Helping to create the next generation of environmental writers

For three non-sequential semesters I co-taught environmental writing at the University of New Orleans. It was a course I created. I was part of the English Department’s MFA program. I taught the course with Professor Nicola Anthony of the Biological Sciences Department. I had the idea to create a course in environmental writing that would be a collaboration between two distinct but, hopefully, complementary departments because of the local environment.

I also strongly believe in exposing students to genres, ideas, opinions, pursuits, other than their own. We — and I definitely include myself — can tend to narrow our focus, to insulate and isolate ourselves from the way others understand and see the world. I have especially found this to be the case in academia. If you narrow your focus too much, you risk getting a narrow education.

I set about to propose a course in environmental writing that I would co-teach with a professor in the Environmental Sciences Department or the Biological Sciences Department at the University of New Orleans. The class would consist of students from both the English Department and from one of those two science departments. The students would collaborate on projects and then write about them. Any basic reader would be able to understand the issues and the science.

One of the ideas of the course would be for the English students to help the science students become better writers. The science students would, for their part, help the English students understand, become better acquainted with science. The result would be, ideally, students who were capable of writing about the complex issues concerning the environment in a lucid, compelling way. The type of writers I had as my role models were Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Kolbert, Barry Lopez, Kathryn Schulz, David Quammen, Bernd Heinrich, Robert Macfarlane and Barbara Kingsolver, to name a few. There are more of course, but the list is not unlimited.

It takes a special kind of writer to write well, to write accessibly, about the environment, just as it takes a special kind of writer to write about pure science in a way that the common reader can easily grasp the content and even relish the experience. How many can do that? To my mind the need for these writers is desperate because these are desperate times.

Before I went to my department chair with a proposal, I would need to find someone from the sciences who was willing to teach this course. I went to the UNO department webpages and examined the roster of professors, read about their specialties, and chose some names I thought might be suitable. Then I e-mailed these professors with my idea. A few responded, and I asked if I might have some time to talk to them about this. Then I simply walked over to the buildings where the sciences were taught at the appointed time, and met with the teachers. I mention how I proceeded in case anyone is interested in the idea of team-teaching a course across genres. There’s probably a more efficient way to go about this. However, there is not a model for this at the University of New Orleans — that is, how to propose a course co-taught across genres. This was all improvised.

I regret to say that I had never been inside these science buildings before. They are quite close to the Liberal Arts building where I had my office and where I taught, but I’d never once stepped foot into these domains. Which was, in a sense, the point. To step inside another world. The buildings are all about science — obvious, of course, but when you go someplace foreign for the first time, you know the people will speak another language, yet there is something arresting and exciting about that. The posters on the walls — depicting complex molecular developments, changes in the seas, and multicell chemical transitions — were elegant in the way only science can be. That is, in the absolute clarity of what is happening through a dissection of the elements that produce it. That does not happen in the English department. We deal in abstractions; we deal in emotions. You don’t prove anything with art. That’s not its purpose.

I wanted to know more. I assumed the English students would as well. I hoped so, in any case.

After talking to several professors, and getting polite, reasonable rejections, one professor in the biological sciences department was interested. That was Professor Nicola Anthony, a highly accomplished scientist with a PhD from Cambridge University, whose specialties are insect and vertebrate molecular ecology, historical biogeography and population genetics and conservation genetics. I am forever grateful for her willingness to join forces and for her enthusiasm about the idea. We made some time to sit down and talk about what this course would be.

And what, exactly, was the idea? What is environmental writing, anyway?

In fact, if you wonder about the effectiveness of the written word in the face of highly complex and urgent environmental issues, you need only look to Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Published in 1962, it detailed, in highly accessible prose and with impeccable science, how pesticides, particularly DDT, were having a disastrous effect on America’s birds. The book and its author met fierce resistance from the chemical companies who manufactured these pesticides when the book came out. However, eventually Carson’s words, backed by her unimpeachable research, won the day. DDT was banned. We can only speculate what would have happened hadn’t America produced the brave, resolute Carson and her work.

Professor Anthony and I decided that the basic idea, as I said before, would be that students from each department would pair up and collaborate on a project; then they would then write about that project in prose that would be readily accessible to an ordinary reader. Professor Anthony and I set about creating a prospectus that we could take to our individual chairs. This we did. We hoped this would convince our chairs to sign off on the idea and allow us to put it in the course catalogue for an upcoming semester.

Now we come to the issue of money.

Our department heads were both encouraging and hesitant. What we didn’t understand was that the income from a jointly taught class would be split between the two departments. If it were a normal class, all the income would go to the single department that offered it. In our case, each department would be getting half of what they normally would receive. The department heads were understandably not overly enthusiastic about this. The university has, as far as I know, no proviso for such a situation. In other words, they have no system intact that would reimburse each department the income they would lose by a jointly taught class. I think they should as part of the effort to widen students’ education. I hope they consider that in the future.

