Even though scholars in English studies are ideally situated to take up the challenge of fostering environmental literacy in the classroom, until quite recently, little practical attention has been paid in the field to such concerns as the welfare of future generations, preservation, and conservation. For the most part we have left these concerns to our colleagues in sciences and social sciences who have a longer tradition of utility embedded in their disciplinary ideals. While scholars of environmental rhetoric such as Jamie Killingsworth have pointed to interest in sustainability as an emerging and growing area of inquiry, others have been less generous. Glen Love states, “Given the fact that most of us in the profession of English would be offended at not being considered environmentally conscious and ecologically aware, how are we to account for our general failure to apply any sense of this awareness to our daily work?” More recently, Derek Owens argues that “composition studies, and, indeed all of English Studies, needs to recognize as a field that sustainability is not only equal in importance to race, class, and gender but also entails many of the concerns associated with those rubrics.” In this course we will explore scholarship in rhetoric and composition that is answering the challenge to open space in transdisciplinary conversations on the environment as we look to a sustainable future.

• Diamond (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Donehower, Hogg & Schell (2007). Rural Literacies
• Goggin (2009). Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability
• Nixon (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• Killingsworth & Palmer (1992) Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America