Essay/Research

Research Essay (Essay # 3) Assignment--Environmentalism & Environmental Responsibility

(Researched) Argument (5-7 double spaced pages)

Due Dates: 13-22 April Optional Draft Conferences via Zoom or other means

24 April Final draft due

Drawing on our work with the documentary film Before the Flood and our readings in Sustainability, write a thesis-driven research essay that focuses on one of the specific problems, listed below, that the climate-change crisis poses for the global community. Your essay should discuss the most salient challenges inherent to this specific climate-change issue you choose as well as the most prominent solutions currently being presented by the scientific community and by local and global leaders.

Below is the list of the subtopics of climate change from which you may choose. Choose one subtopic:

· Understanding / addressing climate change denial

· Understanding / addressing fossil fuel usage and dependency

· Understanding / addressing the loss of wildlife and ecosystems

· Understanding / addressing the consequences of ice loss at the polar ice caps

· Understanding / addressing the issue of rising sea levels

· Understanding / addressing the transition to green / renewable energy

· Understanding / addressing economic disparity in the context of energy production and access (for example, addressing the impact of a transition away from Coal on American mining communities whose economic livelihoods depend upon it—or the fact that 30% of the population in India does not yet have access to electricity).

· Understanding / addressing lifestyle and consumption behaviors that impact climate change

· Understanding and addressing economic disparity and the effects of climate change (for example, the ways in which climate change negatively effects poorer communities disproportionately)

· Understanding / addressing carbon tax

· Understanding / addressing deforestation (and consumer complicity in the practice)

· Understanding / addressing the challenges of global collaboration & partnership (for example, the Paris Agreement)

· Understanding / addressing the issue of climate refugees

· Understanding / addressing sustainable design (for example, gig factories)

As you move forward with your essay, be sure to be as specific as possible in constructing and presenting your arguments, and be sure to ground your claims in specific evidence and examples. Your essay should put your own critical perspectives and ideas on your subtopic into conversation with your research.

Imagine as your audience for this essay the entire University community; imagine that you are presenting an argument for how they (as members of the campus and local communities) can actively effect (and affect) change at the local / campus level in terms of their carbon footprints, from “emissions” to resource consumption. You should also imagine as part of your audience a group of students and professors (an academic audience) that will be selecting the most effective essay for inclusion in an ENG 101 textbook (similar to Sustainability) on persuasive, critically informed research writing.

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Research Component:

In addition to framing and applying your own critical perspectives, you are required to cite four to five sources in your essay. Your sources should break down as follows:

· one source must be Before the Flood;

· one source must be a recent news article on climate change related to the subtopic you choose;

· two sources must be scholarly articles that you find through one of the following library databases: EBSCOHost Databases; Google Scholar; JSTOR; ProQuest Central; Summon; Science Direct; and/or Web of Science;

· one source may be an essay in Sustainability.

Please be sure to review class policies on Intellectual Responsibility and Plagiarism as well as the relevant documentation sections The Little Seagull Handbook and of The Little, Brown Handbook before you begin and as you continue your work.

Writing Objectives for Essay 3:

· To develop and sustain a clear and cogent argument.

· To present specific evidence and examples to explain, illustrate, and support your argument.

· To produce coherent, unified paragraphs that each focus on and advance a single argument.

· To lead paragraphs with thesis-driven topic sentences that announce your argument for that paragraph at the outset.

· To develop paragraphs through the introduction of and analysis of specific illustrative evidence and examples that support the paragraph claim (and the overall claims of the paper).

· To analyze carefully and specifically the data you present to support your claims.

· To employ some of the basic principles, concepts, and methodologies central to the topics of environmentalism and environmental responsibility (and issues related to climate change), as discussed in our course texts (Before the Flood; Sustainability) and through your research

· To engage in research methods to access and engage scholarly essays that treat or in some way critically inform your topic.

· To make informed critical decisions about the appropriateness and viability of secondary (scholarly/research) sources that you use / do not use for your essay.

· To place your analyses of and arguments into conversation with the scholarship (research material) your gather and engage as part of your analyses.

· To comprehend, summarize, synthesize, and explain the scholarship you engage.

· To integrate concepts, data, and material from another author’s text into your own, and to properly cite and document that research material using MLA documentation format.

· To employ the rules of English grammar as a rhetorical tool (for example, using complex sentences to introduce ideas and arguments or subordinate clauses and conjunctive adverbs to qualify or concede argumentative claims) and to write using varied sentence structures and appropriate diction.