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Ranging widely to find home.

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Abstract

This essay chronicles the variety of courses that I have taught over a fifteen-year period that either focus on nature-oriented literature or include it in other types of courses. The examples range from first-year composition to advanced doctoral seminars, and include courses that focus on minority American literature and literature by women. The article is intended to encourage neophytes to venture into working nature-oriented literature into their course development at whatever college level they teach. It also provides a fairly long list of literary works that can be used in courses, including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

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From first-year composition through advanced doctoral seminars, I have included or focused on environmental literature in a wide range of offerings over the past fifteen years. My theoretical work and research have focused on notions of international and multicultural environmental literature, ecofeminist dialogics, interdisciplinarity, and genre configurations across poetry, fiction and nonfiction. In the following paragraphs, I will link these research areas to a variety of courses in order to demonstrate some of the myriad ways that anyone wishing to present to students nature writing, nature-oriented literature, environmental writing, or whatever else one might like to call it, can do so either as part of a larger topic or as a focused course subject.

First and second-year general education composition courses generally work with the premise that for students to write well they must have a serious topic about which to write. Nature as a topic often seems too static or too vague for many students, but environmental issues frequently have more immediate meaning, especially when linked to specific local issues. As a result, I regularly teach a composition course titled either "Toxic Topics" or "Everybody Lives Downstream." With the former topic, instructors can run into the problem of students quickly finding the subject matter uniformly depressing, especially if all of the readings focus on disasters, such as the Love Canal. Hence, I usually include a book such as The Ecology of Hope (1997). There students can read positive examples of community accomplishments, which in turn encourage them to write about actions being taken and possibilities for future improvements rather than just defending the status quo or painting doom-and-gloom scenarios. The latter topic for the course comes Sandra Steingraber's, Living Downstream (1998), teaches students about collecting evidence and arguing from data. Students can learn much from attending to the way in which it is written and discussing and writing about how they might adapt or adopt structures and strategies from this text. Of particular benefit for students is an assignment that calls on them to analyze the differences in strategies employed when Steingraber is building an argument based on data and when she is building an argument based on personal experience. These kinds of books and upbeat journal articles provide more effective models of nonfiction environmental writing for...

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