Thursday, April 10, 2014

Keywords Final Project

There are well over a hundred keywords listed below from among the many more terms we have taken up and deployed over the course of our readings and conversations this term.

For your Final you are to create three categories entirely of your own choosing and design (they can be conceptual, practical, figurative, whatever works best for you), and then include under each of these categories a number of keywords from the list below which seem to you to be related to one another in a significant or useful way through each of your chosen categories and in respect to your sense of the overall subject of our course together.

For each keyword you choose, provide a clear and concise definition of the term (nothing more than a sentence, at most two) in your own words, and then follow that definition with a quotation from one of the assigned texts from our syllabus. The quotation should be one that is especially illuminating for the definition you have made in some way: the quotation can be a definition that yours is a variation of, the quotation can be an example or illustration that supports your definition, the quotation can provide an analogy or figure or frame that inspired your definition, the quotation can even be something that seemed so wrong to you that it provoked your definition as a kind of protest or intervention.

Your final must provide definitions and quotations for at least thirty-six keywords but no more than forty. None of your categories can contain fewer than seven keywords and none can contain more than sixteen keywords.

Each of your categories should have a title and a general explanatory paragraph (and I do mean a paragraph, not an essay) indicating what you mean for your category to delineate.

The deadline for the final is our last class together. If you have time to get this done early rather than later, you should by all means do so. This is the sort of project that is very doable if you devote some time to it, but almost impossible if you try to do it at the last minute. You should give yourself several days to do this work, since scouting through passages and notes across the whole term often yields unexpected insights and shocks of recognition that lead to revisions of your initial categorizations and keyword groupings. I hope this exercise is an enlightening and enjoyable one for you all rather than a drudgery. Be experimental, exploratory, earnest about it and you are almost sure to get incomparably more benefit from it. The love you take is equal to the love you make, as it were.

If you have questions, always feel free to post them in Comments, e-mail them to me, raise them in class, or talk with me about them personally.

Here are the Keywords I'm having you choose from:

Agriculture
Agroforestry
Alienation
Anarchy
Anthropocene
Appropriate Technology
Artificial
Atmosphere
Biodegradable
Biodiversity
Biomimicry
Biopiracy
Biosphere
Biosphere 2
Cap and Trade
Climate Change
Climate Refugees
Climax Ecosystem
Co-evolution
Commercial
Commodification
Common Good
Commons
Common Sense
Commonwealth
Companion Species
Consensus Science
Consent
Conservation
Consumer
Corporate
Cradle-to-Cradle
Criminalization
Custom
Deep Ecology
Democracy
Denial
Depletion
Design
Development
Digital
Disaster
Downcycling
Ecology
Ecofeminism
Ecosocialism
Ecosystem
Ecosystemic Services
Eco-Village
Edge Effects
Edible Landscaping
Enclosure
Endangered Species
Energy Descent
Environmental Justice
Environmental Racism
Exoticism
Externality
Farmers Market
Feral
Finitude
Footprint
Futurism
Gaia
Genocide
Genome
Geo-engineering
Geosphere
Globalization
Green
Greenwashing
Guerrilla Gardening
Habit
Harm
Hierarchy
Immateralism
Indigeneity
Industrial Agriculture
Industrialism
Input Intensive
Instrumental Rationality
Integrated Pest Management
Intentional Community
Intellectual Property
Investment
Irrigation
Land Ethic
Leapfrogging
Limit
Local
Localvore
Luddism
Militarism
Monetize
Monkeywrenching
Monoculture
Native
Nature
Natural Capital
Need
Neoliberal
Niche
One Size Fits All
Organic
Overpopulation
Pandemic
Parks
Patriarchy
Peak Oil
Permaculture
Planetary
Poison
Political Ecology
Pollution
Polyculture
Post-Scarcity
Precautionary Principle
Predator
Primitivism
Private Good
Public Good
Recycling
Renewable
Resilience
Resource Descent
Resource Wars
Salination
Scientificity
Seed Saving
Seed Sharing
Slow Food
Slum
Small Is Beautiful
Smart Grid
Social Ecology
Sublimity
Sustainability
Symbiosis
Systems Thinking
Technofix
Terminator Seed
Toxicity
Triple Bottom Line
Urban Agriculture
Urban Planning
Vegetarianism
Viridian
Warrior
Wealth
Wilderness