This guide serves as a general resource for students enrolled in Professor Priscilla Briggs' Challenge Seminar, "Zines and Sustainability." It is meant to provide resources related to students as they research and design their own zines, utilizing image and text to communicate problems and solutions for issues of environmental, social or economic sustainability.
Zines are hand-made and photocopied publications (and they're pronounced ZEEEEN). The zine has a rich history in social justice movements, where underground presses bypassed the mainstream media to share information. Zines tackle a wide variety of subjects, including political, feminist, literary, how-to, or personal. They are part of an expressive tradition stretching all the way back to Elizabethan pamphlets, with particular roots in fanzines and feminist expression of the 1990s.
The Environmental Protection Agency definition of sustainability is "based on a simple principle: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations."
Environmental studies considers the earth's biosphere, including its soil, water, atmosphere, and life forms, as well as human effects on the environment. This guide points out some of the varied resources available for the multidisciplinary study of the environment as it relates to sustainability.
Photo credit:
Dakota Access Pipeline protest across from San Francisco City Hall by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, via Wikimedia Commons
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
