Writing for a Changing Environment

Writing For a Changing Environment is an advanced nonfiction writing workshop with a focus in journalistic storytelling, designed to help environmental scholars and practitioners write for a broad, lay audience. In other words, this is not just a class for writers – although those with an interest in journalism will find it useful. This is a course for students who recognize the importance of reaching broad audiences in a time of rapidly transforming climate, technology, science, and culture. We will learn and practice the tools of journalism – the ability to listen, communicate, research, capture hearts, spread ideas, and explain complexity – and study writings that exemplify these attributes. Our focus topic in this class is climate and other environmental changes, with an intentional look to the global south as well as the US and global north. Students will write multiple pieces of their own, from short research “explainers” to reported profiles to first person reportage. By the end of the course, students will have refined at least one of their pieces to a quality to submit for publication.