In your critical essay, you will need to make clear why the issue you have chosen matters and to help your readers understand how and why the writers differ in their perspective on that issue. Make sure that you consider the deeper values that shape the writers’ thoughts on this particular issue. If the writers whom you have chosen share some basic values, you should explore this common ground as well as the noticeable distinctions. You may expose any weaknesses or fallacies that you observe in one or both texts. You should also identify particularly compelling arguments. By the end of the essay, your readers should understand why you have written about this issue and how you assess the position and reasoning of the two writers whose works you discuss. Your own thinking on this matter will inevitably emerge in the course of your discussion, but you should keep in mind that your primary responsibility is to investigate the two texts.
You may find it helpful to organize your critical essay so that the text that you consider last comes closest to expressing your own perspective. This strategy allows you to move easily from your detailed analysis of a particular text to the broader conclusion of your essay.
Feel free to draw on one or two brief readings in addition to the ones listed below (e.g. Pinchot’s 1913 testimony before Congress or McPhee’s sketches of Dominy or Brower in “Encounters with the Archdruid”), but be sure to include all of your sources in your Works Cited list.
It may help you to think of your critical essay from the perspective of your readers. Your completed essay should get your readers thinking about an issue that matters to you. Your analysis of two distinctive texts will help them recognize the complexities of the issue you have chosen. Your logic should carry them through the exploration of that issue and lead them toward a meaningful conclusion. You need not choose between the texts that you consider in your paper, but you should make clear what the readers gain by considering them side by side.
The first version of your second critical essay is due Session 14. Please post the essay on the course site and bring three copies of your essay to class. The first version should be at least 1200 words long.
You may consider the following texts in your second essay.
- Aldo Leopold, “Axe in Hand”
- Edward Abbey, “Solitaire”
- Wendell Berry, “Preserving Wildness”
- Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”
- Aldo Leopold, “Marshland Elegy”
- Henry Beston, “Autumn, Ocean, and Birds, I”
- Loren Eiseley, “The Judgment of the Birds”
- Rachel Carson, “from Silent Spring” (American Earth: 366-376) and additional scanned material from Chapters 2 and 8
- Jack Turner, “The Song of the White Pelican”
- William Cronon, “Seasons of Want and Plenty”
- William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”
- Michael Pollan, “Gardening Means War”
- Barbara Kingsolver, “Stalking the Vegetannual”
- Michael Pollan, “Sustaining Vision”
- Roy Finley, “A Guerilla Gardner in South Central LA,” TED Talk
- Michael Pollan, “Why Mow? The Case against Lawns”
- Elizabeth Kolbert, “Turf War”
- Gifford Pinchot, “Prosperity”
- William Tucker, “Is Nature Too Good for Us?”
- Eliot Porter, “The Living Canyon”
- Barry Lopez, “Gone Back into the Earth”
- Ellen Meloy, “The Flora and Fauna of Las Vegas”
