Argumentative environment
Argumentative environmentArguementative Environment
Currently, a controversy is swirling over the issues raised by the despoiling of the world's natural environment. Poet Stanley Kunitz in "The War Against the Trees" depicts a man watching his neighbor, "who sold his lawn to standard oil" (Kunitz 122), laugh as bulldozers ruin the natural beauty of the grounds with its "forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids" (Kunitz 123). As industry wages war not just against flowers and shrubbery, but also against the town's pleasant past. Kunitz's speaker is angry that this war "against the great-grandfathers of the town" (Kunitz 123) is destroying these ancestors' attempt to preserve nature, not allow "the green world" (Kunitz 123) to be turned into a "death-foxed page" (Kunitz 123) of barrenness. Some pro-environmentalists, like Sioux medicine man John (Fire) Lame Deer, claim that the damage industrialized society has done to nature is both immense and nearly criminal , the result of greed. Lame Deer complains that the white men "have not only despoiled the earth, the rocks, the minerals, all of which they call �dead' but which are very much alive; they have even changed the animals, which are a part of us, part of the Great Spirit, changed them in a horrible way, so no one can recognize them" (Erodes 209). On the other hand, conservatives frequently label environmentalists as extremists who despise almost all of capitalism's practices regarding ecology. That is, some extremist defenders of the profit motive name call, terming environmentalists "vandals" (Huber2 1) who prefer "forests over jobs" (Huber2 1) that the industrial age provides. Clearly, the issue has been politicized. Nonetheless, no one can deny that the earth, while not on the brink of annihilation, has been polluted and our air contaminated by the inroads created by the mechanized era. Furthermore, no caring person should recommend a "do-nothing" policy regarding the preservation of our environment which we ourselves are in the process of ruining. The answer to the ecological dilemma is to assess realistically the extent of the damage and work to create a sensible, practical solution to the problem of our eroding environment through cooperative efforts.
It is hard to doubt that human beings are wasting or eroding the earth which we all live on. Not only have the industrial nations altered their natural settings by overbuilding dams, destroying rain forests, and driving species out of their natural habitats to die or mutate, but they have pushed the earth close to the limits of its resources. Lame Deer charges that because certain animals like coyotes, if left alive, "could lose some man a few cents," (Erodes 212) our fauna are being depleted. We have also divorced ourselves from the healing power of nature and from our innate " �love for all that has been placed on this earth' " (Erodes 214) such as vegetation, the waters, the air, and all animals-- except homo sapiens, whom out of...
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