Monday, April 16, 2012

Enduring

         When reading "The Obligation to Endure" it's hard not to notice the way that Rachel Carson uses her research. She uses several different professionals to further her points as if trying to add credit to her words to show that it isn't just her that feels this way and she isn't the only one finding that we are poisoning ourselves with the pesticides that we use. Her idea seems to be really passionate to her;    this shows throughout all of her main points where she begins to almost start ranting about how horrible we are for continuing to use pesticides. Her opinion and facts are somehow tainted by the fact that she is an environmentalist and that she puts her emotions into this piece of writing.
         She does use the research she gathered in a good way by providing good quotes from different people. This can give the reader a warm fuzzy feeling in knowing that she can back up her facts and it isn't just her opinion. She also provides solutions to some of the problems that are given or at least somewhere that the world as a whole can start pushing for.
        On the other hand some fo these ideas that are given to reduce the problems that we have are very biased; leaning more towards her environmentalist view. A good example to point out would be the decrease of acreages so that there would be less plants for insects to infest and therefore reduce the insect problem without using insecticides. I can't help but to look back at another reading we had, "What's Eating America". In this essay Michael Polin uses some words from Vaclav Smil's book "Enriching the Earth" in which Vaclav explains that the creation of the Haber Bosch process in which ammonium nitrate is used to produce nitrogen for agriculture. The reason that this process was created was due to the fact that with the current organic way of producing crops we would only have 2 in 5 people that would of been born in todays society. This shows that with the current production of food in agriculture we are just getting by and if we were to reduce the acreage for farming we would be hindering ourselves even more than we are currently. Of course this is just one example of hers that appears to not be applicable, but her other ideas seem quite reasonable as alternatives to better our environment in the future.
       All around this essay appears to have a lot of work put into with the research that she has done. It has at least made me think about how much pesticides we use in America and gives me an idea of some things that can possibly be done to prevent any more damage to this environment that we have. After all we only have one Earth and it's our job to make it livable for the next generations to come.

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