the expense of understanding a thing itself:
This impulse toward cultural, linguisti c, or historical constructivism, which interprets any
expression of thing - power as an effect of culture and the play of human powers,
politicizes moralistic and oppressive appeals to “nature.” And that is a good thing. But the
constructivist response to th e world also tends to obscure from view whatever thing -
power there may be. (17)
For Bennett, “thing - power” is “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle (6). To be sure, a social constructionist appr oach to composition studies checks many outcome boxes: it makes writers sensitive to their world and their place in it; it exercises contextual rhetorical thinking; and it highlights the idea that writers
75 (as students and human beings) do not exist in a va cuum. These are long - standing values for compositionists. However, these values struggle when massive, world altering concepts supplant humanity as the center of our rhetorical worlds.
A writer's awareness (indeed, almost hyper - awareness) of her own subje ctive position in the world is, to be sure, a vitally important critical move. One natural limitation of this emphasis, however, is that it becomes difficult (or at least not privileged) to consider something as far removed as Baotou's tailings pond. In Hy perobjects , Timothy Morton suggests that
Constructivism is fundamentally Romantic: it gives us too much to know, and Spirit
floats free of things like a ghost. The wish of constructivism is an if - only: If only I could
displace you enough, dear reader, t he world would change. (179)
Morton presents this as a failing. I would suggest that it merely does not ask the questions we
need answered, which presents a substantial problem for those who want composition to have the
ability to consider how Baotou's mat erial reality informs our composing lives. To be sure, I could
draw out a line of reasoning that suggests enhancing awareness for subject position will precisely
bring us around to Baotou. Eventually. In time. But global warming demands action now.
Ontolog y and (Sustainable) Composing Values
As Bennett suggests, an ontological world view (that is, inquiry into the nature of being)
might provide a perspective that epistemology does not. I agree with Bennett's suggestion that
constructivism does not move our thinking as quickly or directly toward objects and the natural
world as ontology might. Several compositionists have suggested that ontological inquiry has the
potential to inform composition studies (Hawk, Reid). Further, Palmeri and Rutherford re -
examin e composition history through an object oriented ontology lens to suggest that, in some
ways, we have always been ontological.
76 My overarching goal to articulate sustainability - infused composition objectives begins with gaining a foothold into inquiry arou nd composition's materiality. The value, then, lies in promoting thinking that prioritizes balancing resources and generates questions around what, exactly, are those objects and practices worth sustaining. Before moving to a specifically composition focus , I first want to set aside the idea that any curriculum or program can perfectly embody sustainability. There's no such thing. Resource consumption follows from the product of being alive and vital in the world. We could buy all of the carbon offsets we want, but that is not going to change the necessity to consume. There are tensions that exist in our field that we grudgingly accept. The vast majority of our classes are staffed by contingent, underpaid labor.
The textbook industry creates its own demand by encouraging and producing yearly updates to popular texts, which keeps new text book market prices inflated. Most schools long ago abandoned incorporating laptops into tuition, instead treating technology as a hodge - podge,
bring - your - own - device cacophon y that simply reinforces end users into the positive feedback
loop that values novelty, high cost, and proprietary goods and services. Sustainability thinking
can inform our approach to these incredible fault lines, but it cannot, in and of itself, fix
eve rything. Far too often we allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
In the next three sections, I will consider how ontology could inform a composition
classroom aspiring to sustainable values. I am ambivalent about wholly embracing the object
oriented ontology (OOO) label for this work. While my main influence, Timothy Mo rton, claims
membership in OOO, my secondary influence, Jane Bennett, claims ontology, unadorned. My
point here is not to suggest that an ontological orientation is going to necessarily lead to some
comprehensive victory against global warming . Of course, it won't. But as teachers, scholars, and
administrators — all of which take up some consuming function — we need to have some presence
77 in this conversation. I no longer want us to kick the can down the road. In the following three
sections I will consider ways that a shift in theoretical orientation can inform pedagogy and
expand areas of inquiry for composition scholars. I will offer sample areas of inquiry for
assignments that tries to balance concern for materiality, resource consumption, and composition
stu dies.
Lifecycle T hinking
The question of material lifecycles is perhaps the most prevalent area of previous composition - resource conversations. An ontological lens emphasizes composition's resources.
The ontological flattening of our world can invite co mposition pedagogy to approach more
directly concepts like limits and consumption, which are potentially two important objectives
that belong in the curriculum of a global warming world. Here, I will consider both Bennett and
Morton's sense of ontological flattening, and I craft an assignment that uses ontology as a frame through which to open student experience to more sustainable 26 thinking.
Understanding global warming as a hyperobject is the initial thinking that leads Timothy
Morton to suggest that OOO can reimagi ne humanity's response to global warming . 27 To
reconceive global warming, Morton points to the advent of technological advances like steam
power and atomic weapons that have functionally ended the concept world . Th at is, the physical
and mental effect of these “world - historical” events disrupts the utility of the concept world for
humanity, which weakens world as a basis for ethics (19, 107). Before humanity's activities
began to influence the entire planet, world c ould operate as an abstract, stable entity, as it
conveyed enormity and an almost eternal quality. Once humanity began to produce and identify
26 As I have taken pains to show throughout, sustai nability is a probematic term. However, it is the one term around which those who seek to bring global warming awareness to disciplines and institutions have come to accept. Environmentalist Bill McKibben prefers “durability,” while Timothy Morton suggests that seeing objects through OOO eyes necessarily means that there is no whole world to sustain ( Hyperobjects , 116). 27 Morton intentionally uses global warming.
78 hyperobjects (or activities) that affected the entire planet, abstract world was no longer accurate, appropriate, or workable. Similarly, let us consider the relationship between weather and global warming : global warming has forced humanity to understand what we had considered to be
“genuine” historical weather patterns are no more than a reflection of climate. As M orton notes,
“we took weather to be real. But in an age of global warming we see it as an accident, a simulation of something darker, more withdrawn — climate” (102). In human lifespan terms, weather has had predictable cycles. In planetary lifespan terms, w hat we understand as predictable weather is not stable, genuine, or unchanging. Rather, it is merely the most recent way that temperature, precipitation, and wind (and a host of other entities) interact.
Today, global warming hangs over conversations and “looms into the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps” (99). Global warming is an incredibly large idea and phenomenon, yet it is immanent in our everday lives. In this way, hyperobjects like global warming have flattened our relationship to the world:
In an age of global warming, there is no background, and thus there is no foreground. It is
the end of the world, since worlds depend on backgrounds and foregrounds. World is a
fragile aesthetic effect around whose corners we are beginning t o see. True planetary
awareness is the creeping realization not that “We Are the World,” but that we aren't.
(99)
Indeed, this is the turn upon which Morton's thinking builds toward a different approach to environmentalism and global warming: “The ultima te environmentalist argument would be to drop the concepts n ature and world , to cease identifying with them, to swear allegiance to coexistence with nonhumans without a world, without some nihlistic Noah's Ark” (100). We lose the ability to consider object s like world , nature , and environment , but what we are left with is
79 intimacy: “We have lost the world but gained a soul — the entities that coexist with us obtrude on
our awareness with greater and greater urgency” (108). Eliminating foreground and backgroun d
(or, in a sense, flattening) gives these entities or objects immediacy, which necessarily shifts the priority of our relations. As Morton notes about the hyperobject global warming , “every decision that we make is in some sense related to hyperobjects. W hen I turn the key in the ignition of my car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about emigration to Mars, he is relating to global warming” (20). This line of thinking no longer allows for humans to separate themselves from other obje cts or entities. Instead, it suggests that humanity has no more claim as the 'top' object than any other object. In fact, it underscores the vitality of objects, a notion specifically considered by Jane Bennett.
In Vibrant Matter , Bennett suggests that be ing in tune with nonhuman vitality is to disrupt constructivist narratives and to develop a “methodological naivete,” a momentary pause that “might render manifest a subsistent world of nonhuman vitality” (17). This intellectual pause — the gap between const ructivism's totalizing impulses and ontology's discrete vitality — represents an opportunity for something new. Indeed, objects contain multitudes. For Bennett, naivete allows for a new world view that helps take what Parikka sees in media and applies it to all objects. In this way, those who take on a vital approach to materialism may “treat non - humans — animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities — more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically” (18). Here, Bennett's vital materialism represen ts a natural extension of Morton's end of the world . The vitalist ontology accumulated through Morton and
Bennett asks us to set aside human, socially constructed epistemology so that we may come to know more completely (or more complexly) the extended liv es of those objects that we are normalized to see only in relation to ourselves.
80 Next, I want to offer a practical curricular application that attempts to balance flattening our world and rhetorical inquiry. A close, flat examination of an object creates an opportunity for users to disrupt their habituated relationship with the object. This type of reflection allows for a more nuanced understanding where hard - and - fast boundaries slip away. This is an apt jumping off point to consider ways to infuse this th inking in a composition assignment.
By way of contrast, below is an assignment that I have used that is informed by social - epistemic rhetoric. The assignment seeks to accentuate our relationship with the natural world:
This assignment will ask you to wri te about the factors in your life experience that have
shaped your relationship with the natural world. You will examine your own history with
the outdoors and choose one or two experiences to write about that have impacted you.
First, I do not suggest t hat there is anything inherently wrong with this assignment.
Epistemologically based prompts that help students develop their subject position in the world have critical value. This line of inquiry accomplishes its goals, but too far down on that list of g oals is developing a more intimate knowledge of those things in a student's life that interrogate consumption, acknowledge limited resources, or stretch a student's understanding beyond themselves. Instead, ontologically - grounded life cycle inquiry can enh ance students' material awareness.
Life cycle assignment (or review)
This assignment will ask you to catalog the hardware and software that you use to write
in your everyday lives. Here, hardware means the physical tools that you use (cell
phones, laptops) and software means the programs or applications you use (word
processing, any social media application). After you catalog your tools, you will
research their life cycle. Questions may include, where did they begin? What materials
81 do th ey come from? How did it come to you? Where will it go when you are done? What
are the most common writing you do with this tool? What does this suggest about the
tool's rhetorical abilities and characteristics? What can the tool do that you do not find
useful? This writing will take the form of two product reviews: one for hardware, and one
for software.
Sustainability objectives:
1. Understand that tools have a life cycle that existed prior to the end user and will continue
after the end user
2. Recognize t hat their tools have a materiality that extends to objects other than the end
user
3. Develop a respect for, and acknowledgment of, the planet's resources and their limits
4. Engage with personal consumption
5. Understand the limits of tools so that writers may max imize their useful life
Composition objectives:
1. Thorough, more comprehensive (deep and slow) understanding of the rhetorical functions
of their tools, both hardware and software
2. Improve facility with research based writing
3. Expand information technology literacy
4. Maximize facility with tools, which expands their rhetorical abilities with their tools
5. Understand the rhetorical origins of their tools (or, what rhetorical need do their tools
fill?)
