Essay 3

Exercise 3.1 (Warm-up for Essay 3)

Due Session 19

Identify the major additional source that you plan to consider in your next essay, and identify the required readings that seem likely to play a role in your next essay.

After reading the additional major source for your third essay, draw up a list of ten passages that will help you develop an argument linking this source to related sources among our required readings.

Exercise 3.2 (Warm-up for Essay 3)

Due Session 21

Track down an article or a chapter of a longer book that offers a critical perspective on one of the works you plan to use in your third essay. You may have difficulty locating articles that focus on the individual essays that you have read, but you should be able to find articles that respond to the book within which the essays originally appeared. This information is available in the back of American Earth and online for Pollan, Kolbert, Bass, and Kingsolver. You may decide to work with a secondary source that responds to the entire opus of a particular author, but you should avoid sources that merely generalize about an author’s ideas.

Once you have found a suitable article or book chapter, read it carefully and write a brief statement of the perspective that it offers. Select 4 or 5 passages that might contribute to your next essay. These passages may articulate a point of view that reinforces your own thinking. If so, you may integrate them as supporting evidence within your third essay. If the article or book chapter that you have found articulates a point of view at odds with your own, don’t worry; just be sure that you can respond effectively to that point of view. In the process of responding to a contrasting point of view, you will inevitably clarify your own thinking and sharpen your analysis. Your essay will also benefit from this opportunity to articulate, and reply to, a specific counter-argument.

Be sure that you write down all of the publication information that you will need for your works cited list. Record the page reference for each passage.

Prospectus

Due Session 22

Your third essay, like the second essay, should explore a question or problem that has emerged from your reading. You may not be able to arrive at an answer or a solution, but over the course of your essay, you should at least be able to refine the central question or identify a range of solutions for your problem. By the end of your third essay, your readers should be able to see what they have gained by exploring this question or problem with you. Stay close to the texts as you explore your chosen issue. Do not wander through the theoretical stratosphere.

The prospectus should identify the central issue, your plan for addressing that issue, and the sources you plan to use (150 to 200 words). Once you begin writing your essay, you will almost inevitably diverge from the path that you lay out in the prospectus, but you should nonetheless make a serious effort to think through the problems that you may face.

Draft of Essay 3

Requirements for Essay 3:

First version due Session 23
Final version due Session 26 (No additional revisions will be possible.)

Guidelines for Draft of Essay 3

Workshop 3

In-class on Session 24

Guidelines for Workshop 3

Final Revision Workshop

In-class on Session 25

Identify and post two or three complete paragraphs from the current draft of Essay 3 (one to one and a half pages). Select paragraphs that play a key role, or paragraphs that are giving you trouble.

Revision

Due Session 26

Example student work

“Wilderness Through the Eyes of Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry” (PDF) - Courtesy of Laura Treers and used with permission.

You must work with at least three published texts, including one secondary source that offers critical insight into the work of one of the writers you plan to consider (see below for Supplementary Readings for Essay 3).

You must work with at least one text from our common readings and at least two texts that you read on your own (see Exercises 3.1 & 3.2).

You must develop an idea that unifies your entire essay. A topic is not sufficient; you must present an argument/thesis. This is not a book review.

You must use MLA in-text citation style, and you must include a works cited list with all of the requisite publication information (in the draft as well as in the final version).

You should expect to rework and expand your essay between the first draft and the final version, but the first version should cover the full range of material described above.

The first version should be at least 1400 words long. The second version will, in all likelihood, be longer.

Your third essay will require that you explore the relationship between one of the works listed below and one or more of the assigned works. You will also be asked to draw upon secondary sources.

Supplementary Readings for Essay 3

Birds:

Quammen, David. Chapters 71–77. In The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. Reprint edition. Scribner, 1997. ISBN: 9780684827124.

Alagona, Peter S. “Biography of a ‘Feathered Pig’: The California Condor Conservation Controversy.” (PDF) Journal of the History of Biology 37, no. 3 (2004): 557–583.

