The multitude of deepening environmental crises currently facing the planet have provoked a number of literary and media responses, addressing various dangerous and deleterious conditions, such as global warming, air, oceanic and water pollution, draught, famine, overpopulation, deforestation, species extinction, radiation contamination, the careless use of nuclear power, and the health damages wrought via chemical and radioactive waste mismanagement and soil saturation by toxic chemical agents. Also considered will the abuse and exploitation of natural resources, such as the depleting of ocean life. This course will examine fiction, non-fiction, drama, essays, films, journalism and other scientific, critical and popular representations related to these concerns. The course will likewise explore how literature, broadly conceived, may be evaluated and understood in terms of its ability to play a role in awakening individuals to the severity of such problems, perhaps enabling environmental activism, by suggesting ways of intervening in order to prevent further environmental damage, thereby potentially forestalling impending disasters. Also discussed will be the problems concerning the limitations that fictional and non-fictional writings and other media may face in terms of qualifying their epistemological relationship to the actual lived experiences and effects of environmental crises. Such matters will be addressed from philosophical, political, economic, psychological, social and cultural perspectives, in view of how a greater understanding of such literature can inform the issue of the human husbandry of nature and the environment.

Students will engage readings from the primary text while instructor provides lecture and other material explaining background of and reflecting significance on the reading materials/topic areas. Students will engage in discussion during class time relative to issues that they need to clarify and understand within the reading. A feature of this process will be keying on terms and critical strategies relative to the concerns of the text. Shorter essay, longer research project, quizzes, midterm and final exam.

Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Paul Greenberg, Four Fish

Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (film)

Jim Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

Bill McKibben, The End of Nature. 1st presentation. 1st essay due.

Maja Lunde, History of Bees

Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

Alan Weisman, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

Charles Moore and Cassandra Phillips, Plastic Ocean: How a Sea Captain's Chance Discovery Launched a Determined Quest to Save the Oceans

Chi-po Lin, Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above (film)

Week 16 Sylvia A. Earle and Bill McKibben, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One