This ontologically oriented assi gnment points up a number of important critical objectives in a global warming world. Life cycle thinking asks us to consider our hardware and software from
82 manufacturing and design to disposal. This brings in issues ranging from manufacturing,
marketing, and selling to questions of origin, materials, and resource limits. Life cycle thinking
also has the practical rhetorical function of allowing users to reflect upon their writing objects to
disrupt their matter - of - fact, everyday experience so that they may come to better understand their
object's full rhetorical potential. Stretching objects to their rhetorical and functional limits
disrupts a normalized approach to consumption. Considering consumption and resource limits
allows for a different relationship between user and tool. Certainly, life cycle thinking could
encourage new understandings ranging from stewardship to hyper - consumption, but it creates in
users a new, intentional awareness where there had been none.
Coexistence and C omposition
The pr evious section encouraged us to consider a world lacking foreground and
background (that our world is flat, so to speak) and to recognize that we cannot experience an
object completely (all objects withdraw in OOO terms). Morton suggests that redefining
co existence is the essence of our flatter world view. A world 'out there' separating me from
objects (including hyperobjects like global warming ) is illusory. Like Russian nesting dolls, we
“coexist with human lifeforms, and non life - forms, on the insides of a series of gigantic entities
with whom we also coexist: the ecosystem, biosphere, climate, planet, Solar System”
( Hyperobjects 128). This ecological awareness emphasizes the countless interrelationships
among objects (both life and non - life forms).
Here , I will explore how approaching coexistence with these ideas in mind can further
orient composition studies to material discussions relevant to resource consumption and global
warming . So far, this is not too groundbreaking. However, as Morton extends the idea, we begin to see the potential of this shift. The first extension of this line of thinking is that we now exist
83 alongside, for instance, global warming . Global warming is not some exterior phenomenon from which we can remove ourselves:
We realize th at nonhuman entities exist that are incomparably more vast and powerful
than we are, and that our reality is caught in them. What things are and how they seem,
and how we know them, is full of gaps, yet vividly real. Real entities contain time and
space , exhibiting nonlocal effects and other interobjective phenomena, writing us into
their histories.
Much turns on the last clause. First, humans are decentered. We are no longer the locus of meaning. Second, and more important, is the assertion that any me aning, understanding, or explanation (contingent though it may be), emerges from objects (from the bottom up, if you will) rather than from some (top - down) system or structure: “The more maps we make, the more real things tear through them. Nonhuman entiti es emerge through our mapping then destroy them” (131). Coexistence, then, is not simply a description of how to live or the essence of a 'we can all live in harmony' aphorism. Coexistence is messy and uncomfortable. Moreover, the emotion that marks our co existence with global warming is something akin to horror.
Global warming is right in front of our faces, with its unpredictable weather patterns, spoiled resources, and our increasingly carbon dense atmosphere. At the same time, it retreats from us, as w e cannot adequately represent it: “We see that we are weak , in the precise sense that our discourse and maps and plans regarding things are not those things. There is an irreducible gap” (133). Coexistence resists totalizing, and in this way it can lead us to more thorough and active world view. In order to form understanding (however temporary) of the ever - shifting dynamics between objects, we have to account for our relationship with objects, and we also have to consider how objects interact with other ob jects.
84 Again, Bennett's vital materialism can pick up from Morton's “irreducible gap.” I pick up
Bennett's argument at her definition of assemblage, as this definition attunes us to the particular
agentic quality of coexistent objects. For Bennett, assemb lages
1. are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements
2. are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent
presence of energies that confound them from within
3. have unequal power distribution
4. are not governed by any central head (2 3 - 24).
Crucially, Bennett asserts the assemblage's distributed agency, which, in part, is revealed through
considering efficacy and causality. Each of these ideas help describe the qualities of coexistence
among objects. Efficacy is associated with intenti onality. In an assemblage, finding a sole mover
is not the goal: “The task becomes to identify the contours of the swarm and the kind of relations
that obtain between its bits” (32). Human intention still plays a role, but outcomes are far less
dependent u pon it. Questions become, how are intentions revealed? What are the various objects
at play, and how might we see intentionality play out across the assemblage? We could even
speculate about the effect of removing or replacing particular objects.
In an as semblage, causality, as Bennett points out, is rarely an efficient, 'if X, then Y.' The quality, then of causality among coexisting objects is emergent and fractal, not efficient and linear:
Instead of an effect obedient to a determinant, one finds circui ts in which effect and cause
alternate position and redound on each other. If efficient causality seeks to rank the
actants involved, treating some as external causes and other as dependent effects,
emergent causality places the focus on the process as itself an actant. (33)
85 Bringing together Morton's notion of coexistence and Bennett's suggestion to reconsider efficacy
and causality in the context of distributed agency may, perhaps, be able to tease out particular
perspectives on sustainability and te xtual creation than we otherwise would have attributed to
individual actors.
Coexistence assignment (or a nalysis)
This assignment will ask you to reflect on a past writing experience. Here, you will
reflect on how the various objects (rhetorical, both ph ysical and mental) came together
to create the text. You are encouraged to stretch your thinking as far beyond your mind
and computer as your imagination will allow. What/How many objects played a part?
What were their roles? Did you make full use of th e objects at your disposal? What made
the writing more/less successful? For instance, do you have a favorite place to write?
What are your physical surroundings? Do you have certain objects, places, or materials
that make your writing more comfortable o r productive?
Sustainability values:
1. Recognize the interdependence and irreducibility of objects
2. Establish an ecological ethic for managing and preserving resources
3. Consider the importance of intergenerational perspectives and resource stewardship
Composing values:
1. Privileges deliberate, comprehensive facility with software and hardware
2. Encourages metacognitive reflection on composing processes
3. Consider the rhetorical and functional possibilities and limits of our hardware and
software choices
4. Under stand that our rhetorical and material choices are part of supply chains
86 This type of an assignment aspires toward a rhetorical assemblage, of sorts. How do discrete
objects (ourselves included) come together to develop a text that is greater than the sum of its
parts ? How does a text come out of these rhetorical objects (mental, immaterial things included) ?
This writing and thinking provides an opportunity to develop (or redevelop) a connection with our composing tools. That is to say, we can reconsider co nsumption by, in a sense, slowing down to fully explore the capabilities of our hardware and software. If we can, perhaps, expand our facility to its limits we can certainly scrutinize our tools in ways we haven't, and we can stretch their usefulness perha ps further than the marketplace would like.
It Turns on A ffection
In their own way, each of the above ontological moves create or enhance a writer's
relationship with the material world. Too often, relationships with hardware, software, texts, and
classr ooms exist at an unconscious, periphery level. Regardless of what we think of the term
sustainability , this thinking, nonetheless, forces us to consider limits and to regard how our
rhetorical worlds, including people, tools, and other resources, add to or take away from our
communities and their long - term health. This final shift does not fit into a neat category, as it is
part epistemological and part ontological (if such a thing can happen). Indeed, this section shifts
from the previous sections' critica l goals to expand or shift perspective to outright advocacy: I
actively want people to prioritize improving their connection to their world (or at least the
objects that influence global warming ).
My final argument begins with Wendell Berry's 2012 Nationa l Endowment of the
Humanities Thomas Jefferson lecture. Berry suggests that everything between local environmental degradation and global warming derives from our separation from our world(s).
Simply put, if we as humans had affection for our world, we wou ld not treat it the way we do.
87 Without that affection, we do not care that our lives and decisions have implications that resonate beyond us, and we are less likely to care for the health and welfare of our surrounding world. In fact, it becomes unnatural to make such systematic connections. That is, our normalized social, economic, and ecological worlds explicitly minimize interconnectivity. We are not encouraged to consider the world beyond the plug or outlet, let alone the idea that the electricity that we use likely comes from unsustainable, polluting power plants. There is no incentive to move beyond a discrete, specialized, and compartmentalized world view. This section, then, considers how applying Berry's thinking to an ontological view of compositi on studies can allow for a recovering of affection.
To encourage the ability to imagine the interconnectivity of the objects that comprise our world, I suggest three particular appeals that can help restore affection. In The Pleasures and
Sorrows of Work , philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that guilt, wonder, and gratitude may motivate our thinking. To be sure, guilt is already a commonly employed attitude to encourage change, but wonder and gratitude present more affirming, constructive opportunities to re - engage affection for a sustainable world.
Broadly speaking, global warming is often framed by the world’s deficiencies and humanity’s complicity — known or unknown, conscious or unconscious — or participation — active or passive — in perpetuating destruction or loss of resources. de Botton's suggests that guilt has certain productive persuasive connotations in some cases: choosing a fair trade coffee brand over a non - fair trade brand because you want workers at the end of the line to earn a living wage.
Guilt can also create backlash when decisions are more difficult, debates are more public, actors more remote from our lives: rejection and suspicion of the need to spend money improving waste water treatment capacity in Cincinnati to prevent untreated waste wat er from flowing into the
88 Ohio River. Individually and in small cases it is easy for the individual to understand the system and her role. Collectively, we have a hard time seeing our role and the system’s workings. If we are all guilty, then blame is share d, and we all go down together.
To wonder at, be curious about, and aware of relationships and connections between actors within our world can foster imagination and can be framed as an exploratory appeal, one that calls upon the composer to rouse interes t in her surrounding world — to explore the back story of everyday details. How did our coffee get to us, from bean on a plant to our grocery store or coffee shop? Where is coffee grown, how is it processed, shipped, marketed? What are its costs? We live in a highly specialized world, and we are alienated from the workings of our day - to - day world. Our economy, after all, is more efficient if I pump my own gas and do not attempt to refine my own light sweet crude. While this specialization does not prevent us from asking questions, it does send the message to mind one’s own business. Workers are specialized, whether they work on the manufacturing floor, the corporate cubicle, or the ivy - draped college.
Wonder and curiosity enable affection for surroundings as t he actor’s associations with the larger system become tangible. How, for example is Miami University powered, cooled, and heated?
How influential would it be to our relationship with a lighted, cooled, and heated university if we knew that, as of 2005, eac h day’s energy use required burning 125 tons of coal? (“Miami
University Utility Systems” 3).
Being thankful for the world we live in, whatever that may look like and wherever that may be, is perhaps the most difficult move to make in a specialized societ y in which continuous, planned obsolescence is accepted as a given — even as a good. Gratitude is a conservation move that values our present circumstances and asks us to accept that we have enough, and, in the future to be judicious, thoughtful, and sustain able in our decision making. I can be thankful to be
89 working on this computer and that I have instant access to the largest bank of information the
world has ever compiled. But perhaps the most important change to thinking that gratitude brings
is forcing us to ask important questions about the future: What do I have right now? Is what I
have right now enough? How much farther do I want technology to go?
Understanding our connections
Countless systems function so that we may go about our everyday lives. For instance, we
need utilities like water and electricity to wake up and get ready for our day. We need a
transportation infrastructure to travel to work or school, and, once there, we likely need
an information technology infrastructure to accomplish our go als. Because these systems
often operate just below our awareness, we usually only notice when they do not function.
