Sunday, February 8, 2015

20. Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp

In her article, Joy Williams discusses about the environment in a different way. She makes it clear that she does not like how modern society is treating the environment- using it for its own benefit, merely for self-interest. She starts arguing by talking about how the environment has been mistreated, and how the famous nature photographs tend to hide the genuine current state of nature- which is not as "pretty" as a picture would seem to show. Then, she abruptly changes topics and talks about how shrimpers refuse to use TED (Turtle Excluding Device) whilst fishing for shrimps, since it lowers the amount of what they catch; but risking lives of turtles. In addition to this, she argues about how tourism has been a "destructive industry" where the nature we see is not "real nature", how wildlife interest harms animals (and sometimes endangers them), and how pollution leads to acid rain which is detrimental to society. She then concludes her article by blaming society for being too incautious with their actions, leading to the belief that nature is solely a source for "human" materials and not the immaculate, beautiful piece of art it used to be. She ends by saying that this environmental problem is a hard one to fix, that not even politically it can be fixed- that it now is only a moral issue that can be changed only by society's actions.
The way that Joy Williams wrote her article was not in the standard, one-way informational style that environmental articles usually possess. She used the word "you" various times throughout the essay, actually making it seem that she was blaming the readers for having caused all the environmental problems of today. What Joy Williams also does is that she italicizes words that relate to the environment such as "filtering systems", "arable land", "tourist industry", and "secure landscape". By doing this, she emphasizes her urgency to warn readers that society today has been deteriorating the environment. The author provides many examples to support her statement that society kills the environment; however, the way she states the examples in the article is a bit confusing and exaggerated in some ways. When she changes topic/example, she abruptly changes it- without giving the reader time to think the prior example though. Her essay could have been better in many ways: she could've used transitions to make it flow more, instead of using appeal to pity, she could have used more of fact-based evidences and instead of blaming readers directly, she could have blamed society as a whole instead. Though her ideas were good, the way she expressed them in an article were not that effective.

https://disassemblingwalle.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/savethewhales1.pdf

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