In his critique, “The Trouble with Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon argues against the romantic conceptualization of nature that a great portion of the environmentalist movement has embraced. Subsequently, Cronon revokes the Romantic and even quasi-religious notion that wilderness spaces are separate from those inhabited by man. He argues that by eliminating the divide in perception between the human constructs of the natural world and the civilized world, man will be encouraged to take more responsibility for his actions that negatively impact the environment. In prefacing his conclusion, he writes, “Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the place for which we take responsibility,…
Never has a man left the embrace of nature once he found himself enamored by it; this infatuation is found in both John Muir’s and Aldo Leopold’s writing, a sense of wanting to protect this deity they call Mother Nature, a moral and ethical responsibility which every human being has to this Mother. Both John Muir and Aldo Leopold recount their almost romantic encounter with Mother Nature in their books Our National Parks and A Sand County Almanac, respectively. However, in both books it is notable that each man carries instilled in the very fiber of their being a sense of dissatisfaction toward the process of mechanization and industrialization; processes which unfortunately…
In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, she makes a compelling argument for the planet’s sustainability. Through several chapters, she illustrates how, despite how the Earth provides for all of our needs, we do not repay the favour and instead destroy the life it has left. We are not realizing the value of preserving the environment; instead, we are adapting to the thought that the extended use of fossil fuels is typical, climate change is irreversible, environmental pollution is an unfixable problem, endangered species are beyond salvation, and society has become increasingly disconnected to the planet as it once was. Kimmerer articulates this throughout multiple chapters.…
There are so many bad things in this world and the environment is one of them bad things. Our environment will never just go away but it’s definitely needs to change. It’s causing damage to our friends and family, it’s taking away all of our animals, and it’s hurting the world we know around us. If we don’t do something about it, will the world’s population go down because of a great amount of people dying? Will the animals become extinct and no one ever talk about them again? Will the oceans be able to hold their ground and keep producing the oxygen it’s giving us? Throughout this essay, Sandra Steingraber does a great job using ethos, pathos, and logos while talking about the environment and the issues it is causing to the people and the…
This web that Suzuki speaks of has been built up and perfected over millions of years. Every single aspect of nature has found a way to evolve and mold its way of living to depend on every single other aspect. This includes, whether we know it or not, human beings. Gore sees the world from a different, more statistical lens. In his eyes, though we are part of this earth and ecosystem, we are not made up of the elements, but rather are inhabitants of this planet for a short while. He gives the impression that humankind is not actually part of the ecosystem, just an outside force, or separate entity, acting upon it. No matter the perception of our place on the planet, both writers agree on the fact that humans are throwing the balance of the earth off kilter and see us as without a doubt the number one cause of the decline in the biosphere’s diversity and climate change in general. The two men also mutually share the understanding that the detached, shortsighted way of living in which we live today has only recently been adopted by society. Suzuki depicts the way in which our “ancient understanding… has been shattered” (429), while Gore outlines the “new relationship between humankind and the earth” (460) in their respective writings.…
In “ Everybody’s Guilty – The Ecological Dilemma, “ author and professor of Human Ecology at University of California, Santa Barbara, Garrett Hardin, explains the current issue with invisible reverberations. Hardin calls attention to the readers about how innocent actions by individuals can inflict on the environment. “ We all acquiesce in the system of arrangements and practices that has created our ecological crisis” (Hardin, 40). In order to approve of our actions, individuals tend to hide from reality behind symbols and/or words. Incorporating rhetoric into our everyday lives does this.…
The flora and fauna of the world is delightful to humankind, much like a popsicle might be a delight to an individual. When one considers the rainforests and the deforestation that takes place there in order to support a growing human population, this relates to the consumption of the popsicle. People may neglect to think about the consequences of deforestation or the use of fossil fuels, even though they may be a participant in these processes through their consumption of paper products or devices that need energy. The person consuming the popsicle might also be in denial about the impermanence of the popsicle, or the consequences of consuming it. Russ Crest, an author at Beautiful Decay magazine, says of Myers and Berg’s work; “ Sometimes something must be broken or fractured in order for us to see its value. This may be especially true for our environment. Only when we see the consequences of our actions do we begin to understand our complicity in fracturing it” (Crest). People do not notice the destruction of the environment until awareness is brought to it, either in their real life or in news media. Until then, people take nature for…