This assignment, however, will ask you to take a step back, consider your relationship
with a particular material system that you may other wise take for granted, and argue for
ways that the system could be improved. As a jumping off point, consider de Botton's
suggestion that guilt, gratitude, and wonder can help us bring our relationships with
these systems to light. Describe the particular system and your particular feelings toward
it. What material objects does it consist of? What components need to work for the system
to function? How might the system break down? What could be improved about the
system? What are the major issues and questi ons that prevent or enable change in the
system? What organizations or advocacy groups exist to promote, maintain, protect, or
change the system?
Sustainability objectives:
1. Emphasizes the discrete life of objects
2. Values convergence and relations between objects
90 3. Explicitly connects a system vital to the student's everyday life with greater social,
economic, and environmental objectives
Composition objectives:
1. Emphasizes the value of dialogue and civic participation
2. Considers how arguments are shaped by subject position
3. Recognizes the utility of community engagement and research
We are well versed in applying rhetorical lenses, but in the time of global warming our lenses
need values to inform our analysis and produ ctivity. We need some quality that connects us to the
world and that compels us to be interested in ways that the world operates that are far from our
first - person view. Narrowly defined as sustainable rhetorical appeals or more broadly defined as
rhetoric al values, guilt, wonder, and thankfulness can inform sustainable composing and
rhetorical theory in a way that urges us toward common cause with the world around us.
Conclusion
Before moving to the next chapter's concern for disciplinary approaches to gl obal
warming , I want to reiterate how a more ontological approach removes stumbling blocks,
particularly an insistence on isolating environmental concerns as somehow separate from our everyday composing lives. With any societal shift, ambivalence is an ear ly barrier. I see two
exigencies afforded by the ontological intersection between global warming and composition.
First, encouraging people to acknowledge and reflect on the positive feedback loop of
innovation, production, consumption, and disposal in a w orld of finite resources represents a
move toward a more sustainable world view. Second (and likely more important) focusing on the
mundane materials of our composing lives suggests that we are no longer taking on the gap
between global warming and our own actions. Instead, we are taking on a more immediate,
91 manageable problem. Namely, this is how I consume to produce successful texts; therefore, I ought think and act in ways that minimize my consumption. As Timothy Morton suggests, those of us who want to pursue a more ecologically equitable world must recognize that science and humanism hold pieces to a broken jigsaw puzzle. Both sides hold pieces, but they might not fit together. He offers
The ecological thought must interrogate both the attitude of scien ce, its detached
authoritarian coldness; and the nihilistic, baselessly anthropocentric arguments in the
humanities as well as humanist refusal to see the b ig picture, often justified by self -
limiting arguments against “totalization.” (12)
Compositionists who want to branch off in this direction (and I hope there would be more willing than not) must not be afraid to over reach. Our consumption is before us everyday, whether it is in our hardware and software choices or the energy we ask students use to comp lete the work we compel them to do. In the words of George Orwell, “to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.” What, I wonder, might we recover?
92 Chapter 4: Disciplinary Leadership on Global Warming
Introduction
In chapter three I offered an ontological direction for composition scholarship and
teaching that investigates the materiality of textual composing, which can, in part, provide
composition studies with an active path for participating in climate - change - bas ed inquiry. In this chapter I will consider how the top - down dynamics within our field's academic infrastructure, including our disciplinary identity as composition professionals and scholars, contribute to or inhibit attention to the material consequences of our work and global warming conversations.
To begin, let me qualify 'our field.' I mean, in part, the imagined space that we occupy on our home campuses that organizes us within our departments. But I also mean conference spaces and our publications, both print and web - based. I intentionally draw this line because opportunities to interact with global warming likely exist for all of us, but they tend to manifest themselves through sustainability - related campus administration decisions, committee work, or
even student organizing, all of which are informed by us, but are not primarily driven by our
discipline or how our various disciplinary interests intersect with global warming . Indeed, these
days it is likely that sustainability and global warming conc erns are alive and well on most
campuses, and there are greater national initiatives leading the way like the Association for the
Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. For instance, I teach on two campuses: One
has an entire solar array in par tnership with the local electric utility. The other has a sustainability
office, mission statement, staff, and programming. In their own way, each of these initiatives
open the possibility for dialogue around sustainability and global warming .
The critica l gap, then, is that it does not necessarily follow that any local sustainability or
global warming related roles have any obvious crossover with our disciplinary roles. Our
93 position as members and representatives of the broad field of composition studies has, so far, not asked us to be sensitive to global warming or any part that humanity may play in global warming . We are short on conversations that ask, what can our lives as composition professionals contribute to global warming amelioration? Indeed, I t hink that we would do well to remember that even promoting sustainability does not inherently mean promoting the idea that anthropogenic global warming is a real, observed phenomenon. If we choose to move our discipline toward a more full participation and contribution to this vital conversation, and, perhaps more importantly, to act from these conversations, then we will be taking the crucial step to examine our attitudes, behaviors, and technological choices. As Gillen D'Arcy Wood puts it, an ecological w orldview insists that we have much work to do toward understanding our disciplinary relationship to the natural world:
As it stands right now, at the beginning of the most crucial decades in the history of the
human species on earth, the complex syner gies of sustainability between natural and
human domains have barely begun to b e conceived, in any discourse. We as twenty - first -
century ecocritics need to he lp encode, enrich, and promote new languages of ecology,
human, and natural, if we are to take our desired place among the acknowledged
legislators of a sustainable world. (14)
Whereas in chapter three I suggested that a turn toward a more material orientation to composition teaching and scholarship can provide us with an environmentall y sensitive perspective not as easily reached by normalized disciplinary conversations, in this chapter I will consider how disrupting our normalized disciplinary positions and conventions can enable global warming action. Certainly, the velocity with whic h our world's climate is changing demands such attention. To offer an extreme contrast, the United Nations, generally considered to be a
94 lumbering, dysfunctional bureaucracy, produced a seemingly comprehensive statement in
“Climate Change 2013,” a report o fficially signed off on by all member nations. Their
conclusions present stark terms: by 2050 human - influenced global warming will lead to a
substantially different world than the one we live in today. By comparison, I hope that our work
can move a bit mor e quickly. It is time for us to accede to global warming projections — even if
that action means overcompensating for our delay.
Acknowledging Global Warming Politics
In chapter one I examined the largely uninvestigated intersections between composition,
global warming , sustainability, and the environment, and in chapter two I asserted that any
inquiry that has occurred has failed to take hold. In the present chapter, I will consider ways our
disciplinary bodies can foster inquiry into these overlooked int ersections so that composition
studies can chart a lasting dialogue with global warming . Global warming is not a one - off
problem to solve. Should we act on global warming , the institutions and governing bodies that
form the structures by which we teach, re search, and theorize will need to be reconsidered.
To move forward, we, as a discipline, need first to affirm the link between composition
studies and global warming . Such affirmation is not simple or obvious, and the of - the - moment popular thinking that p ersists in allowing a question to hang over humanity's connection to global warming reveals that affirmation is still a fraught move. One way that our disciplinary bodies have helped guide members through contentious issues and develop disciplinary norms h as been with position statements. Past Conference on College Composition and Communication statements that highlight sensitive or controversial topics include 1987's “The Range of
Scholarship in Composition: A Description for Department Chairs and Deans,” 1974's (and reaffirmed in both 2003 and 2014) “Students Right to Their Own Language,” and 2004's
95 “Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments.” Of course, position statements themselves do not dictate policy or application, but they d o vital work to indicate a subject's scope and consequences for a field or organization. Position statements exist because something important (and likely contentious) has come to the fore. A global warming policy statement would acknowledge that global wa rming is a problem with a human cause and that we, as compositionists and citizens of the planet, have a role to play in its amelioration. Such a statement would bring increased attention, awareness, and conversation, which members of the field at work in their home institutions may need to legitimize their interest and inquiry.
Indeed, the popular political conversations around global warming science only hint at the on - the - ground consequences that affirming humanity's link to global warming can bring. Th e consequences are not trivial. In July 2014, Harold Hamm, the billionaire CEO of Continental
Resources, urged Larry Grillot, dean of the University of Oklahoma's Mewbourne College of
Earth and Energy, to remove staff of the Oklahoma Geological Survey beca use they suggested that the increase of earthquakes in the state was due to fracking (Elgin). In March 2015, the
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting reported that Florida's Department of Environmental
Protection employees and contractors, under the presumed pressure or at least tacit consent of
Governor Rick Scott or his administration's leaders, were told to never use the words climate change, global warming, or sustainability. It seems that this informal policy was verbally enforced down the organi zational flow chart. The administration ensured plausible deniability of the policy's existence because the policy was never put in writing and entered into the public record. It seems that enforcement occurred largely in person or in the margins and infor mal comments during drafting. In fact, responses from the governor's office and the Florida
Department of Environmental Protection are in lock step: No such policy existed.
96 While I may personally find equivocation of this nature reprehensible, for those o f us
who acknowledge global warming , these examples recall that our argument is not automatic. The further step, then, of bringing global warming to composition's disciplinary conversations is all the more tenuous. Awareness, then, of the tenuous position that global warming conversations
can place a scholar, teacher, or employee of a state (or state university) indicates that it is
important to create safe markers that shield from the type of undue pressure exhibited in
Oklahoma and Florida. Indeed, these pressures exist across higher education bureaucracy.
Before moving to more substantive, discipline specific policy statements, I want to offer
accreditation as a brief, representative sample, as this evaluation and approval process is often
the unseen mov er behind United States higher education. Indeed, there is a clear overlap between
writing program assessment and accreditation assessment. In 2007, these assessment
conversations hit a high water mark in the aftermath of the Bush Administration's “A Test of
Leadership: Charting the Future in US Higher Education” (commonly known as the Spellings
Report). In the wake of the report and its insistence on instructional accountability, the Council
of Writing Program Administrators Executive Board produced a lett er addressing writing
assessment in higher education accreditation calling for writing program administrators to
become an active part of assessment conversations on their home campuses (“Executive Board
Letter”). Composition studies has long been sensitiv e to assessment conversations, and these
conversations have been especially important to document when they appear politically
sensitive. 28
A quick glimpse into the general criteria behind higher education assessment points to the
problems and possibilities of integrating a global warming worldview. In the US, there are six
28 The CWPA also produced a “WPA Position Statement on Assessment - Draft,” but the statement appears to never have been a dopted by the Executive Board.
