I should be a good writer by now. I guess I thought that by hanging around a liberal arts campus for this long, I would passively absorb writing skills. Unfortunately, you absorb most of your education through your major courses and requirements, and my major has no writing and rhetoric learning objective. That should change.
I arrived at Pitzer College determined to help address environmental issues. Growing up, four cross-country moves left me without communities to associate with. I felt detached from basically every social question, but Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 2014 TV show “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” gave me a sense of belonging. Climate didn’t require membership in any particular community. By virtue of being on Earth, I felt, for the first time, a sense of ownership over what was happening around me. “Cosmos” gave me social bonds, citizenship even, like I had never known before.
In 2015, warming was at 1℃, yet the existential threat of compromising Earth’s natural cycles did not prompt a domestic climate bill. My 2010s youth left me with a core puzzle: Why wouldn’t we help ourselves? Was the logic for assuming such drastic climate risk more compelling than the case for state control?
It was these questions that led me to Pitzer’s Environmental Analysis (EA) major — first-years’ top intended major at the college for at least the past 10 years. The EA major proposes that students will “Gain the tools and experiences needed to address environmental challenges.” Notably, the program also “applies approaches in the social sciences, arts and humanities, and natural sciences.”
EA’s interdisciplinary structure helps students navigate the vast landscape of how to begin addressing environmental challenges. It gave me the chance to start with nothing more than youthful clarity toward environmental issues, and begin to consistently reflect on how I wanted to address them. Through the diverse reflection built into the interdisciplinary approach, I began to recognize that learning how to argue for environmental regulation felt fundamental to addressing environmental issues.
My understanding of the benefits of the major is grounded in my individual EA experience — as is my understanding of where it falls short.
Within the broader program, EA has tracks that direct learning outcomes in more specialized fields — students can concentrate in Sustainability and the Built Environment, Environment and Society or Environmental Policy. These tracks complement EA’s more general learning objectives by requiring students to narrow their focus and consider how they will apply a chosen approach to environmental issues.
All majors have the following learning objectives in common: learn about environmental issues, develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the subject, make presentations, explain popular arguments to various groups and become active in addressing environmental issues.
As a policy track student, I have additional learning objectives: acquire a working knowledge of environmental policy, law, and politics; develop a critical analysis of environmental policy and politics; and conduct policy-related research.
However, the major lacks a learning objective in writing and rhetoric. Interdisciplinary education epitomizes a liberal arts education. However, rhetoric — writing as a means of persuasion — is crucial for anyone entering environmental policy. Effectively articulating arguments for environmental protection is essential for EA majors to gain the tools and experience needed to address environmental challenges. Why, then, does a rhetoric requirement not exist?
The absence of rhetoric in EA has become clearer to me through coursework in other departments, such as political studies and philosophy, where writing and rhetoric are vital. When I took a philosophy class my junior year, a peer told me that my writing didn’t read like a typical philosophy paper, explaining that it lacked the pure analytical form that marks a proper argument. Before this, I scarcely understood that a paper could have common conventions that mark the quality of its analysis. Looking back, what my draft lacked aligned with the learning objectives listed for the class and the concrete writing skills the philosophy curriculum emphasized.
One might say that this gap, as I have laid it out, only proves differences in discipline, not general writing skill. I do not mean to propose that EA should borrow the structures of other majors. EA Policy is not different from these majors in content; its learning objectives simply lack dedicated requirements for written communication.
Stella Stringer PZ ’26, co-founder of Pitzer EcoReps, started as an EA major but pivoted to the Economics, Environment and Policy program. In an interview, she outlined central problems she has identified with EA.
“Because the EA major is broad, it can sometimes feel like you aren’t gaining hard skills,” she said. “Other majors teach concrete abilities, like writing papers or conducting research, while EA focuses more on ways of thinking. Students need to learn how to apply that thinking in different settings, and that is something the current major lacks.”
The language of the EA Policy learning outcomes requires students to “develop understanding” of theories and “acquire working knowledge” of issues, but this curriculum is incomplete without the skills to translate that knowledge into research and writing.
In environmental education, the interdisciplinary approach doesn’t necessarily limit students’ capabilities; it is crucial for helping them develop an effective perspective and a useful compass in a vast field, but it should be complemented with a more robust toolbox of learning objectives for the greatest benefit.
Adding a writing and rhetoric requirement would help students gain the tools and experiences to address environmental problems. If addressing environmental problems involves convincing audiences of an issue’s importance, then learning how to move audiences through written communication should be institutionalized. Following the form of the history department’s writing learning objective, a rhetoric-focused EA Policy objective could read: “students will learn to compose an environmental policy paper that clearly presents and successfully defends their argument.”
We must regularly investigate the relationship between the learning objectives in our majors and evaluate if motivations to pursue the field align with its learning outcomes.
EA majors should not have to cobble together their hard-won writing skills from other departments. The EA Policy curriculum should be the fountain of this vital skill.
Luca Davis PZ ’27 thinks maybe we should bring the term `global warming’ back into the mix.
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