How does the land talk? How do people talk about and with the land? This course looks at studies of language, communication, land, environment and climate. Topics include: media coverage of the climate crisis; greenwashing and attempts to ban misleading corporate advertising; Indigenous language revitalization, sovereignty and land/water protection; what it means when the law recognizes rivers as people and how rivers talk; ecolinguistics, and the language of maps. We will read ethnographies, poems, fiction and literary non-fiction that think through and with non-human kin (plants, rocks, water, creatures) in order to think about what a just world and well-being look like, for all beings (Mary Siisip Geniusz, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Sabrina Imbler, Zalika Reid-Benta, Leanne Simpson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Anna Tsing, Joshua Whitehead). Come prepared to write—your water autobiography and to experiment with ways of writing about trees/water that are shaped like trees/water. Approximately one-quarter of the classes will be outside the classroom/on the land.