97 bodies that accredit higher education degree granting institutions. The accrediting criteria that
these bodies set dictates, in part, how a school carries out its educational mission. For instance,
the Higher Learning C ommission, which includes Ohio and 18 other states across the country,
offers evaluation criteria that includes no mention of environment, global warming , or
sustainability (“About the Higher Learning Commission”). Sustainability does appear, but it
stands in for sustaining economic viability. Under the category, “The Criteria for Accreditation:
Guiding Values,” HLC offers a standard economic definition of sustainability as a criteria for
“planning and management of resources to ensure institutional stabili ty”:
HLC does not privilege wealth. Students do expect , however, that an institution will be in
operation for the duration of their degr ee programs. Therefore, HLC is obliged to seek
information regarding an institution' s sustainability, and, to that end, wise management of
its resources. HLC also watches for signs that an institution's financial challenges are
eroding the quality of its programs to the point of endangering the institution's ability to
meet the Criteri a. Careful mid - and long - range plannin g must undergird an institu tion's
budgetary and financial decisions.
Note the language. The idea of 'wise resource management' would not be out of place in a
conversation about energy, natural environment, or even the students and employees of a
university . Further, the forecasting quality — the concern for mid - and long - range planning — certainly echoes the need to sustain, but, again, the criteria are relegated to economic considerations and not the campus or institution as a dynamic organization within a par ticular natural, social, and economic framework.
While the guiding values statement serves to mark several missed opportunities in a global warming world, one further resource - conscious point is found in their criteria for
98 accreditation. There are five cr iteria categories: Mission, Integrity, Teaching and Learning
(quality, resources, support), Teaching and Learning (evaluation and improvement), and
Resources, Planning, and Institutional Effectiveness. The latter section presents the most clear inroad for considering an institution's ecological life. The final point of the entire document expects that institutions will work systematically to improve performance: “The institution learns from its operational experience and applies that learning to improve its institutional effectiveness, capabilities, and sustainability, overall and in its component parts” (The Criteria for Accreditation and Core Components). Here, again, the language is so generally sustaining orienting as to verge on meaningless. While docum ents from umbrella organizations like HLC tend toward vague language, they do, nonetheless, matter when it comes down to an institution's degree granting status. If the accrediting body is concerned for economic stewardship and longevity, then individual i nstitutions will in kind. Let's take HLC's guiding values as a test case.
How might adding a few words change the way that both HLC and a school consider their mission:
HLC does not privilege wealth. Students do expect , however, that an institution will be in
operation for the duration of their degree programs. Therefore, HLC is obliged to seek
information regarding an institution's economic, environmental, and social
sustainability, and, to that end, wise ma nagement of its resources, including, but not
lim ited to, its ecolog ical, financial, economic, and community impact . HLC also
watches for signs that an institution's financial, physical, and environmental challenges
are eroding the quality of its progra ms to the point of endangering the institution's abi lit y
to meet the Criteria. Careful mid - and long - range planning must undergird an
institution's economic, social, and natural resource decisions.
99 The goal of accreditation and top - down evaluation is to present targets for member institutions to
hit. Adapt ing to more encompassing targets that account for a world coming to terms with global
warming is both sensible and responsible. After all, each of the criteria expected by an
accrediting body calls for the institution to track and report on that criteria. Naturally, if an
administration is not asked to meet a criteria, they might be less likely to account for that criteria
as meticulously. Adding a few key words to the several thousand that describe accreditation
criteria and values will produce consequence s at the local level. I offer this brief critical example to suggest that top - down change needs to mirror the bottom - up scholarly and pedagogical change at the individual faculty level.
Policy Statements: A Critical Review
As demonstrated in my brief rev iew of sustainability's use in HLC's values and criteria statements, there is space for organizational bodies to play a role in how individual members or institutions approach global warming , sustainability's possible ecological, social, and economic dimen sions, or the environment in a practical, intentional sense. Despite climate science consensus and the idea that we, as humans, contribute to global warming , there are few statements from national academic organizations of any kind that speak specifically to changing disciplinary practices or values due to global warming . In our own field, despite a wide ranging tradition of producing of - the - moment position statements, neither NCTE nor CCCC have produced an environmental, resource, or climate conscious poli cy statement. In this section I will critically review extant statements as a way to work through the potential for a position statement from a body like NCTE or CCCC.
The American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) produces policy statements on a wide range of issues relating to the broad mission of community colleges. In November
100 2007, AACC approved a “Resolution on Sustainable Development.” It reads,
Whereas , s ustainable development is defined as “meeting the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”
(Brundtland Commission, 1987);
Whereas , higher education associations such as the American Association for
S ustainability in Higher Education (A ASHE) and the Higher Education Associations
Sustainability Consortium (HEASC) are convening, catalyzing and communicating
among sectors of society to engage community colleges in sustainability;
Whereas , the America n College and University Presidents Climate Commitment
recognizes the unique responsibility that institutio ns of higher education have as role
models for their communities and in training t he people who will develop the social,
economic and technological s olutions to support sustainable development;
Whereas , the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) is a leading
organization representing community coll eges and is well positioned to support higher
education in promoting sustainable development;
Whereas , the AACC Board of Directors recognizes the unique role of community
colleges in bringing awareness, education, and training resources to foster and expand
sustainable development.
Be it resolved that the AACC and its member institutions will colla borate with HEASC,
AASHE, and other higher education organizations to pro mote education for sustainable
development amo ng AACC member institutions and affiliated councils, and
Be it further resolved that AACC take a leadership role in promoting sustainabl e
practices among its member institutions and assisting them in providing the
101 educational infrastructure for sustainable development.
The language found in this statement is a fine example of how a governing body can provide a
rationale, direction, and l eadership for an of - the - moment issue. Each whereas statement
establishes how the present circumstances have led to the AACC's resolution to promote
sustainability. The organizational emphasis, perhaps, stands out most. The sustainability
definition upon wh ich the statement turns is from the United Nation's Our Common Future (the
Brundtland Report), which was, at the time of the AACC statement, 20 years old. The AACC
refers to both AASHE (Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education) and its coordinating arm, HEASC (Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium.
AASHE was founded in January 2006 and HEASC was created in 2005. Each clause emphasizes the growing sustainability infrastructure and, ultimately, affirms that AACC intends to play an important role promoting sustainable practices and infrastructure for its member institutions and encourage education for sustainable development. This language makes their position on sustainability clear: we value sustainable developme nt, and we want to encourage and promote it. Sustainability and sustainable development are positive civic values that are at the heart of the community college's mission.
While the statement itself is a hearty endorsement of sustainable development, it i s,
perhaps, a touch too superficial even for such statements that are meant and composed to be
broad. As I have already discussed in chapter two, the Brundtland Report's sustainability
definition is now seen as problematic and dated, and its persistent use as a definitive definition
wildly overstates its original use and intent. More than that, though, is the idea that sustainability
here is framed in much the same way as the earlier HLC statement: sustainable development as
an economic principle, which run s against the environmental and ecological mission of both
102 AASHE and HEASC. AASHE's vision statement is ecologically clear: “AASHE will lead higher
education to be a foundation for a thriving, equitable, and ecologically healthy world” (“Mission,
Vision, a nd Goals”). Meanwhile, HEASC's history indicates that it arose from higher education
associations that
recognize that fulfilling their mission in the 21st century requires a broader, systemic,
collaborative approach to their own wor k and that of the consti tuents they serve. The
societal challenges to create v ibrant, secure communities and strong economies while
preserving the life support system on which we all depend are daunting and will only
increase as the w orld's population and our need to increase eco nomic output grows.
Working toward an ecologically healthy world or preserving our life support system are decidely more than development or eco nomic goals. Sustainability is a topic because a lack of awareness and understanding over humanity's ecological relationships has caused our climate to change in historic ways. Of course, position statements are not law, nor are they meant to account for e very
nuance of an issue. To be sure, this statement is not comprehensive, but its sense of sustainability
tends toward the narrow confines of economy. Nevertheless, a statement that, in effect, says,
“AACC institutions should work with partners and do what they can individually to promote
sustainability” accomplishes its main goal: the statement provides a policy cover for those who
take on sustainability work but who may be inhibited by institutional or disciplinary pressure. In
this regard, the statement is successful.
The challenge, then, is not simply for a statement to support sustainability, sustainable
development, or environmental awareness. The challenge is to communicate that sustainability
requires rethinking educational goals and practice. The change is both epistemological and
ontological. The systems and practic es by which we create and promote knowledge and learning
103 must change as our relationship with the natural world changes. In February 2003, the National
Science Teachers Association, “the largest organization in the world promoting excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning,” produced an environmental education position statement that argues for environmental literacy to be at the heart of modern, comprehensive science education (“About NSTA”). The statement's preamble sets out a broad but po inted argument:
NSTA strongly supports environmental education as a way to instill environmental
literacy in our nation's pre - K – 16 students. It should be a part of the school curriculum
because student knowledge of environmental concepts establishes a foun dation for their
future understandings and actions as citizens. Central to environmental literacy is the
ability of students to master critical - thinking skills that will prepare them to evaluate
issues and make informed decisions regarding stewardship of t he planet. The
environment also offers a relevant context for the learning and integration of core content
knowledge, making it an essential component of a comprehensive science education
program.
While this statement is targeted to K - 16 science educators and crafts a position that primarily concerns science curricula, its overall argument steps well beyond classroom borders and into the public sphere. Emphasizing students' “future understandings and actions as citizens” and concern for their “informed deci sions regarding stewardship of the planet” realizes the greater consequences of environmental literacy in the wider public sphere. One way to approach any curriculum is to understand it as a response to a perceived societal need. What need, then, does the NSTA hope to address? Fostering environmentally literate students for citizenship is important, but, perhaps, not necessarily different from the argument that many disciplines make,
104 including composition studies. This statement is noteworthy because it equ ates citizenship with
stewardship of the planet. According to the thinking put forth by the NSTA, a full, active
citizenry must recognize that they have a relationship with the planet. Further, NSTA's particular
use of 'stewardship' suggests more than coex istence. Stewardship suggests management,
supervision, care, and the idea that a relationship is temporary and will be passed on to
successive stewards. This statement presents a subtle, important shift that suggests citizenship
without planetary stewardsh ip is incomplete and inadequate for the real problems global
warming presents.
The NSTA statement also offers a series of declarations that further establish the importance of emphasizing environmental education. I have included below a few of the declara tions for further scrutiny:
All learners are expected to achieve environmental literacy and an appreciation for and
knowledge of a range of environmental issues, perspectives, and positions.
All learners should be taught how to think through an issue using critical - thinking skills,
while avoiding instructor or media bias regarding what to think about the issue.
Environmental education should provide interdisciplinary, multicultural, and multi -
perspective viewpoints to promote awareness and understanding of global environmental
issues, potential solutions, and ways to prevent emerging environmental crises.
Developers of environmental education programs should strive to present a balance of
environmental, economic, and social perspectives.
The quality running through each of these selected declarations is the recognition for science educators that their work aspires to influence how students go out into the world as citizens.
