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Global Warming and Composition Studies: the Case for Intervention

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Global Warming and Composition Studies: the Case for Intervention 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
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