Reading responses
Due: Via hard copy at the beginning of class per due dates on the syllabus.
Overview: These responses should be a succinct summary of the reading. You should synthesize the author’s
main arguments in your own words and identify and define key terms. Your concluding paragraph should be
evaluative—in other words, you should note which aspects of the author’s arguments that you found persuasive
or convincing (or if you didn’t, say so!) and parts (if any) you found confusing or contradictory. Responses will
be graded on an informal check/check-minus basis.
Format: Responses should be one single-spaced page, 1-inch margins all around, 12-point Times New Roman
font. Be sure to carefully proofread so that you submit a polished and error-free assignment.
Your response should begin by identifying the reading and its author(s), e.g., “In [reading title here],
[argues/suggests/analyzes] [key argument].” The full first paragraph of the response should be a succinct
overall summary of the argument and the project. The second paragraph can delve more deeply into key terms
or points that you identify as significant. Be sure to note the author’s method and evidence in your response.
Example of first paragraph:
In The Slums of Aspen, Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow argue that in order to understand
ecological injustice and ecological racism, we must seek to understand ecological privilege. For them, the resort
town of Aspen, Colorado, a getaway for some of the world’s most outrageously rich, is a prime site for studying
this privilege. It is a location where the extractive and exploitative practices of global capitalism reveal their
most rarefied products: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few; a valley where an
“essential and invisible” workforce (16) of Mexican and South American immigrants labor to make possible the
Aspen experience; and a justifying (and incoherent) logic in which capitalism and capitalists are centered in the
movement for environmental justice. The authors argue that this “Aspen Logic” holds up capitalism as the best,
if not the only, way to protect the environment, and it is this reasoning that they identify as “the defining
philosophy of the mainstream environmental movement” (15). But Park and Pellow argue that capitalism is
fundamentally incompatible with true environmental justice. Moreover, they contend that nativism and
environmentalism are fundamentally linked, and at their intersection lies the rhetoric of population control.
Hence, a focus on immigrants and immigration policies can be key to understanding ecological privilege:
paradoxically, while Aspen visitors depend on immigrants’ labor, they have contempt for immigrants’ physical
presence. The kind of rhetoric that emerges from this tension is just another strain of the nativism that has long
been a pillar of American culture.
The concluding paragraph should be evaluative and/or should connect the reading to the other
scholarship from that week or earlier in the semester. You can also connect it to course themes/previous
course discussion OR something from popular culture. This can be the space to use the work toward
further lines of inquiry.
Example of last paragraph:
Even so, I have reservations. If one accepts their premise that an organization like the Sierra Club is indeed
truly representative of mainstream environmentalism—all of it—then their conclusions are valid. But I remain
troubled that this focus represents a rather narrow view of environmentalism and not one that takes into account
so many other flavors of it. Perhaps it’s just a question of my own biases: when I think about the biggest names
in environmentalism, my mind turns to figures like Al Gore. An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006; how is it
possible that Gore is not mentioned even once in a 2011 book critiquing mainstream environmentalism? What
about Rachel Carson? Jane Goodall? Winona LaDuke? I don’t know where these figures come down on all of
the questions Park and Pellow raise, but I am surprised that none of them merit even a footnote. I conclude that
Park and Pellow’s sense of the mainstream is different from mine—one takeaway for me, then, is that I might
need to rethink my own understanding of what the environmental movement actually is. At any rate, what the
authors want is a type of environmental justice that is concerned with “social inequality rather than fixating on
immigrants and population control” (158). Pellow apparently went on to write that book, What Is Critical
Environmental Justice, in 2017, and I want to read it, but I will be disappointed if it does not acknowledge that
numerous major figures in environmentalism writ large have been concerned with social issues for decades. It
is, in my view, only by carefully excluding them from consideration that the argument that nativism and
environmentalism are inextricable can hold.