Nowhere does this statement (or, indeed, any of the statements offered here) mention g lobal
105 warming . Global warming may be this statement's subtext, but the underlying thrust of these representative declarations implores science educators to understand that there needs to be a sea change in the way they aspire for students to know and inter act with their world. The idea of stewardship mentioned in the statement's introduction requires a perspective shift. This statement implores science educators to wade into public environmental conversations and expand the classroom's scope. Expanding citi zenship to include stewardship changes everything from content and delivery to outcomes and assessment. In this way, environmental literacy is not simply an adjunct idea to be fit into a curriculum; rather, it brings along a changing worldview regarding th e natural environment.
The final position statement that I would like to bring to this discussion is one crafted by the Association for Science Teacher Education, an affiliate organization of the NSTA whose particular purpose is to promote “leadership and support for professionals involved in the education and development of teachers of science at all levels” (“About ASTE”). The ASTE
“Statement on Environmental and Sustainability Education” begins with a similar rationale to the
AACC statement, as the A STE takes its cue from the United Nations. Rather than referring to sustainability as defined in the Brundtland Report — that is, as sustainability within the context of economic development — ASTE refers to an environmental - education oriented document, the
Be dgrade Charter of 1976:
The goal of environmental education as defined by the Belgrade Charter, “is to develop a
world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its
associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills, attit udes, motivations, and
commitment to work individually and collectively toward solutions of current problems
and the prevention of new ones” (UNESCO - UNEP, 1976). ASTE strongly supports the
106 inclusion of environmental education in science teacher education a s a way to instill
environmental literacy and sustainability in our nation’s p reK - 16 students. Environmental
education should be a part of preparing teachers to become knowledgeable about the
environment. The environment offers a relevant context for the t eaching and learning of
core science content and issues of environmental justice. . . Environmental education in
science teacher education is critical because informed decisions regarding the future of
our planet depend upon an environmentally literate cit izenry.
Two interesting details stand out. First, this contemporary document refers to an environmental
science perspective from the 1970s. This is not bad or inherently wrong, of course, but citing a
40 year old document stretches relevance, no matter the source's credibility. It strikes me as odd
that environmentally oriented position statements seek to enhance their ethos by appealing to
work done by the United Nations more than a generation ago. 29 The second characteristic that
stands out in this statement is the focus on teachers as leaders and advocates for environmental
education. Wheras the NSTA statement focused on educating studen ts to be citizen - stewards of
the planet, the ASTE statement speaks specifically to the curricular role that environmental
science teachers play.
Like the NSTA statement, the ASTE statement offers a series of declarations. Below, I have included relevant d eclarations that I will consider more fully:
ASTE urges science teacher educators to prepare teachers that have understandings,
skills, and attitudes necessary to be environmentally literate.
Environmental education provides interdisciplinary, multicultura l, and multiple
29 Perhaps an area of inquiry coming out of this work is th e question, why do environmental and sustainability minded folks persist in using 40 year old documents as their jumping off points? Recent UN publications like the IPCC's Climate Change 2013 have addressed the legitimacy of global warming, wheras earlier documents addressed the importance of environmental education.
107 viewpoints to promote awareness and understandings of a global environment.
Environmental education provides a balance between environmental, economic,
ecological, and social perspectives to sustain future needs.
Science teacher education s hould emphasize content, pedagogy, and instructional
planning that promotes environmental literacy, an important component of scientific
literacy.
Science teacher educators can foster inquiry by taking students outside and encouraging
them to ask questions and explore their local environment.
If follows that the close organizational ties would mean that the ASTE and NSTA position statements would be similar. If the NSTA statement says, in effect, “science education should foster environmental literacy,” then the ASTE statement says, “science educators should be taught to foster environmental literacy.” Common themes exist across both statements: envir onmental literacy, the existence of multiple perspectives on the global environment, encouraging local inquiry, and insisting that fundamental to science literacy is environmental literacy.
One declaration, however, stands out. The ASTE statement does not rely on old, dated, or, indeed, economic definitions of sustainability. There is no requisite callback to the Brundtland definition or adding 'development' to sustainability. ASTE's approach to sustainability does not treat sustainability as a abstract, a chievable state or objective. Instead, it uses sustainability as a verb: environmental education encourages sustaining future needs by balancing environmental, ecological, economic, and social perspectives. This statement can be framed as an elaboration on stewardship or citizenship, but I would assert that maintaining sustainability as a verb, as an action that is always becoming, provides an important departure from all of the previous
108 statements in this section. This brief clause presents the previous 40 years of sustainability
discussions and theory in a concrete organizational policy declaration. If one important role of a
position statements is to drive disciplinary conversations, then beginning with a generative,
active, participatory understanding of sustainability is certainly a significant move.
Toward a CCC C Position Statement on Global Warming and Composition
The spectrum of global warming worldviews is wide. There are, however, particular declarations that a major disciplinary body like CCCC can make to productively, positively, and actively enter the conversation. Comparing language from accrediting bodies and organizations aspiring to em brace environmental literacy and sustainability indicates that word choice is, of course, important. Such nuance has not gone unnoticed in composition studies. In a 2015 presentation to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Gesa Kirsch a sserted a difference between rhetorics of sustainability and adaptability. Adaptability and sustainability thinking both recognize change and invite further conversations and actions, but adaptability stresses our reaction to a changing climate and minimiz es the reasons why our
climate is changing. Of course, these represent one of many divisions within global warming conversations. Language varies even on the question of whether or not global warming is an empirically provable phenomenon. Among accepters y ou have folks like Bill McKibben in The
End of Nature who acknowledge that global warming exists. They say, “We're complicit, so how
can we ameliorate its effects by reducing and altering consumption?” However, other folks such
as the ecomodernists might s uggest that reducing consumption is not the problem. In fact, the
solution is the opposite. They might suggest, “We need to ramp up economic investment in
energy solutions, as technology will be the thing that saves us from ourselves.” In The
Ecomodernist Manifesto , Asafu - Adjaye et al. assert
109 intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry,
and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is key
to decoupling human development from envi ronmental impacts. These socioeconomic
and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental
protection. Together, they allow people to mitigate global warming , to spare nature, and
to alleviate global poverty. (7)
The wide sp ectrum of thought within the global warming community indicates that moving these conversations to composition studies is not straightforward or obvious. A McKibbenite might suggest that the best way forward would be to decouple from or refigure our relati onship with the marketplace that provides us everything from course management tools to textbooks to employment. An ecomodernist, however, could suggest that our part to play would be minimal, and that our only contribution as professionals would be to exi st as efficiently as technology will allow. These are legitimate differences that demand consideration when refiguring the relationship between composition studies, the environment, and global warming .
To be sure, opening our field to global warming conve rsations has the potential to create a massive shift, and it needs to explore the very foundations upon which our current disciplinary thinking is built. A global warming and composition studies position statement needs to frame extant disciplinary convers ations and present paths for further conversation. Any statement should also function as a message to external audiences that the intersection between global warming and composition studies is a legitimate area of inquiry and that we as a community are not idle in the face of this problem. It should articulate a rationale for those fellow faculty and administrators who may otherwise look skeptical at, say, compositionists who delve into hardware and software lifecyles or how literacy supports or inhibits a writer's relationship with
110 their material world.
Sample Statement: Global Warming , Sustainability, and Composition Studies: Principles and
Practices
In accordance with the CCCC Mission and Strategic Governing Statements to promote the
exchange of knowledge in our field, work “to enhance the conditions for learning and teaching college composition and to promote professional development,” and “provide conditions under which teachers and scholars can discuss, build, and practice sustainable, relevant, and eth ical
models of teaching and learning, this document describes the possibilties for composition and
rhetoric to take an active role in addressing and ameliorating global warming .
1. CCCC acknowledges that the scale of global warming — both in terms of scope and
connection to every facet of personal and professional life — demands inquiry into ways
that composition studies can positively participate in lessening this global crisis.
2. CCCC recognizes that composing teaching, research, and theory exist in a material,
in terconnected, and networked world, and, as such, consume resources that contribute to
global warming .
3. CCCC recognizes that environmental problems are cultural, not simply technological,
and solutions to these problems must also be cultural, not simply tech nological.
4. CCCC recognizes that we must be aware of the full lifecycle of our hardware, software,
textbooks, and other composing tools, from sourcing to manufacturing to use to disposal.
5. CCCC affirms that satisfying future programmatic and disciplinary nee ds requires
balancing ecological, social, and economic concerns.
6. CCCC acknowledges that its organizational work, including conferences, publications,
and other development activities produce a carbon footprint; correspondingly, we will
111 reduce our carbon fo otprint through conservation efforts or purchasing carbon offsets.
How resource consumption can contribute to composition teaching and learning
We acknowledge that sustaining the needs of the future requires balancing economic, social, and environmental needs. However, there is no one, ideal state of sustainability. Rather, sustainability thinking should act as a generative feature of composition pedagogy and programming. What do we want to sustain? For whom do we want to sustain? For how long do we want to sustain? What are our priorities, and how do we ensure an equitable balance?
Just as literacy is a gateway to advanced civic participation, expanding literacy to include
resource stewardship is a gateway to citizenship in a world of global warming . Material awareness includes, but is not limited to, textbook cost and production, hardware and software lifecycles, and labor practices. Good composition pedagogy acknowledges that our tools are a rhetorical and ethical choice. Writers do not write in an ideal, abstract plain, but exist as stewards of their rhetorical means, tools, and texts.
How considering resource consumption and sustainability can contribute to composition and rhetoric scholarship
We acknowledge that incorporating global warming in to our disciplinary conversations enhances learning and civic participation in college composition. Learning about the history of global warming rhetoric adds nuance to the broader public debate. Expanding composition's conversations to include the full sc ope of materiality enhances the idea of resource stewardship and improves our understanding of our modern, interconnected world.
A greater material and environmental awareness encourages composition studies to expand outward into the public sphere. Compos ition studies has done well to absorb theory, research, and teaching practices from diverse fields. A resource - conscious composition studies
112 compels public engagement and encourages the field to assume a greater, active role in public
literacy discourse.
Statement Rationale
Revisiting our historical disciplinary relationships to the environment, natural resources, and the reality of global warming is an important first step toward compensating for the heretofore marginalized nature of these conversations. Further, expanding resource - conscious composition studies will help provide a rationale upon which we can build discourse around the many and varied approaches to the intersection of sustainability and composition studies. Here, I am not defining or promo ting a new movement qua movement. Rather, I am offering qualities that allow sustainability to cross from abstraction into our physical, interconnected world.
