Right now, I'm teaching a first-year writing class that is affiliated with an interdisciplinary first-year seminar in environmental science. Looking for articles to use in class, I came across this website http://www.counterbalance.net/. I haven't reviewed it in great detail but it seems like a good place to look for academic yet accessible conversations about interesting, contemporary issues.

I am under the influence of the assignments suggested to me when I taught RHE 306 at UT, so for my class, I'm thinking of using the essay that appears to "map the controversy" on religion and environmental ethics. I am especially interested in this "map" because it appears (here comes the refrain) academic yet accessible. My students are reading some of the sources dealt with in the counterbalance article and then, I think, we'll look at it as an example of an overview of sources that is more than a sequence of summaries, an example of how one can "merely" synthesize information in a way that is nontrivial but stops short of "expressing one's opinion" or "arguing" one's position.