The long and short of it is that our chairs, much to their credit, gave us the go ahead. (They were highly supportive for all three semesters we taught the class.) We began to create a syllabus. I didn’t know Professor Anthony, really, and here we were (voluntarily) thrown together to teach a single and, hopefully, single-minded course. I had my ideas. She had hers. Eventually, we hammered out a syllabus with a reading list that included both pure science writing and selections from renowned environmental writers, with assignments and goals.

The next step was to put the course out there and see if any students signed up.

Fortunately, some did. Professor Anthony and I taught Environmental Writing three times at the University of New Orleans, in the spring of 2018, the spring of 2020 and the fall of 2021. The first class we taught had eighteen students, a near perfect balance of nine students from the Biological Sciences Department and ten from the English Department. The course was open to both undergraduates and graduate students, and there, however, the balance was not perfect. We had seven undergraduates from the Biological Sciences and two graduate students; we had six undergraduates from the English Department and four graduate students. We thought that undergraduate students would be paired with undergraduates and the same with graduate students, but that proved impossible, so we paired students by interest, and, in one case, three were grouped together. In the end, the graduate/undergraduate status was not a serious issue.

A scientific paper is not an easy read unless you are used to reading that kind of writing. It is often heavy with specialized terminology and complicated graphs, charts and statistics. Creating a narrative for a scientific paper is not a priority, because the reason for its existence is to convey the results of inquiry and/or experiments. Scientists do not write papers for entertainment. The first person is never used. The list of authors at the top of some scientific papers can seem endless. Scientists may understand what they’re reading in these articles, but the layman has difficulty making their way through them — if they can at all. That’s not the fault of the writers. The goal of scientific articles is not to make them readable to the layman. But our goal would be.

Writing exercises became an integral part of the course. They were directed toward basic issues and techniques such as openings; transitions; finding the right word; metaphors and similes; revision; the power of nouns and verbs; and conclusions. Professor Anthony provided essential texts about writing, such as Writing Science by Joshua Schimel (Oxford University Press 2011) and Writing Science in Plain English by Anne Greene (University of Chicago Press 2013). We also assigned Anne Lamott’s classic and most helpful book on writing, Bird by Bird.

Science students who had never written a college paper in the first person become more comfortable with that notion, especially after having seen the example of an Elizabeth Kolbert, who inserts herself selectively into her narratives and always with a purpose. Her science is impeccable; her writing is exemplary. They found her, and other distinguished environmental writers like Barry Lopez, Kathryn Schulz — whose New Yorker article they especially liked — and David Quammen, trustworthy.

Sometimes the collaborations went smoothly, sometimes not so smoothly. Students can be very protective of their views and the work and their methodology, understandably so. The simple fact is that not only do students work differently, some work harder than others. That’s the case in any class environment. However, in most cases, the collaborations went well, and the students produced worthy projects and papers — in some cases, publishable, in our opinion.

Some of the projects and papers that these collaborations produced were: “Queen Bess Island: After Decades of Land Loss, a Tiny Louisiana Barrier Island Is Restored as a Refuge for Brown Pelicans”; “The Sinking City: Environmental Injustice in New Orleans”; “A Famine of Phytoplankton: The Disappearance of Creatures that Are Too Small to See but Too Important to Ignore”; “The War on Straws: Collective Altruism or Fad?”; “Off to Greener Pastures: Green Burials in New Orleans and Beyond”; “Bringing Back the Swamp: Can Trees Save New Orleans?”; “Greenwashing and Other Sins Behind Chiquita’s Blue Sticker”; and “It’s Not the Almonds, It’s the Industry”.

What happened, in the end, was, for the most part, what we hoped would happen. Students from one discipline worked with, got to know, exchanged ideas and points of view with, students from a completely different discipline. In all probability, most of these students would not have had a similar interchange otherwise. In the end, they produced what Professor Anthony and I would not hesitate to call solid environmental writing that, in some cases, was of a very high quality. Hopefully, some of the students will continue writing about the environmental issues we face. I know for a fact that one student, from the English Department, will be working with the Norwegian government starting in the fall of 2023 researching deep sea mining and will eventually write about what she finds.

I’m no longer at the university, but I’m pleased to see Environmental Writing is being offered in the fall of 2023 and has become part of the standard course offerings. I hope it has a long, productive future. I urge the university to offer as much support as possible. The more students understand how other people think, what they are passionate about, and how they see the world, the better they will be able to grow and flourish. And, in this case, to write about the world we live in and must protect.

Related posts:

Have you ever wanted to make a drastic change in your life? To become the best version of yourself and be unrecognizable from your old self? It may seem like a lofty goal, but it’s certainly…

After finishing Chetan Bhagat’s “Three Mistakes of My Life,” I was eager to delve into more books of a similar genre. As a first-time reader, I found the …

The report titled Project Based Learning has recently been published by Absolute Markets Insights which provide readers with a perceptive and cogent business outlook. The data also presents…