Conceived this way, I am also attempting to account for a common stumbling block: the need for so me unrefined level of expertise to think 'sustainability.' The appeal to expertise stunts dialogue, and it too often goes hand - in - hand with attempts to match some top - down definition or objectives that reinforce status quo interests. Stacy Alaimo notes thi s core concern in our academic terms:
Has the term sustainability become articulated too firmly to a technocratic,
anthropocentric perspective? Is it possible to recast sustainability in such a way that it
ceases to epitomize distancing epistemologies th at render the world as a resource for
human use? (563)
Shot through my attempt to produce inductive tenets is the reality that policy prescriptions that are meant to enact these objectives cannot help but be, in the words of Sharachchandra Lele
“seriously flawed and reflect personal, organizational, and political preferences” (617). For better or worse, this is the trade - off we make when, as Marilyn Cooper might say, we bring forth new
113 worlds. Gillen D'Arcy Wood puts it a different way: “In the 'gulf' betw een the data and the
decision - maker, between the motive and the action, between past and present, lies the mandate
and charge of sustainability studies in the humanities” (4). Indeed, sustainability is interstitial in
every sense. It occupies a space betwe en disciplines, expertise, and a variety of vested interests.
Lele reminds us that the difficulty in sustainability application comes from two
competing impulses: the desire to take a strong stand on fundamental concerns, and the practical
need to gain br oad political acceptance and support (618). Clearly, sustainability is not an easy or automatic conversation, which, as I asserted in the previous section, makes an automatic or obvious adoption of sustainability principles untenable. To be sure, taking on entrenched social,
economic, and ecological interests is uncomfortable. It probably should be.
The thrust, then, of my sustainability thinking here is practical change, but to what end?
We can no more assert the path to sustainability than we can assert its obvious value. Here, I do
not suggest the need to prosecute the case anew every time it is engaged, but we are far from
consensus. As Marilyn Cooper notes in “Being Linked to the Matrix,”
How we each respond to this experience — whether we focus forward as designers,
transforming resources, making choices, learning from and taking responsibility for our
transformations and choices, or whether we cling to the past, relying on conventions and
stable forms of social power to validate our choices — will det ermine what we gain or
lose. (37)
While Cooper is not specifically addressing global warming, her comments about our
interconnected, overdetermined textual world call for a substantial course correction. How that
course correction plays out is up to us.
C onclusion
114 Of course, we, as a lone discipline, cannot stop global warming . No lone actor can, and to even conceive of a goal that massive is a fraught exercise that can end in frustration and cynicism. But the direction proposed by a global warming posit ion statement needs to be one of productivity, positive change, and broadening our disciplinary perspectives. A position statement would work from our narrow disciplinary purposes. How can we as individual actors be one of the many parts working together t o alleviate this problem? The answer will call on the field to consider its materiality in ways that it never before has. In a simple way, the task will be no different than overlaying a global warming lens on our pedagogy, research, and scholarship: what ways can we better account for resource consumption? How can we add this to our everyday approach to teaching, theorizing, and researching? In this regard it is not much different than other lenses we employ to highlight inequality or our own limitations a nd possibilities. We are simply offering one more thing to be sensitive to.
The breadth of previous CCCC position statements and the importance of global warming dictate that it would not be out of place for composition studies to have a global warming po sition statement. The previous examination of environmental and sustainability policy statements highlights common themes that can be integrated with existing composition disciplinary concerns. Questions of resource consumption surround us everyday, whethe r we are consciously aware of them or not. Consuming natural resources goes hand - in - hand with what we eat, how we travel, how we work, and where we live. While the particular implications of this are apparent to me, I do not think that this conversation is served by assuming a conclusion or direction. Indeed, it would be presumptuous to assume that global warming has the potential to be a more productive field - wide conversation, as the field has historically marginalized environment - related conversations. F urther, any proposed reconfiguration of the field's social,
115 economic, and ecological consumption would be hugely disruptive to the field's status quo,
which we should not take lightly.Of course, this conversation needs to offer more than
investigating our history and accounting for the status quo. Looking forward, we need to reflect
upon the assumptions inherent in those moments when our field does address our impact on the
world.
Historically, our work has always been at its most transformative when compo sing and
composition theory acts as a tool through which change can happen. That is, when we take steps
to ask our colleagues and students to not only read about a new point of view but to then
consider how to value and enact that point of view we are at o ur most effective. As those who
have written in the space between composition and the environment already noted, we have done
well to inflect composition with values that bring into relief conversations about education,
gender, race, sexuality, and power inequities of all kinds. It is time that we bring the same
approach to addressing global warming and resource consumption. How can we use composition
as a tool through which we confront global warming through our day - to - day composing lives.
To this end, t he most important, immediate goal is to support organizational buy - in for resource - composing conversations. As Timothy Morton suggests in Ecology Without Nature this
moment's problem presents a corresponding opportunity. He notes
The humanities are where we reflect on culture, politics, and science. If they mean
anything at all in this age of scientism, the humanities must do serious reflection. While
we address the current ecological crisis, we should regard this moment as a pre cious, if
p erilous opportunity to think some difficult thoughts about what ecology is. (14)
116 Chapter 5 : Composition and Global Warming: What’s Next?
Over the course of this project I have asserted that composition studies has the opportunity to offer a p rolonged, field - wide conversation acknowledging global warming and the part that our normalized pedagogical and theoretical orientations play in propping up the resource consuming status quo. To be sure, the processes involved in textual production and ana lysis did not create the United States' (or the world's) energy, manufacturing, or economic infrastructures. As an academic field, we do, however, participate and benefit from these structures, and our disciplinary goal to exist at the forefront of composi ng means that we need to meaningfully acknowledge our responsibility.
As I addressed in chapters one and two, our field's history is littered with aspirational forays into epistemologies that expand our thinking toward ecology (Coe, 1974; Cooper, 1986;
Do brin and Weisser, 2002), the environment (Herndl and Brown, 1996; Killingsworth and
Palmer, 1991), and sustainability (Owens, 2001). Further, I suggested that these respective offerings did not necessarily compel different theoretical or pedagogical paths, nor were they necessarily directly responding to resource consumption, environmental degradation, or global warming . In turn, these offerings come off as a retrofit. They say, in essence, “Here's what we do. Let's see how we can apply various ecological, environmental, or sustainability lenses to create something that informs and works for composition and rhetoric.” These lines of inquiry are certainly not harmful or unfrutiful, to be sure, but composition's history has shown that they have not enabled or fostered an ongoing dialogue within composition studies regarding resource consumption and the natural world. In concluding this project, I will consider areas for further exploration and consideration, as composition studies' (if not, perhaps, the humanit ies') path forward in a world confronting global warming will first be found in refiguring how we make
117 meaning and interact with our material world. Further, I will offer prospective directions that
demand our attention if we are to infuse a resource - consc ious, global warming aware ethic into
our everyday composing lives.
Shifting Priorities in a Global Warming World
I would like to frame my concluding argument with a reflective anecdote that, I think,
offers an analog to the way that I observe the place o f global warming and sustainability
conversations in today's higher education. After completing a master's degree in English in 2003,
I decided that I wanted to take a break from being a student, but I wanted to keep a foot in the
academic world in case I decided to re - enter the fray. I volunteered for a year of national service with the AmeriCorps' VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program, a branch of the
Corporation for National and Community Service that focuses on anti - poverty work. My appointme nt was with Ohio Campus Compact, an organization whose mission is “to provide statewide leadership in mobilizing resources, services, and partnerships that strengthen Ohio colleges and universities’ capacity to educate students for civic and social respons ibility and to improve community life” (About - Campus Compact). At the time, Campus Compact's specific day - to - day mandate was to build capacity for service learning in Ohio colleges and universities.
My specific appointment was with the Service Learning Ini tiative at Ohio State University, and my job was to provide a bridge between the school and the University District neighborhood.
'Bridge' meant anything from recruiting students to volunteer with area non - profits to embodying
OSU's resources and mission w hen interacting with community residents, business owners, and social services. My main mission, however, was to build capacity for service learning courses.
118 Similar to any educational concept, service learning has s everal meanings and approaches
that ch ange depending on, among other usual factors, outcomes, location, ideology, and
pedagogy. The Corporation for National and Community Service acknowledges this reality:
Service - learning may mean somewhat different things to different individuals and
orga nizations. But, in its essence, service - learning must have these three elements:
1) Clear learning objectives - Learning must be an intentional and important component.
2) Genuine community needs as its goal - The strength of service - learning is that learn ing
is utilized to make a real difference. It is in the genuineness of the work that young
people find the power of learning.
3) Systematic reflection - One of the most powerful and important parts of good
service - learning is reflection.
As a young vol unteer/professional who wanted to carry out his duties according to the definition established by his employer, I took those three tenets seriously. Namely, if a project did not fulfill each of the three goals, I could not call it service learning (and, by extension, I was not
doing my job as well as I needed to). The practical reality was that rarely did a project meet all
three measures. Service alone — say, cleaning up a playground — is not service learning. While
the task may be considered service and a uni versity would have every right to count it as
community service hours, without a connecting course component and opportunity for reflection,
it does not fit the strict service learning definition. Same, too, with offering a tutoring program
attached to a c ourse: while the college students may complete their own learning objectives and
have an opportunity to reflect, unless the community has buy - in and agreed that the program's
goals addressed a genuine community need that they wanted filled, it was not serv ice learning.
(Think of a one - and - done - type project connected to a college course goals, not the community's.)
119 In the early 2000s service learning was a buzzword that, in my experience, was claimed in many more instances than it deserved to be. Service, se rvice learning, and community engagement was in vogue, and colleges and universit ies didn't want to be left out. Any activity or program that fit under the vast umbrella service signified a university's contribution to its local community.
There are several things that I took away from this experience that inform my approach to developing a more resource - conscious ethic throughout our academic working lives. First, simply because a community - based project or course did not fulfill all three criteria does not mean that the work was bad or malicious. Of course not. As I argued in chapter two, I am not advocating for movement purity, but global warming and resource consumption present important challenges. There is a particular appeal to an 'all of the above' strategy when it comes to solving ingrained societal problems. However, 'all of the above' exists in the context that some options have more worth than others. Indeed, some options may do as much to prop up inequity as they do to solve it. C onsider global warming : the work that composition and rhetoric has done to consider ecology, environment, and sustainability has been positive, without question, but has it met our natural world's needs? I would argue that our environmental work has fulfil led our own community needs, but it has yet to fully grasp that civic participation and engagement requires answering community goals side - by - side — or even before — our own. Indeed, to get started we need to discover what genuine global warming community goal s are.
Coming to terms with genuine goals, the n, leads to another point. As a VISTA volunteer,
I learned that service learning was a mature concept with an intellectual lineage and infrastructure all its own. By its nature, service learning is interdisciplinary. In a sense, interdiscipli narity is an agreement between two or more disciplines to achie ve answers to a question by meeting somewhere in the middle. My experience, though, made me sensitive to
120 projects, classes, or initiatives that approached service as simply an adjunct to a course. The most
cynical projects or classes that were merely looki ng for a service learning designation simply offered a service component without regard to course content. While such jaded work is likely an outlier — and certainly retains no characteristics of interdisciplinarity — the warning holds for
composition studies work that aspires to take on global warming . Ecology and environmental
studies, to mention a few of the disciplines whose work overlaps with global warming , are fully formed disciplines that have their own methods and objectives. We need to be mindful to n ot add on resource conscious thinking as an afterthought. At the very least, we should be careful to not use jargon without recognizing its greater implications and associations. After all, any curriculum is a response to a perceived societal need. Side - st epping a particular societal need for
the sake of falling under a particular label short circuits the original need. There can be a fine
line between intellectual appropriation and attribution. We must be ever - vigilant to remain on the
right side.
