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Apr 23, 2016 9:46:47 AM

“Once we understand that ‘nature’ is not separate from ‘culture,’ we have to think more carefully about the roles we must inevitably take in shaping and sustaining the places that we love so well.”

Kent Ryden, “Beneath the Surface”

As I sat re-reading Kent Ryden's "Beneath the Surface" on Earth Day, it struck me that the interconnectedness of places and the inseparability of nature and culture really require us to think carefully not only about the places we love well, but also about those we neither love nor know. For if not by us, they are known, loved, or mourned by others with whom we are intertwined. With that in mind, we must take seriously the roles that we play in shaping all places. Some roles we play intentionally as stewards, as gardeners, as lovers of cherished vistas, as campers and hikers and hunters, as outdoor-enthusiasts, and yet others we play passively, often thoughtlessly, as consumers or taxpayers or tourists or visitors. As Ryden notes, nature derives its layered and constantly renegotiated meanings through cultural and personal ascription, but of course, nature is also materially affected by cultural, human, activities. Climate change, environmental destruction, species extinction, the use of natural resources both renewable and not, are all directly - at least partially - related to human activity.

In turn, people react to and are affected by changes in their environments, both culturally and materially. The stories that we tell about our relationship to the environment are powerful repositories of cultural values and perspectives. But there are also the physical effects and the secondary social ones: Famines and changes in food production due to drought or depleted soils; loss of fisheries and coastal habitats due to rising sea levels or increasingly powerful or frequent storms; lost value of natural areas due to pollution of air, water, and land; increases in disease due to increasing habitats for insect vectors. All of these and more represent effects of environmental changes on human lives and cultures, and all of them require human responses - political, scientific, social.

Inevitably, because it concerns the body politic - the people that grapple with the discursive and material changes wrought by a changing environment - environmental rhetoric is political. And because the NCERW is a space for thinking collectively about the roles that we – as practitioners of public rhetoric, teachers of writing, as citizens and lovers of places – must take in shaping our world, its mission, too, is inherently political.

The NCERW has deep roots in other discourses that foreground the relationships between space, place, and identity. Indeed, I was rereading Ryden's essay because it in some ways represents the first seeds of the NCERW. Those seeds were planted in the fertile soil that was the University of New Mexico English Department in 2008, where Dr. Ryden came to give a lecture on "Place-Based Learning and Writing Across Communities." He had been invited by Michelle Hall Kells, who was then ushering the nascent Writing Across Communities concept and its disruptive possibilities through the English department with the help of graduate students and community members determined to broaden the institutional conversations around marginalized writers and marginalized rhetorics. Since the Fall of 2008, the conversations on environmental rhetoric and writing have ebbed and flowed in the UNM Rhetoric and Writing Program, driven primarily by the students interested in these conversations and the increasing number of course offerings and professional conversations that have dealt with issues of place and the teaching of writing.

Today, as many of the students who pushed and shaped the conversations around environmental rhetoric and writing, who stretched themselves to think deeply about place and its relationship to identity, civic responsibility, and community action have moved on and inevitably taken their experiences with them into other domains - many academic, but some not, it is appropriate that the conversation on environmental rhetoric and writing that we've been having also becomes enlarged and enriched by the voices of scholars and practitioners of environmental rhetoric and writing around the country.

Welcome to the National Consortium on Environmental Rhetoric and Writing. We invite you to be a part of the conversation.

Read more about the roots of the NCERW at UNM, and meet some of the conversation's earliest supporters in this brief (personal) history.