My friend and colleague, Justin Mando, who serves on the Board of the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association (LSRA) with me, has created a triptych of videos on the Conejohela Flats, a series of small islands and adjacent mudflats in the Susquehanna River which the National Audubon Society calls significant stopover points in the Eastern U.S. for shorebirds. The Flats are located in Clarke Lake, a slow-moving section of the Susquehanna River, and their fortunes rise and fall with the river, its inhabitants, and we humans who use the river.

I asked Justin to answer a few questions about himself and give us some insight into how he came to work in his field and specialize in environmental matters. This is part one of a three-part series. I will share parts two and three this week.

Photo courtesy of Millersville University

You’re an English Professor at Millersville University and currently Department Chair.  Tell us how you got there.

I started at Millersville directly after completing grad school (Ph.D. in Rhetoric and an M.A. before that) at Carnegie Mellon in 2016. I’ve been department chair for 1.5 years now and served as assistant chair for three years before that. I think I was selected by the former chair to be her assistant because I was one of the people in department meetings who always came ready to ask questions.

My areas of expertise are environmental rhetoric, rhetoric of science, and science writing. My training in rhetoric taught me how to investigate, analyze, and create writing about environmental issues, but the whole thing can be applied more broadly. That led me to teach Science Writing as one of my primary duties at Millersville. My specific research interest has been related to the question of how people communicate about environmental threats. Fracking was the topic I selected to research and write about for my doctoral work.

I have another research topic that has been increasingly taking my attention, which is intellectual risk-taking, especially as it exists in the writing classroom. Colleagues from grad school and I were curious how we could encourage our students to consider taking risks as writers rather than just following the safest path to complete their assignments. I have continued to work on this for over a decade now and am making good headway with my colleague from UMass Dartmouth, Alexis Teagarden. She and I are currently writing a textbook, editing a special issue of a journal, and leading a workshop on this topic. What’s really exciting about it to me is that asking students to think about risk has shown me how generative concepts like “courage” and “risk” can be for students when you really get them to dig into what those concepts mean to them. The connection to my environmental work is in helping my students see that their voices matter, especially when they are willing to take a risk to say or do something unconventional, something that pushes the boundaries of what’s expected. We need more people who give a damn today, and I’m doing my best to help my students find that within themselves. 

What books, articles, papers, etc., have you written?  Do they have a common theme? What are you most proud of?

I published a book called Fracking and the Rhetoric of Place: How We Argue from Where We Stand in 2021. That was a big accomplishment for me that helped me get promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. The book was developed from my doctoral dissertation. I have an article on the topic that was published in the journal Environmental Communication. I also have published another article in that journal on the topic of representations of invasive Asian carp, co-authored with Garrett Stack. I’m pretty proud of the title we stuck on that one: “Convincing the Public to Kill.” We found that people were using xenophobic rhetoric to promote the eradication of these non-native fish, which we see as a big problem. 

I’ve also published one book chapter and two articles on the topic of intellectual risk in the writing classroom in the journals Rhetoric Review and Composition Studies. The book chapter appears in the recently published book “If at First You Don’t Succeed: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Question of Failure.”

One of my favorite publications is a short essay about praying mantises that hatched on my Christmas tree a few years back — Mantis Move In. I really found it to be so enjoyable to write an essay like that after so much academic writing. 

I’ll also admit to a weird side road that my life has taken over the past couple of years. I got way into an Australian psychedelic rock band called King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. I’ve always been a big fan of live music, especially improvisation, like you find in the band Phish. When I found out that King Gizzard didn’t have a fan website similar to Phish.net, I started one by purchasing the URL “KGLW.net” for $17 for the year. That’s turned into a much bigger enterprise than I ever expected. (We were even mentioned in Rolling Stone in an article about the band.) It’s been an outrageously fun creative outlet that allows me to collaborate with similarly weird people from all over the world. I’ve also been able to write some blog posts for the site that give me a lot of joy. King Gizzard has a strong environmental message that really resonates with me, so that was the initial draw. They even have a song called “Plastic Boogie” with a refrain that goes, “Fuck all of that plastic!”

Photo courtesy of Millersville University

Speaking of plastics, when did your interest in plastics begin, and how has it evolved?

I try to stay pretty well-read on environmental issues broadly, so I’ve long been aware of the problems we face with plastics. But it was my first river cleanup with Ted Evgeniadis [our own Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper] and John Naylor [former LSRA Board member and still at the helm for LSRA events such as the Plastics Purge, and soon-to-be-rolled-out Geotrashing] that really sent the message home. That was right after I joined the Riverkeeper Board of Directors. We went out, just the three of us, to do a cleanup along the eastern bank of the river north of Wrightsville. I was astonished at the amount of trash we were finding. I also was captivated by John Naylor (Susquehanna_Plastic_Pickn_1000). He let me borrow two books that really made an impact on me: Garbology and From the Bottom Up. The latter was written by Chad Pregracke, a guy pretty similar to John who had simply had enough and decided to make it his personal mission to clean up a river. 

Ah, I know you want more, but we’re going to save the rest of Justin’s commentary for the next two videos, so sit tight, enjoy the video above, and feel free to ask Justin any questions you might have. We’ll be back in a couple days with Part Two on the Conejohela Flats when things are going to get really interesting.

Thanks for reading.

pam lazos 2.2.25