Essay 2

Essay 2

4-6 pages. Minimum three sources (list them at the end, but I don't care about MLA bibliography format at this point)

The purpose of the the first essay, among others, was to get a sense of where you're coming from in terms of the environment. In this paper, you get to explore some aspect, perhaps one that you have no experience with but are curious about. it also gives you a chance to try out the first advanced heuristic prewriting strategy, tagmemic analysis, which is good for thinking about things in systems terms. If you spend 20-30 minutes on them, cranking out a dense page or so, the tagmemeic prewrite questions should tell you what you know, what you don't, might suggest an "angle" or focus, and ideally would get you thinking systematically and even better systemically about solutions, one of the most valuable skills you can get from this course). What you produce depends on your background; if you're starting from scratch, which is ok, the paper will probably be an overview in which you educate yourself and others. If you have some background, you can do a bit more analysis, especially in terms of what to do about the problem. We'll go to McHenry pretty soon to get some good research tools, but you can find some on their Getting Started page.

Finding a topic: Wiki Surfin' Safari: Note: if you're doing a group project, this paper could serve as foundational research (see me). If not, go to the College Eight wiki and look for an entry point that appeals to you (a good one is Big Picture which gives you an quick overview different aspects of the current state of the planet. You can also browse through Categories, search geographically, or by Eco-heroes (including UCSC people). Another more serendipitous approach to finding a topic would be to go to New and Cool or a current environmental news story.

[Extra Credit: It would be great if you kept track (in a separate informal document) of how you moved through the links. For example: "I started with [paste link] and found [paste link] , comment on the resource (liked this aspect, but not that), which led me to look at [paste link] add comment.... by now I knew I wanted to write about _________, so/but....”]