announcement from professor:
As the assignment instructions note, you also need to draw on course themes. Use course themes to support your argument, or if you disagree with the authors we’ve read, show how their arguments fail. So, by all means, if you’re interested in a specific environmental problem, do explore it, but apply course themes to argue why this problem has arisen. For example, you might draw on Indigenous environmental ethics (Week 4) to argue that overfishing is the result of the Western world’s understanding of the natural world as merely a resource to be exploited.
Another hot tip: when you are writing an essay in which you present an argument, it’s crucial to back up any claims you make that are not common knowledge. For example, it is common knowledge that Canada is a country in the northern hemisphere so you don’t need a source for this statement. But if you say Canada has reached net zero with respect to its carbon emissions (it hasn’t), you’d better provide a source for this claim.
As you write, imagine you are trying to convince someone, and they are skeptical of what you’re saying. Any time you make a claim that isn’t obvious, imagine that person responding, “prove it!” or “yeah, says who?”. You need to convince that person by appealing to experts, authoritative data, and the like. So be sure to include parenthetical citations whenever you make such claims or whenever you use someone else’s ideas. Like so: (Smith, 2022). If you quote them, you need to include a page number as well: (Smith, 2022, p. 10).