Cultivating Nature:

Pollan, Michael. “Playing God in the Garden.” The New York Times Magazine. October 25, 1998.

———. “Weeds Are Us.” The New York Times Magazine. November 5, 1989.

———. “The Idea of a Garden.” In Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education. Reprint edition. Grove Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780802140111. [Preview with Google Books]

Burdick, Alan. “Coming of Age in the Anthropocene.” OnEarth. September 27, 2010.

Kingsolver, Barbara, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Reprint edition. Harper Perennial, 2008. ISNB: 9780060852566. [Preview with Google Books]

Carpenter, Novella. Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. Penguin Books, 2010. ISBN: 9780143117285.
(On the creation of an urban farm in central Oakland. Short book—you may draw on several chapters rather than the entire book.)

Mitchell, John Hanson. Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile. Counterpoint, 1997. ISBN: 9780201149371. [Preview with Google Books]
(On the history of the land around Mitchell’s Massachusetts farm and about Mitchell’s own farming enterprise.)

Spirn, Anne Whiston. “Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Edited by William Cronon. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. ISNB: 9780393315110. [Preview with Google Books]
(On recognizing the constructed nature of Olmsted’s parks.)

Reconstructing Nature:

McPhee, John. “Atchafalaya.” The New Yorker. February 23, 1987.
(On the Army Corps of Engineers’ struggle to control the Mississippi.)

Reisner, Marc. “A Semidesert with a Desert Heart.” In Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. 2nd edition. Penguin Books, 1993. ISBN: 9780140178241. [Preview with Google Books]
(On the attempt to re-engineer the desert Southwest of the USA.)

Williams, Terry Tempest. “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.” In American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Edited by Bill McKibben. Library of America, 2008. ISBN: 9781598530209.

Wolves:

Lopez, Barry Holstun. “An American Pogrom” and/or “Epilogue: On the Raising of Wolves and a New Ethology.” In Of Wolves and Men. Photographed by John Baugess. Revised edition. Scribner, 1979. ISBN: 9780684163222. [Preview with Google Books]
(About the history of the US effort to eradicate wolves & Lopez’s own doomed effort to raise two orphaned wolves.)

(You may find electronic comments useful in responding to some questions.)

Does the writer establish a clear direction for the essay within the first few paragraphs?
1. Underline the clearest statement of the essay’s focus or central issue.
2. Note any problems.
Can you see the relationship between this initial direction and the subsequent points within the essay?
1. If not, where does the writer seem to shift focus?
2. Can you help the writer articulate a more coherent thesis/central question for the essay? Offer some suggestions.
Does the conclusion (if it has been written) make clear what the reader has gained by following the writer’s path through multiple sources?
1. Can you discern the link between the introduction and the conclusion?
2. How might the writer strengthen that connection?
Does each text mentioned in this essay play an active role in the critical essay?
1. In other words, do you learn something new each time the writer examines a specific text? Identify and explain any exceptions.
2. Do you know what the writer thinks about each text? Does he/she spell out this thinking?
Identify each major quoted passage with a Q in the margin of the essay. Consider the role it plays in the paragraph within which it appears.
1. Can you understand all of the references within the quoted passage?
2. Can you see why the writer chose this passage?
3. Does the writer spell out the significance/implications of this passage?
4. Identify any problems below or in the margins.
Are you confused by some aspect of the current essay?
1. If so, try to identify the point at which you lose track of the writer’s reasoning. (Place an asterisk * at the point that you have identified.)
2. Write out a question that might elicit a clarifying answer. In other words, what do you need to know?
Is there another question or a new perspective that the writer might consider as he or she revises the third essay?
1. Ideally, the question or new perspective that you propose should help the writer view his or her material from a slightly different angle.
Choose three sentences that would benefit from extensive revision.
1. Underline the phrases that seem problematic.
2. Identify the problem and, where possible, suggest alternatives.
3. Explain more complicated problems in a marginal note.

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Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues