Multi-Genre Research Paper Letter to Reader

Dear Reader,

This has been, without a doubt, a long and arduous process. After reading a book on math, I eventually settled on reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinctinon, a nonfiction book about the current wave of extinctions that could eventually qualify as a mass extinction. I chose geoengineering as my eventual topic over more structured, mathematical ideas, such as investigating the S = cAz or extinction rates over time. My reasoning for this lay in the fact that geoengineering is a complex topic that integrates both scientific and philosophical ideas, because it has so many ethical issues playing into its controversy. This made it interesting to write and think about for lengthy amounts of time, and made writing my creative pieces more than a contrived exercise, because I really didn’t want to write poetry about logarithms.

As you will see, the root of my project is the expository essay, which weighs the pros and cons of geoengineering and ends up settling on the qualification that geoengineering is too risky to be applied right now, but should be researched more as a “backup” for the future. In writing the essay, I focused on solar radiation management through silicates, creating reflective silicon dioxide, because this is by far the most viable and written about method of geoengineering.

My “golden thread” begins with structure. As I was writing the expository essay, I blanched at the fact that I had to waste so much of my limited space writing background on the issue and not dealing with the abstract nuances of weighing it, which are what I believe to make geoengineering such a cool controversy. In weighing the pros and cons, a ton of abstract ideas “speak” to one another, which informed the creative pieces I wrote. Therefore, my first 3 genres, entitled “Ideology,” “Complexity,” and “Pragmatism,” are inserted into the expository essay in spots that balance a break in the text, so as not to interrupt the flow of the essay, and parts that need some more clarification of these major topics. These are italicized to ensure that they aren’t confused with the essay. “Complexity” takes the form of a fictional speech. “Pragmatism” is a set of three haikus, economizing words and space well. “Ideology” is a characterization as inspired by Ruth Gendler’s Book of Qualities.

Because I wanted to refer to the connections between these abstract ideas, the trio of ideas are mentioned throughout each other’s features, trying to demonstrate how ideology is at odds with complexity and pragmatism, etc. To further this idea of the interconnected nature of the abstractions in relation to geoengineering, my final piece, a fictional article from The Economist, relates these three ideas in a more direct way to geoengineering.

If I’ve succeeded in this project, you should expect two things: to learn a little bit about geoengineering and to think about the abstract roots of the controversy.

Thanks,

Ben Foutty