The fin al — and most important — point that I would like to draw from my anecdote is the recognition that, initially, conceiving an intellectual framework matters more than material, superficial changes. In chapter four, I argued for specific organizational positions that would
enable the Conference on College Composition and Communication to acknowledge that the
capacity for change begins with enhancing the way that individual teachers, researchers, and
students approach the phenomenon. After all, addressing any soci etal change is a human
behavior problem. As Gillen D'Arcy Wood notes about human behavior, global warming , and
the humanities' instructional objectives: “Behavioral change at the necessary scale is
unimaginable through simple consciousness raising, moral a ppeals, and even conventional
government regulations” (8). The position statement that I offered is but one, limited starting
121 point, but it encourages a bottom - up appr oach that puts the conversation’s questions and prospective answers into the hands of stu dents, teachers, and administrators. While organizational change can be broad, sweeping, and fast, without corresponding individual behavior shifts, lasting change is unlikely.
Further, global warming is not a problem that can be addressed simply by havi ng an organization (university, department, or professional organization) compensate for its members' decisions. Departmental or disciplinary energy policies like purchasing carbon offsets, credits, or divesting from particular investments can be useful, t o be sure, but, I think, the first priority must be to overhaul our thinking. Yes, these solutions can work side - by - side, but here I am offering this project's particular argument: only when individual composition professionals initiate conversations and i nquiry that brings to light the costs of our material composing lives — hardware, software, textbooks and the ways these things are produced and the implicit world view they support — will our professional organizations orient themselves to more climate and en ergy responsible practices. Climate responsible composition professionals can shine a light over everything that we do. Building a resource - conscious capacity comes from popular consent and agreement, not top - down fiat.
The goal should be to investigate the resource use and objectives of our departments, schools, and organizations before offering fixed solutions that do not address underlying climate damaging behavior. It doesn't cost a lot per kWh to run a computer, but what of the cumulated costs of stu dent laptops, computer labs, servers, routers, and the other thing necessary for them to work? We need to acknowledge this instead of seeking to wipe it away by an annual carbon credit payment. Material resource costs exist, but we need to tag them and mak e their existence more explicit. Our discipline has historically marginalized conversations around our planet's
122 changing climate, but we must also recognize that we can have something to say about living, working, and composing in ways that are more ecolog ically, economically, and socially balanced. We need to reorient our thinking toward resource consciousness, and a natural entry point in higher education is not only the composition classroom but our discipline's greater curricular influence. Most importa ntly, we need to understand that our first goal cannot be to prop up current teaching, research, and administrative practices simply by, for instance, purchasing carbon offsets or credits. Our works needs to be shot through with a global warming conscience .
Limitations of this Project and Open Questions
Until now, I have argued that top - down leadership should be secondary to efforts to build community - wide conversations and areas of inquiry. I insist that bottom - up efforts need care and feeding because th e one area where global warming and sustainability leadership is not lacking is in the creation of organizations. In the past decade, global warming related advocacy groups have begun to make inroads into higher education. For instance, one such group, the
International Sustainable Campus Network, formed in 2007 to “provide a global forum to support leading colleges, universities, and corporate campuses in the exchange of information, ideas, and best practices for achieving sustainable campus operations and integrating sustainability in research and teaching” (“About”). The organization has member institutions around the world. As the ISCN notes about the sustainability on college campuses, much attention is already being paid to two principal areas in highe r education - sustainability conversations: 1) resource consumption by a campus' physical plant and the energy needs of a campus' infrastructure, and 2) campus - wide resource consumption goals and planning for students and campus staff. The part of higher edu cation life largely ignored is integration of
123 sustainability principles in research, teaching, and outreach — and by extension individual
departments and disciplines. Of course, this makes a certain amount of sense. Resource use,
infrastructure, and consumpt ion goals often fall under the purview of traditionally hierarchical
decision making. Inviting disciplines, let alone individual departments, to consider injecting
sustainability goals into the professional lives of individual faculty invites arguments ove r
academic freedom and autonomy. As academics, our professional lives exist between the
particular management of our schools and the movements of our disciplines, so what ways can
sustainability enter our conversations without our becoming sustainability t eachers who happen
to focus on composition and rhetoric? The further difficulty in our field is that the conversation is
not new; rather, it is a conversation that has not stuck. There is always a natural suspicion of
retreading old ideas.
There are any number of questions that require top - down thinking and leadership, and
they all represent areas for further inquiry. How might a sustainable composition and rhetoric
discipline teach, research, collaborate, come together, and distribute knowledge? Can
sust ainability be a line of inquiry that becomes infused within our discipline? Is it, for instance,
better for our work to be electronic or a physical document? What is sustainable about the ways
that we create, organize, archive, distribute, and search our d isciplinary conversations? For our
publications: What is gained and lost by the changing media of our scholarly writing and
composing? For our conferences: What is gained and lost by coming together from across the
country, and are there other ways to acco mplish these same goals? Thinking about how to apply sustainability to our disciplinary lives ofte n ends at the meeting room door. 30
30 A new tenure - line assistant professor might say, “Sustainability is a fine idea, but how much can I really control my perso nal carbon footprint when I need to travel across the country so that I can remain relevant to do my job?”
124 Indeed, even organizing top - down from common sustainability tenets does not assure
common cause. I offer qualification because sustainability, as t he cliché goes, is in the eye of the
beholder, an argument that has particular historical resonance in this country. Today, the shifting
views find one articulation in Stacy Alaimo's assertion:
Rather than approach the world as a warehouse of inert things we wish to pile up for later
use, we must hold ourselves accountable to a materiality that is never merely an external,
blank, or inert space but the active, emergent substance of ourselves and others. (563)
While resource - conscious questions have becom e necessary areas of study for the sciences, engineering, and business, their place in the humanities is still tenuous. While the prevalence of digital, electronically mediated curricula may be one obvious area of inquiry, it is by no means the only target for a revised, resource - conscious lens. I would argue that too much focus on composition's materials ignores larger questions of equity. It is our job to go further, to consider and instruct on systemic connections that the workaday world and popular cult ure cannot or will
not consider. How might a guiding resource - conscious ethic influence pedagogical theory and
practice? How might it influence professional development and scholarship? And what of
staffing and labor decisions? These simple — perhaps even ob vious — questions reveal that
material and economic conditions are merely the signposts of inequitable, unsustainable
practices.
If one of our disciplinary goals is to remain relevant regarding the ways people view
situated texts, then it is not a large cur ricular leap — even if it is a large ideological leap — to
overlay a resource - conscious lens. Already, much composition and rhetoric sustainability work
has been necessarily caught up in programmatic, curricular, or technological sustainability. In his
forewor d to McKee, Selfe, and DeVoss' Technological Ecologies and Sustainability , Charles
125 Moran leaves us with the question, “How shall we cope, personally and institutionally, with the
environmental costs of this technology that we love so well” (5)? Of course, technology is only
one area for sustainability inquiry. Indeed, viewing our disciplinary goals through a sustainable
lens quickly reveals the enmeshed relationships between social, environmental, and economic
aims. We can no more focus solely on compositio n and rhetoric's relationship with the environment than we can speak of a rhetorical situation being perfectly fixed and bounded, the parts of which we can discretely and independently analyze, irrespective the context.
If our field is to acknowledge glob al warming, our contribution to the ecological status quo, and begin the tough work of figuring out ways for our field to come to a new, resource - conscious synthesis, then it is no exaggeration to suggest that we need to reconsider everything.
We need to c ast a lens that is sensitive to global warming contributions across the length and breadth of our field. The problem's scale requires nothing less. In addition to using ecology as a lens through which to view composition studies, we need to recognize that we exist within an ecology, which should compel us to push into questions of resource allocation and use. Indeed, sustainability needs to mean more to us than keeping our local academic economies self - sufficient. We need to begin these conversations and n ot fear the inevitable over - corrections — those moment when our classrooms seem more about Subject X than composition and rhetoric.
Only when we wade hip deep into these conversations may we eventually achieve a point when seeing an environmental impact stat ement on a syllabus is as common as today's statements regarding accommodating learning difficulties.
However, if we choose to fall on the side of research and empirical evidence of global warming — and, further, acknowledge that confronting global warming is vitally important to our societal, indeed human, progress — then what do we need to become sensitive too? Where in our
12 6 conversations is the vital line of inquiry bringing together human induced global warming and
our disciplinary responsibility to conside r how our attitudes, beliefs, and technological choices
contribute to global warming ? One essential move in a climate - change - is - real world is to
examine the totality of our existence and to better understand our influence on a changing world.
Where, then, can we foster this particular thread throughout our publications? Where can we
develop an ethic that runs through our day - to - day teaching and thinking? Indeed, where is the line in our syllabi — perhaps somewhere among our sections about academic integrity, learning difficulty accommodations, or commitment to open, discrimination free classroom discussion — that represents our contribution to a changing world climate and the acknowledgment that what we do in our cl a ssrooms contributes to global warming . And what about the tools that we ask our
students to use — software, hardware, endlessly and profitably updated readers and writers? We
may also add to this list economic and social concerns about hiring and promotion practices,
particularly our historical ly uncomfortable over - reliance on contingent labor?
Not asking these questions contribute to an inequitable world, one that is out of balance
economically, socially, and environmentally. The absence of inquiry around changing our
attitudes, beliefs, and te chnological choices that have material social, economic, and ecological
costs indicates that we may be too cautious or that we are simply unready or unwilling to lift the
lid on entrenched interests. I do not want to go so far or to be so intemperate as to broadly
suggest that we have been global warming ignorers, waiting for ecological change to come to us
through improved technology or improved economic systems that others create. But there is a
certain level of ambivalence, of matter - of - factness, that pe rvades composition studies relationship with the materiality of our work. Clearly, the scope of this conversation is vast.
Final Speculation: Slow Composition
127 I suspect that a resource - conscious composition studies can prove a rich vein for further
inquir y. In chapter three, I offered four implications for a more sustainable composition studies:
1. We need to theorize the relationship between texts and resource consumption
2. Sustainable composition is concerned about production (of texts)
3. Sustainability should be considered situationally, not as a God term
4. We need to rethink composing’s cost
Each of these claims revolves around bringing into sharp relief those composing spaces that we
currently overlook or assume as 'givens.' The inspiration for this type of wor k comes from the
wide umbrella of work — think New Materialisms, Object Oriented Ontology, or Actor - Network
Theory — that is intensely concerned about the interactions among the objects and acknowledges
the value of privileging description over analysis when d eveloping lines of inquiry in our vast,
interconnected world 31 . Eric Laurier and Chris Philo's description of Bruno Latour’s Actor -
Network Theory (ANT) is, perhaps, the best distillation of this broad worldview. In their review
of Latour's Aramis , Laurier and Philo suggest that this inqu iry sets itself against “big theorizing
[and] instead tell[s] stories and provid[es] weak explanations.” The concern for understanding relationships before discrete analysis of parts lends itself to further composing questions that otherwise may be beneath our consideration. How are resources rhetorically represented in texts?
