This course explores how local institutions—including businesses, nonprofit organizations, and our own campus—variously advance and challenge received ideas about nature and sustainability. By analyzing the public-facing, multimodal rhetoric of these institutions, we will ask: how suitable are these ideas for a consideration of the complex environmental issues of our present age? Specifically, students in this course will analyze how projects at Georgia Tech (the Living Building project) as well as businesses and nonprofit organizations engaged in real-world work across Atlanta (including Zoo Atlanta, the Georgia Aquarium, Trees Atlanta, the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, and others) conceive of “nature” and humans’ relationship to it. We will also examine several contemporary literary texts (poetry, creative nonfiction, and a novel) to advance and complicate our discussion of key concepts.