Yuxin Guo
03/06/2013
ENG 121
First draft of Essay 2
Dr. Hodgkins The Land We Live In—Earth Earth, the land we live in, we are doing everything on it and live with other creatures. The nature provides everything we need and also we use the nature build machines and high technology stuffs. However, after we went into the Industrial age, people use nature, exploit the nature and destroy the nature. People did not realize that the nature should be protected, they just use it and destroy it. Some people may say: “we are the master of the nature, we build the world.” Actually we are not, pretty sure we already get the answer from nature today, for example, global warming, disease carrying, disasters and so on. Global warming, increasing natural disaster let people see clearly what we got from nature after we made the earth so dirty. People should do something to reduce the pollution and increase the green land. One of the revenge from nature is global warming. Global warming means the earth’s average temperature changed both land and ocean because burning fuels and over fell trees. Burning fuels make the concentration of carbon dioxide get increase. Also people over fell trees make the area of green land fell sharply, in a way it decrease the ability of removal. Finally, the concentration of carbon dioxide gets increase and makes the world temperature changed. There are some data information show the increasing world temperature, “Without any change in our habits, Earth may warm by about five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, although the actual warming could be half or even double this amount, depending primarily on how clouds respond” (Caldeira, 2012). In china, there are a lot of cities’ temperature will over 40 centigrade which is equals 104 Fahrenheit. This temperature also appears in my city. In the July and August, the temperature at noon will over 40 centigrade. And in the winter, it will have less snow than before. The negative effect of global warming already occurs in our daily life. The article “The Environmental Issue from Hell” also mention about the global warming. The author said in the conclusion that:
“The point is not that such actions by themselves—any individual actions—will make any real dent in the levels of carbon dioxide pouring into our atmosphere. Even if you got 10 percent of Americans really committed to changing their energy use, their solar homes wouldn’t make much of a difference in our national totals. But 10 percent would be enough to change the politics around the issue, enough to pressure politicians to pass laws that would cause us all to shift our habits. And so we need to begin to take an issue that is now the province of technicians and turn it into a political issue, just as bus boycotts began to make public the issue of race, forcing the system to respond. That response is likely to be ugly—there are huge companies with a lot to lose, and many people so tied in to their current ways of life that advocating change smacks of subversion. But this has to become a political issue—and fast. The only way that may happen, short of a hideous drought or monster flood, is of it becomes a personal issue first.” (Mckibben, 447) The second example for revenge is disease-carrying. In the article “The Obligation to Endure”, the author said: “Disease-carrying insects become important where human beings are crowded together, especially under conditions where sanitation is poor, as in times of natural disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is a sobering fact, however, as we shall presently see, that the method of massive chemical control has had only limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very conditions it is intended to curb” (Carson, 451). But today, we have another kind of disease-carrying which is called avian influenza. At first, this kind of flu