How To Write An Essay About Environment

[Shane Rouse]

Butover the first two years of high school, I learned about these terms. I became more aware of my surroundings, as well as the privilege I experience where I live. My views before high school were like a one-way road: they were narrow and without incoming perspective and knowledge about injustices and privilege. I was lucky to not need to lobby local leaders and the government so I could breathe more freely. But there are those who do have to fight for clean air. After discovering this reality, I have spent my time in and outside of the classroom learning more and seeing how I can create change.

It started with my Advanced Placement human geography class, where I began learning about environmental issues and those who are most impacted. My teacher was the one who brought the topic up during class. At first, I was very intrigued. I became interested in solving the problem, so I started to do my own research outside of the classroom.

My developing passion for making a change in environmental issues led me to my Girls Inc. Eureka internship at the Mississippi River Connection. During this experience, I learned about the environmental impacts of invasive species in and around the Mississippi River. We even did restoration projects where we removed invasive species from different plots of land.

I also learned the history of the Mississippi River, ranging from its origin to the industrial revolution and the current state of the river today. I learned the disadvantages of the local communities around the rivers throughout history, such as during the industrial revolution, when the poorer neighborhoods located near the river had an increase of health problems and disease outbreaks, like typhoid. This led to many deaths and a gradual change in company policies for properly disposing of waste.

Furthering my interest, my first job was joining the environmental justice crew at the Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center at the Science Museum of Minnesota. We learned and analyzed local and national environmental issues that affected specific communities. For example, after researching the geographic information system mapping we found that a few local communities have been impacted by toxic chemicals dumped by nearby factories.

We also learned how the chemicals spread to other communities. Many of these communities did not have the power to bring up the problem to local authorities and government leaders. This led to many problems, such as health issues for members of the community.

a nonprofit program of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, uses the principles of strong writing and reporting to help diverse Minnesota youth tell the stories of their lives and communities.

Let me start with the physical, sensory environments that we write within. When I ask my students about the physical circumstances under which they write, the responses tend to be quite varied: one writes in a quiet, deprivation chamber-like nook of the library, another in a relatively quiet but also distraction-rich dorm room, while a third may prefer the bustle and ambient energy of a coffee shop. Similarly, some students need absolute quiet to focus on writing, while others write, astoundingly to me, with the TV on, or earbuds in. Whatever environment students write within, I encourage them to take note, and then to experiment with writing in other environments. By being reflective about the physical spaces within which we write, we may improve our productivity, both in terms of its quantity and quality. We may find spaces better-suited to the energies required to undertake and complete writing tasks.

Just as we may physically cloister ourselves in order to write, so too might we socially cloister ourselves and our writing. While a natural enough tendency, isolating our in-process writing from the eyes of others is frequently not a successful strategy for producing writing, nor for producing effective, convincing writing. On the whole, most successful writers share their in-process work with others, a trusted colleague or two, perhaps even an organized writing group, and at later stages with editors and perhaps colleagues with whom they have less familiar relationships.

Try sharing your writing with a colleague at an earlier stage than you usually do. Consider the social network within which you write. Do you have a community of support? Readers who can offer you feedback on early drafts, or help you fine-tune your arguments, evidence, and prose, before making a formal journal submission? Somebody to help you parse vexing reader reports and make effective changes for an article resubmission?

Once established in our careers we often forget about the trial-and-error processes through which we established the work habits that we now rely upon. By being reflective about those habits, and perhaps experimenting with them from time to time, we can counteract some of the stultifying effects of routine, and develop habits that are more and more finely tuned to our own personalities, circumstances, and needs.

What we decide matters in literature is connected to what we decide will matter for our history, for our pedagogy, for our culture. What we do and

do not value in our art reveals what we do and do not value in our times. What we leave off the page often speaks as loudly as what we include.

I could choose among several paths walking from school to my childhood home in the Southern California hills. Route One was the most direct as the crow flies. It involved the fewest inclines but required a precarious scrabble down a pathless embankment to get to the greenbelt attached to the cul-de-sac where we lived. Route Two involved an initial ascent, then a level walk along the street where Jeff Blumenthal kenneled the Dobermans he often sicced on my sister and me. Running from the dogs was complicated by the steep stairs leading down to the greenbelt that separated our streets; this should have been the easiest way home, but we avoided it whenever we could. Route Three had no dogs, no stairs, no embankments, and no greenbelts, but it was significantly longer, ending with a climb up a three-block road that had hill in its name.

Aggressively trained Dobermans, sun-lazy rattlesnakes, green turf in a desert, and ice plant clusters to keep serrated foothills from sliding over newly constructed neighborhoods represented the thin divide between the natural world and our built environments. When one world impinged upon the other, my daily life was directly affected.

Writers exploring ecopoetics ask themselves questions such as these: How does climate change affect our poetics? How do we write about resource extraction, agribusiness, endangered bird species, the removals of indigenous peoples, suburban sprawl, the lynching of blacks, or the precarious condition of gray wolves and the ecosystems dependent upon them? Our contemporary understanding of ecopoetics takes into account the ways human-centered thinking reflects on, and is reflected in, what we write. And, contemporary ecopoetics questions the efficacy of valuing one physical presentation of animated matter over another, because narratives about place and about life contribute to our orientation in, and our interpretation of, that place and that life.

According to what Jeff Blumenthal yelled at us as he commanded the attacks, he sicced his dogs on us because we were black girls and, in his mind, beneath him. Hearing all the names he assigned to my body, so many of them intended to limit my potential, I quickly learned the danger of categorical labels. Never mind all the things Jeff Blumenthal and my sister and I might have had in common; our differences were enough to cause him to be indifferent toward our safety. He was hostile toward our presence in a space he considered his own. So, walking the easy path home from school was often nearly impossible.

In a companion post, I reviewed the college admissions process from the perspective of a sustainability-themed applicant. I broke down the five different components of a college application in the context of admissions, both broadly speaking and for those emphasizing an environmental focus in their application. In this article, I will take a detailed look at the common app essay and supplements.

For writers and artists these challenges are particularly acute. Not only must we confront the inhuman scale of the transformation that is taking place around us, its temporal, physical and moral enormity, we must find ways of making sense of its complexity and interconnectedness. We must begin to find new ways of representing its effects, new imaginative and lexical vocabularies capable of naming and describing concepts and experiences that exceed the human. We must learn to talk about grief without being overwhelmed by it or descending into bathos. We must find ways of recording and memorialising what is being lost, of resisting not just the assumptions of hypercapitalism but the amnesia it induces, the constant Year Zero of a post-fact society. And perhaps most importantly, we must find ways to communicate ideas that are not just uncomfortable and frightening but actively difficult to comprehend because they demand we accept the ideas and ideologies that structure our world are, as Marx had it, no more solid than air.

Yet this writing from the frontline is only the most visible expression of a growing body of non-fiction that seeks to give shape not just to the physical and social reality of the post-natural world but something of its psychic and affective dimension as well. At least initially much of this work had its roots in the once-staid tradition of nature writing, a field that has experienced something of a boom in both public profile and creative vitality in recent years.

Exactly why nature writing has enjoyed such a sharp uptick in its profile in recent years is an interesting question. One answer lies in recent advances in our understanding of animal minds, and the degree to which these assumptions demand we rethink our assumptions about human exceptionalism. But is it also difficult to escape the suspicion it is also to do a deeper cultural and psychic dissonance engendered by our growing estrangement from the natural world.

3a8082e126