In Let Them Eat Carbon, Sinclair repeatedly stresses that the attempts politicians and governments are making to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are very expensive and generally ineffective. Ordinary families pay a heavy price for the attempts governments make to control emissions, as they increase electricity bills, raise the price of gasoline, and put manufacturing jobs at risk. This issue hits certain people particularly hard: industrial worker, as they are already struggling to compete with rivals in countries with lower labour costs, the poor and the elderly who feel these increasing energy costs strongly, and anyone with a big family who needs to drive their kids around because they do not live in a city centre. At the other end of the scale, politicians who do not need to drive vast distances because of their central location, and have above average incomes, will not feel the strain of these increasing costs to the same degree, and would easily underestimate the extent of the pressure on average household budgets. Sinclair scrutinizes how much of the money invested into the energy cutting schemes end up in the pockets of an array of special interests, as climate change has slowly turned into a business rather than an…
What better way to stir up a person’s emotions than to threaten his privacy, safety, and the well-being of his family? This example of pathos is a common tactic in a rhetorical argument, and one that has its place, but certainly does not belong in a work meant to raise awareness of the destruction of forests and canyons. Edward Abbey, author of Eco-Defense, begins his work by describing a scene that would make any man’s heart race, “If a stranger batters your door down with an axe, threatens your family and yourself with a deadly weapon, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants…” (Abbey) Immediately you find yourself engulfed, prepared for battle, only to realize just a few lines down, Abbey is using this manipulation as a set up for his argument that we should feel the same emotions towards the defense of our public lands. The author immediately loses merit with this false analogy, and the continuation of fallacies throughout the work serve only to prove his argument ineffective.…
The contradictive topic of environmentalism leads to unproductive discussions. Edward O. Wilson’s satire illustrates this concept through a unique structure, parallelism, and diction. The discussions of the topic, environmentalism, are unproductive and redundant in nature.…
Over the years, the planet’s luscious greenery, vast bodies of ocean, and clear blue skies have declined at a steady rate with the overtake of industrial buildings and pollution from technology . For the explorers and hard-core transcendentalists who devote themselves to living on the healthy and undeveloped parts of the world, nature and “the life and simple beauty of it is too good to pass up.” (McCandless 12/7/16) If technological advancements continue to occupy most of Earth, this appreciative view of the planet will no longer be attractive to those whose lives depend and thrive upon its bare soil. To some Transcendentalist preachers, like Henry David Thoreau, nature is also perceived as “daily to be shown matter to come in contact with,” giving people a chance to ask “Who are we?…
The act of conserving the environment is extremely Hot Topic in contemporary politics and the author Edward O Wilson ,a scientist, proposes two different viewpoints about environmental conservation to help inform the politically involved people around the world. The author conducts his essay through multiple forms of satire in order to portray the useless bantering between conservatives and liberals .…
This is as easily extended to a policy of strict conservation or preservation as it is to resource exploitation, as each of these positions would be in some regard good for humans. From a strong anthropocentrist view, one might “have no interest in preserving penguins for their own sake; penguins are important because people enjoy seeing them walk on rocks.” (Clowney & Mosto, 335) The environmental position here is still that penguins are important. Strict adherence to strong anthropomorphism does not disqualify a person from classification as an environmentalist; in fact with very few exceptions, environmentalists still value human needs and desires and moral concern above those of an individual non-human, which is the fundamental assertion of weak anthropomorphism. Biocentrism offers a much expanded definition of moral standing and intrinsic value; extending these characteristics from humans to all and only individual living things. This concept, in conjunction with the slightly less expanded sentio-centrism of Peter Singer and Tom Regan and the further-expanded moral consideration of the biotic community inherent in ecocentrism and deep ecology, more explicitly defines the moral obligations of humans with regard to environmental policy. The concept of radical equality is perhaps the most contentious claim of biocentrists; however it is neither necessary nor detrimental to the usefulness of biocentric reasoning to environmentalism. All of these positions make definitive claims as to what ought or ought not be done, and though they rely on different reasoning, they agree on appropriate courses of action in most cases. Philosophically the differences here are, undoubtably, significant and worthy of exploration and debate. In the context of modern environmentalism and public policy, however, these fundamentally distinct philosophies work together toward…
Although a lot of effects have manifested in today’s time, there’s only a little effort exerted to lessen these harms. First, critics pointed out that the nature is an ever-evolving entity. As it is ever-evolving, whatever we do to it – may it be good or bad – actually doesn’t have any bearing because it is destined to change the nature that we once knew. Another thing that critics pointed out was that humans are part and parcel of nature itself. Critics say we are one with nature. If this is the case, it is possible for ourselves to be blamed for whatever experiences nature we have and we can be held liable because we are nature.…
Caring for and preserving the environment is an issue that gains interest daily. In the essays “How to Poison the Earth” by Linnea Saukko and “Chronicles of Ice” by Gretel Ehrlich both authors make excellent points about how to save and conserve the planet Earth. Ehrlich and Saukko go about making these points in two completely different ways though although they do have their similarities. Saukko uses a more sarcastic and ironic way to prove her point while Ehrlich uses a more serious and detailed way to prove hers.…