The Idea of Sustainability as Content
In a sense, Owens is proposing that we make sustainability, broadly defined in ways that intersect with more conventional writing topics, the content of our composition courses. He justifies that choice by noting that composition instructors often have the freedom to ask students to write about almost anything, and he asks, "Of all the information out there in the world, what is absolutely crucial to their [students'] intellectual, spiritual, economic, and physical survival?" (35). From this perspective, Owens asserts, "the classroom becomes a course in local, necessary knowledge" (35). Owens' writing assignments – from "place portraits" and neighborhood histories to "future scenarios" in which students speculate about what the world might be like in twenty or thirty years – are intended to help students acquire such "local, necessary knowledge."
The goal, of course, is a sophisticated, critical awareness of our places within the physical world we inhabit and the implications of our activities for our own survival and that of the nonhuman world as well. This awareness is really part of the kind of self-reflexiveness described elsewhere in this webtext, for in exploring our relationship to the environment, we ultimately confront our conceptions of self and our implications of those conceptions for our communities and the larger world we inhabit.