ENV 3500/ENG 3010: Environmental Writing, Spring 2026
This course explores how the way we communicate about the environment powerfully affects how we perceive it and ourselves in relation to the natural world. Environmental communication involves naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiating our ecological relationships in the world, including those with nonhuman systems, elements, and species. Through an interdisciplinary and multimodal approach, we will examine various rhetorical, cultural, political, and media factors when writing about local and global environments, addressing environmental crises, and advocating for more sustainable environmental futures. Students will engage with a range of topics: environmental meanings, symbols, and identities; environmental campaigns and movements; environmental law and policy; green advertising, public relations, and design; public health and environmental risk communication; environmental journalism and climate science communication. Class activities provide students with opportunities to research and participate in environmental conversations and debates that are taking place locally and globally while course assignments will help students develop skills in communicating for and about the environment to multiple audiences through the effective use of public-facing writing and various media strategies.
