How to Create a Thesis for your Annotated Bibliography and Essay
The essay for this course is connected to an annotated bibliography assignment.
Specifically, you use your essay topic to direct your annotated bibliography research.
Thus you must have an idea of what your essay is going to be before you work on your
annotated bibliography. Specifically, you must have your thesis ready before you can do
any work on the annotated bibliography. However, the thesis does not have to be final or
even detailed, just enough to get you started on your research.
For now, all you need to do is pick a general topic for your essay, and that should be
sufficient to get you started on the annotated bibliography. Once you have done some
research the essay topic will narrow and become more specific. Here are the topics:
Essay Topics
Anthropogenic impacts on the environment
Urbanization and the environment
Water management technologies
The technological fix
Colonialism and the environment
Science and the quantification of nature
The commodification of nature
Technology and resource extraction
Nature and the state
Nature and the market
The automobile and the environment
Industrialization and the environment
Science and the environment
Globalization and the environment
Science and the environment (chemical synthetics, scientific knowledge of environmental
damage, scientific contributions to industrial processes, scientific solutions to
environmental problems, etc.)
Nuclear power
Green technologies (hydro, wind, solar, etc.)
A few general points, as you can probably note, the essay topics tend to mirror or at least
parallel the general subjects in the course. My goal is that you should find one of the
general areas of interest from the course and derive an essay topic out of that. So if you
are generally interested in how particular nations used natural resources to secure market
dominance you could write an essay on a number of subject areas: colonialism and the
environment, science and the quantification of nature, technology and resource
extraction, nature and the state, etc. It will be possible that your topic transcends more
than one subject area, that’s fine, as long as it is in at least one of the areas of interest for
the course you are good.
Once you have a topic area, you need to find a specific thesis. There are a few ways to do
this:
1. Use your summary and critique as a starting point. Since you have already done
at least one reading and found something to critique about it, you can use that
critique as the basis of an essay. So, for example, say you criticized Diamond’s
piece about Spanish conquest of the Americas as it downplayed the role of
European introduction of new diseases, you could parlay that into an essay topic
about the importance of environmental factors in European conquest.
2. Take a well-established thesis from the course and build a topic around that.
For example, we discuss the idea of a technological fix in the course, and one of
the units is on nuclear power, which is often seen as a technological fix for
greenhouse gas emission problems.
3. Take a concept or idea from another course that overlaps with materials from
this course to create a thesis. For example, say you took a business or economics
course and you learned about the importance of putting a price on carbon for
limiting carbon emissions. You could write a paper for this course on the
difficulties in measuring, enforcing and negotiating within such a system, based
on the historical examples we consider in the course.
4. Find a controversy in the readings and use that as your essay topic. For
example, many authors argue that industrial technology is the main source of our
environmental problems, but it is possible to argue that environmental abuse is
older than large-scale industrial technologies.
5. Start with a historical example and relate it to technology and the course
themes. For example, say you were interested in the oil rig disaster in the gulf last
year. You could relate this to our discussion of the use of technology to extract
natural resources as a vestige of colonialism and the colonial attitude towards
resources and the environment.
These are just some suggestions. Two further points are important, one, any topic for this
course must be historical, you must look at a process or a series of events that occurred in
the past, and discuss how their development changed over time. I am happy with papers
that have a contemporary focus (e.g. use current issues to shape our understanding of past
events), but there must be some historical focus to the paper. For example you are more
than welcome to consider a topic like modern communications technology, but you must
look at the topic historically or link it to a historical example.
Secondly, any topic for this course must have an environmental component. You are
welcome to argue, for example, that in the historical case you consider the implications
for the environment were actually overstated, but if you do so that should be the primary
focus of the paper, not a side conclusion.
Third, any thesis for the course must incorporate one or both of science or technology
into the argument. There are many environmental issues, and many aspects of these
issues, but whatever you pick science and technology must be part of the argument.
Once you have an idea of what you want to do, determine if it fits in the scope of the
essay topics I have outlined above. If so, get a draft version of your thesis ready and you
can start on the annotated bibliography. Remember that a thesis has to be an argument for
or against something, not just a statement or a description of facts. This is not a
descriptive paper, it is an argumentative paper.