Sustainability A Reader for Writers

Read. Write. Oxford.

Sustainability: A Reader for Writers focuses on the timely and vital subject of sustainability, examining the latest research on economics, society, resource planning, and the environment. It takes on key issues including climate change; food, water, and soil; energy and resource management; and trash. The articles embody a range of experiences, ideas, and strategies-from scientific research and engaging questions to poetic reflection and powerful arguments.

Developed for the freshman composition course, Sustainability: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and scientific reading selections, providing students with the rhetorical knowledge and compositional skills required to participate effectively in academic and public conversations about the environment.

Sustainability: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives.

Carl Herndl is Director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Composition and a member of Patel Center for Global Sustainability at University of South Florida.

1. Us: How We Live With Each Other and With the World.
Rachel Carson. "The Obligation to Endure" from Silent Spring
Aldo Leopold. "Thinking Like a Mountain." from Sand County Almanac
Jared Diamond. "The World as Polder: What Does it Mean to Us Today." from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Garrett Hardin. "Tragedy of the Commons." Science
2. Trash: The Costs of Throwing "Stuff" Away.
Annie Leonard. "The Story of Stuff: Electronics." Story of Stuff Project.
Annie Leonard. "The Story of Stuff: Bottled Water." Story of Stuff Project.
Chris Caroll. "High Tech Trash." National Geographic Magazine
Luke Cole. "We Speak for Ourselves: The Struggle of Kettleman City." from From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement
Emily Fontaine. "Where Did Our Clothes Come From?" Le Quaintrelle blog.
Lucy Siegle. "Why it's time to end our love affair with cheap fashion." The Observer
Gay Hawkins. "Worm Stories." from The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish
3. Food: A Different View of the Food Chain
Jeff Opperman. "Getting to Know Your Bacon: Hogs, Farms, and Clean Water." The Nature Conservancy blog.
Sarah Lozanova. "Starbucks Coffee: Green or Greenwashed?" GreenBiz.com blog.
Stephanie Wear. "Finding Nemo on Your Plate." The Nature Conservancy blog.
Dan Charles. "How Community Supported Agriculture Sprouted in China." The Salt. National Public Radio blog.
Michael Pollan. "The Genius of the Place" from Omnivore's Dilemma
Deborah Whitman. "Genetically Modified Foods: Harmful or Helpful?" ProQuest
Paul Epstein. "Food Security and Climate Change: The True Cost of Carbon." The Atlantic
4: Climate Change: What It Is, How It Affects Us, and Why We Argue About It so Much.
Ralph Cicerone. "Finding Climate Change." National Council for Science and the Environment.
National Research Council. "Introduction: Science for Understanding and Responding to Climate Change." Advancing the Science of Climate Change
Terry Cannon. "Gender and climate hazards in Bangladesh." Gender and Development
Roman Krznaric. "Empathy and Climate Change: A Proposal for a Revolution of Human Relationships." from Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination
New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action." Evangelical Climate Initiative webpage.
5. Energy: Supply, Demand and Invisible Consequences
National Research Council. "Energy Supply and Use" from Advancing the Science of Climate Change
Liz Barratt-Brown. "It is All About the Framing: How Polls and the Media Misrepresent the Keystone XL[tar sands] [oil] pipeline." National Resources Defense Council blog.
Vandana Shiva. "Food for Cars or People: Biofuels a False Solution to Climate Change and a Threat to Food Security" from Soil Not Oil
Thomas Friedman. "The Age of Noah: Biodiversity" from Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How it Can Renew America
Evan I. Schwartz. "How Not to Make Energy Decisions: Lessons from the Battle Over Cape Wind" Technology Review MIT
Willett Kempton. "The Offshore Power Debate: Views from Cape Cod." Coastal Management
Christopher Bateman. "A Colossal Fracking Mess." Vanity Fair
6. Soil and Water: Resources We Take for Granted
David Montgomery. "Good Old Dirt." from Dirt: the Erosion of Civilization
Sandra Steingraber. "The Case for Gardening as a Means to Curb Climate Change." from Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis
Bryan Walsh. "Nature: A Major Company Puts a Value on the Environment." Time blog "Science and Space."
Dan Charles. "Putting Farmland on a Fertilizer Diet." The Salt. National Public Radio blog.
Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium "About Hypoxia" from Hypoxia in the Northern Gulf of Mexico webpage.
Cynthia Barnett. "The Illusion of Water Abundance." from Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis
Michael Specter. "Why Sewers Should EXCITE Us" from "We Are All Downstream." Water.org
Lisa Stiffler. "All You Need to Know About Storm water Runoff" Sightline Daily. Blog of the Sightline Institute.
Elizabeth Kolbert. "The Darkening Sea." The New Yorker.