Unit 3: Recovery & Reciprocity — Oathbringer

• Engage in structured research on an environmental topic, practicing the full research cycle from question formulation through source evaluation, reading Oathbringer alongside scientific writing, environmental journalism, and indigenous knowledge texts.

• Write environmental argument integrating evidence from both scientific and narrative sources, handling complexity and uncertainty without losing argumentative clarity.

• Understand how to conduct and document research across multiple source types, including scientific, journalistic, narrative, and cultural sources.

• Use Oathbringer's ecological world-building — the spren system, the highstorm ecology, Urithiru as a living building — as a conceptual framework for analyzing real-world arguments about ecological reciprocity and recovery.

• What does the ecology of Shadesmar — where the physical world's geography is inverted and every object becomes a bead of glass in a vast ocean — reveal about the relationship between the human world and the world that sustains it?

• How does Navani Kholin's project of restoring Urithiru — a living tower whose Sibling spren was nearly killed — function as a model of ecological reciprocity: tending the system that tends you?

This research unit examines humanity's relationship with the natural world through the ecological lens that Oathbringer, the third Stormlight Archive volume, provides. Sanderson's Roshar is a world shaped by its ecology at every level: highstorms deposit crem that builds the geology; spren are fragments of Honor and Cultivation that embody natural forces; the Listeners (Parshendi) bond with spren to take different forms in a deep reciprocal relationship with the rhythms of the land. When the Everstorm arrives — a counter-storm that the Fused have summoned — it does not merely disrupt weather; it destabilizes the entire ecological and spiritual system that Roshar depends on. Students investigate how Sanderson uses this planetary-scale disruption to make arguments about reciprocity, recovery, and what it means to be responsible for the systems that sustain life.