WR 121SUSTAINABILITY

CRN 25830 MWF 10:00-10:50

TAYLOR MCHOLM

TMCHOLM@UOREGON.EDU

OFFICE HOURS: PLC 102 - MW 11-1, AND BY APPOINTMENT

AGENDA

Names

Designing a wicked spaceship

Course overview and syllabus

Reading for Wednesday:

Shape of Reason (SoR), Ch. 1 (2-11), Ch. 2 (28-9), Ch. 5 (56-64);

SUSTAINABILITY: BUILD A SPACESHIP

HERE’S WHAT TO DO

1. Get in a group of 3 or 4

2. Design a ship on a piece of paper

• Quick, rough drawing of it• Make a list of some essential features necessary to

sustain 100 lives indefinitely aboard the ship

3. Condition: everything you need to survive must be on the ship when you blast-off; the only external input from that point on is sunlight

NEW CONDITIONWith each new condition, decide if or how you need to respond in order to sustain the lives on the ship. Briefly write down your thoughts and then we’ll discuss. (Come to some kind of consensus in small group, present to large):

1. New Condition: some of the shipmates (about 6 to 8) have begun taking double rations of food.

2. New Condition: There are now 125 people on the ship.

3. New Condition: A few of the shipmates have developed a way to increase food production. It is done through creating a new kind of fertilizer that uses some of the ship’s reserve fuel. At the same time, a few other shipmates have invented a new converter that reduces the amount of fuel necessary to run the ship.

4. New Condition: The fertilization process makes the 25 people who live closest to the production site terribly ill (in some cases, fatally so).

WHAT’S THE POINT? A “problem” is highly

complex

Context: multiple actors and factors to consider

Scale: spatial and temporal

Causality: multiple forces and trends converging

Consequences: multiple and unforeseen

WHAT’S THE POINT?Sustainability is a “wicked problem” (Rittel and Webber’s term)

There are incomplete, contradictory and/or changing requirements that are difficult to recognize in advance. “Solutions” to wicked problems often cause unexpected consequences and new problems.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH COMPOSITION?

This is a course devoted to thinking about argument as inquiry. That means that the point of the writing is to try to figure out a way through the wicked problems we uncovers (generally speaking, about “sustainability”).

This is not about “convincing” or “winning” an argument. This type of writing is about working through ideas by testing an argument and its own unstated assumptions. We will use a tool of logic and writing called an “enthymeme” to do this.

COURSE OVERVIEW

We have the opportunity to design the course in a way that speaks most directly to our own sets of interests.

I have a few ideas for how this might work, but you all should have a say in what we read.

On pages ix-xi in our casebook, Sustainability, a number of different units are laid out. Which are most interesting to you?

ON A PIECE OF PAPER

1. Write your name

2. Choose two units that you are most interested in (we will do three total, but you’re choosing your top two).

3. Choose three/four articles that you are most interested in (will be reading more, but you’re only choosing your top three/four). You can list these by just the author’s last name. Ex: “Heinberg” for Richard Heinberg’s, “What is Sustainability?”

THE SYLLABUS

Read it. Know it.