What are the economic cost of materials? There is an ecological cost to composing that is beyond energy and resource concerns. They are merely our starting point — the call from inside a closed room inviting us to open the door.
An additional Latourian area of inquiry is in attending to composition studies' floating signifiers. Here, I follow Latour’s Reassembling the Social , a book - length examination of the
31 One interesting point of departure is Kristin Arola’s work on indigenous approaches to digital pedagogies, particularly her critique of ontological individualism that takes for granted that we exist apart from technology.
128 signifier “social” and the w ay that Actor Network Theory can meaningfully reassemble the term.
Latour parses out the difficulty at work in social’s overuse. Adding ‘social’ as an adjective to a
phenomenon (e.g. socio - economic, socio - cultural) indicates a process of assembling, of com ing
together. It also, however, means something material, concrete, stable — Latour uses “wooden” or
“steely” — “a specific type of ingredient that is supposed to differ from other materials” (1). In
short, social has become a floating signifier, and compositi on is loaded with “social” signifiers
(e.g. social construction, social - epistemic, social turn). What are those signifiers that become
exposed when we dwell in the space between? What are those things that are so familiar that we
have become habituated to their function?
An ever - present strain in modern composition scholarship suggests that the field needs to
be rhetorically minded; that is, compositionists need to be concerned with not only their research
findings or pedagogical practices, but how they are portrayed to a suspicious public that always
questions our relevance (never mind that the public is rarely identified). Fleckens tein et al., for
example, aim for their research to act rhetorically, to “devise and argue for a systematic account
of reality in ways that others find persuasive, useful, and widely applicable while remaining
sensitive to the incompleteness and the distor tions of a single account” (389). I read this public
emphasis against Joseph Harris’ conception of composition as a “teaching subject — as a loose set
of practices, concerns, issues, and problems having to do with how writing gets taught” (x).
Harris issues this description in an effort to privilege “how teaching practices are formed and
argued for” over “how knowledge gets made and tested” (x).
Composition is notorious for its inward, reflexive gaze — what some might call navel gazing.
I suspect, however, that composition’s inward gaze is gradually being replaced by an outward gaze, one that will only serve to leave composition equally unsatisfied. I would suggest that an
129 extreme attention in either direction endangers the field to lose site that, at its heart, composition
is the localized, pedagogy - driven discipline that Harris describes. The four lines of questioning
that I offer at the beginning of this section suggest that there is a remedy to this double bind.
Again, this is inspired by the way that Bruno L atour rescues social from an over determined fate.
To recover social, Latour locates five central sources of uncertainty:
1. Membership in a group is never constant (or consistent);
2. Notions of agency are ceaselessly debated and can never be pinned down;
3. No nhuman objects play an important — and almost autonomous role — in the world;
4. The only way to identify social (to reassemble, that is) is to observe traces between
mediators (any actor that transforms, translates, distorts, or modifies the meaning it is
suppo sed to carry); and
5. A good written account traces a network: “the movement of the social needs to be visible
to the reader” (128).
While I would assert that the first four principles of uncertainty could be reworked or refined to
look at other signifiers, the last principle is significant for the way that composition presents
itself. When a good written account — the actual write - up of a study (or perhaps any
scholarship) — treats actors as mediators in a textual account, the actors “render the movement of
the social visible to the reader” (128). What actors do — how they mediate their own meaning in a
situation — should drive the research story, but critical lenses that are too often employed simply produce explanations that fit the lens. Bad textual accounts simp ly transport an already
composed social force onto a situation. This is antithetical to the tongue - in - cheek label for ANT:
“slow - ciology.” Composition research and theory can benefit from a slower, small scale practice
130 that produces knowledge inductively. As with Latour, what actors do is important. Our
explanation is not.
More object - oriented inquiry could look at the inner - workings of a current composition program, to be sure, but it could also be an historical effort to consider relationships in the pas t.
Historically, what types of consumption have been taken for granted or assumed as given? While
I do suggest that the historical choice of writing media is important and needs accounting, I would assert that course objectives, themes, reading materials, staffing, and educational resources are just as important to create a full resource - conscious description. What type of cultural - educational decisions — the social in my simple sustainability calculus for this thinking — have caused or corrected economic or ec ological imbalances within a composition program? Where is the program sustainable, and where are the sustainability deficits and surpluses? A resource - conscious historic lens considers what has been durable throughout a program’s history? What values pers ist as a mark on the university's curriculum — that is, the how the university answers perceived societal needs?
As a discipline — and as educators who shape the lives of generations who will still be making decisions in 2050 — we need to more fully acknowledg e that we cannot separate our resource use from our intellectual and workaday lives. We can no longer justify our avoidance of consumption questions in the theory and application of our professional lives.
Pedagogically, a resource - conscious composition c ontinues rhetoric's objective of expanding the text. First - year writing classes invite students to interrogate texts according to rhetorical principles so that they have a vocabulary to study and produce texts. Other classes are positioned to inquire into the rhetorical qualities of particular disciplines or professions. Still others ground work in particular historical or ideological rhetorics. This line of inquiry compels
131 us to push beyond intellectually understanding how to create or analyze a text. It c ompels us to
consider a classroom's material choices — from software packages and creating and disposing of
materials to staffing and energy consumption. After all, if our focus originates out from 'the text,'
then any beginning and ending point of study is arbitrary. In our time of global warming ,
extending the conversation to include sustainability should be as obvious as the assumption that,
today, all textual composition is digitally driven. And it extends that this move can even stretch
further, toward i nterrogating ways students' surrounding physical spaces influence their
composing. To consider sustainable composition is to always be searching for connections that
will increase knowledge about how economic, social, and ecological goals are balanced. It is an
opportunity to bring to light and foster the rich connections that students have with the rhetorical
workings of their worlds. Sustainability — let alone a resource - conscious composition — will not
be productive if guilt or limitations are emphasized; ra ther, emphasis should be on seeking out
opportunities for depth and durability in our world.
Concluding Thoughts
To maintain relevance in an increasingly resource - conscious world, composition studies simply must negotiate a place to enter global warming conversations, even if that entrance means
a short term minimizing or refiguring of composition and rhetoric's disciplinary objectives. Our
scholarly work can benefit from a material interest in balance. Arguably, one of the most
significant movement s in o ur field today is the study of technology's influence on textual
creation. This move, however, is directly related to our increased consumption and our
unsustainable world. Sustainability's values add meaningful perspective to questions about the
in/equity of our technological consumption. Further, we will need to re - consider our field's
notions of growth, progress, and production. Applying a composition and rhetoric lens to
132 sustainability is, perhaps, the most traditional application included in this propo sal. In America,
global warming and the related sustainability ethic has been cast as a political issue. In works
like Herndl and Brown's collection, Green Culture , composition and rhetoric has already waded
into environmentalism discourse. Rheto rical analyses of, for instance, the apocalyptic narrative that runs through so much environmental discourse (Killingsworth and Palmer, 1996) or theorizing how risk is communicated regarding a pollutant like radioactive waste (Katz and
Miller, 1996) are va luable, to be sure, but they are not necessarily about a sustaining world. A resource conscious rhetoric expands our knowledge about how our world succeeds or fails at balancing objectives. It is a learning move concerned for depth and durability and that we need to make the most of what we have. It does not uncritically value growth or expansion in a world of finite resources — even knowledge for its own sake.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there are particular ideas and approaches that th ose who have already written about ecocomposition, environmental discourse, and sustainability have brought to our collective discussions. Simply put, we have not risked enough.
These conversations have never been in danger of going 'too' far toward outrig ht environmental, ecological, or sustainability advocacy. As I outlined in chapter two, our environmentally tinged conversations have always extended from a particular debate, but no more than any other extension. They never carved their own niche or offer ed enough to be considered important to all of our conversations, not just those about reading subject selection or composing processes.
Compositionists who are attracted to ecology agitate for a way to account for the sheer number of forces at work in the production of a text. They are also attracted to a particular cluster of ideas about systems: 1) systems are best understood and described as a whole, 2) analyzing discrete parts or actors inherently distracts from the interconnected whole, and 3) systems
133 understood first from individual parts or actors can reinforce entrenched power dynamics
(Cooper, 1986; Dobrin and Weisser; Jung, 2014). But to what end? Yes, composing is overdetermined. But so what? What does this bring to our conversations that helps u s to confront global warming head on? How does this reconfigure our relationship with resources?
Vital dialogue associated with changing our living patterns in the face of global warming is cut short when we assume that we see the problem the same way or that there is one answer.
Of course, we do not all respond to the world in the same way. In fact, from my perspective, the only premise that I am comfortable accepting is, 'we need to address the global warming.' From there, the debate is (and needs to be) as wide open as our improved sense of ecology. For instance, arguments over whether or not natural resources have limits or whether or not improved energy technology will ultimately prove to be the solution distract from the underlying reality that we hav e a direct influence on our planet's changing climate. As Timothy Morton suggests about an ecological world - view in The Ecological Thought, “The ecological thought is intrinsically open, so it doesn't really matter where you begin” (12). Stacy Alaimo offer s critical faculties that the humanities can contribute:
Perhaps what the environmental humanities and science studies can contribute to
'sustainability,' if we choose to use the term, is to formulate more complex,
epistemological, ontological, ethical , and political perspectives in which the human can
no longer retreat into separation and denial or proceed as if it were possible to secure an
inert, discrete, externalized this or that. (563)
Here, seeing the world through a lens that is sensitive to c omplexity and interconnectivity is paramount. The spectrum of folks who want to engage in global warming discussions is no different than other conversation continua. On one extreme side, there are folks who accept
134 global warming and demand whole - sale chan ge. On the other, there are folks who understand that we have long term climate variability, but the origin is unknown: something exists, it isn't our fault, so how can we minimize the impact on us? While I find value in employing the former world view as a baseline measure for 'positive, productive, constructive global warming thinking,' others (likely many others) may not. If this global warming debate operates from a position that advocates change — and does not retreat into separation or denial — then it is precisely the difference in how these positions choose to move forward that matters.
This thinking represents the first of many departure points. I envision global warming composition discourse to operate from a space where actions, solutions, and progre ss demand more attention than arguments over cause. Of course, cause is important, as cause determines directions for remedy. Here, however, I make the case that global warming 's immediacy requires us as theorists, teachers, and researchers to place a high value on material change, even if we do so at the expense of establishing shared, universally agreed upon premises. It is time to discover for composition studies the pragmatic value of ecological pluralism.
135
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