Can the Earth Be Saved?

It is awfully concerning that the human race has to be convinced to conserve the finite resource that is the land we live on. From debate still raging as to whether or not the global warming is actually happening¹, to wasting thousands of acres of farmland that could create enough food to feed all 7 billion of us, then taking it and feeding it to cattle to eventually eat them², or even not knowing how to properly throw away the hundreds upon thousands of tons of non-biodegradable plastic, so we decide to dump it in the ocean³. Just as disturbing, is how quickly humans are taking over land to accommodate for our constantly growing population. The Wildlife Conservation Society studied and reported on the landmasses composed on Earth, and found that “17 percent of land is still virtually untouched”. Now, nearly one fifth of land seems like a sizable portion, but the study continues saying that this is the case, “…mostly because it is inhospitable to humans. In areas capable of growing basic crops, and therefore most able to support people, untouched lands have diminished to 2 percent of the total”. And even that statistic may be too generous. The same study notes that “Pristine lands, by the strictest definition, no longer exist… Atmospheric pollution has settled on every earthly surface. Human-induced climate change is affecting ecosystems across the planet.” Worst of all, this was a study that took place in 2005. Now that nearly a decade has passed, who knows how small the two percent of usable land has shrunk to, or how much of the other 15 percent has been flat leveled to make more space for suburbia (Marsh).

This isn’t an issue being ignored, either. Emphatic efforts are being made across the U.S. to preserve wildlife, maximize utilization of land, and maintain environmental needs along with human necessity. The Land Use Clinic in Georgia have been working on a project known as New Ruralism, a combination of restructuring the living conditions and homes of Georgia families, as well as conservation and sustainability of natural fauna and farmland. Essentially, any new construction would be compacted and created as close-proximity housing, businesses, and industry, which would usually be farther spread across the land. By enacting on this, examples like “Serenbe, [Georgia], consisting of 900 acres in total, has planned to maintain 70% of the land as green space” (Stratton). This change in the way architecture and living space is designed to truly maximize the area is a step in the right direction. Prebuilt land can also take part in the New Ruralism, like Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia, which is taking advancements towards the “conservation of existing green space, promote land values, and encourage sustainable development”. By building around the ideologies of protecting the areas green spaces, the town is already saving and setting a standard for eco and industrial coexistence. These developments have only been around for the greater part of the last decade, but New Urbanism and New Realism is taking its hold on the standard for land creation, appearing “up in California, Maryland, the New England states, and Georgia” (Stratton).

            Also attempting to combine agriculture and urbanity is the SAGE organization (Sustainable Agriculture Education). SAGE is also taking part in a New Ruralization on the West Coast in California. As well as covering outreach programs for students to learn of being eco friendly, as well as what is called an Urban Edge AgParks, which “food production, nature trails, and agricultural learning—all addressing economic, health-related, educational, and recreational needs— create multi-functional places that link farmers and urban residents for their mutual benefit”. Combining a learning process about how urban living benefits from the sustaining influence of agriculture with the hands on effects, SAGE attempts to link both ways of life and hopefully cementing a feeling of inseparability.

Despite these positive outlets, these don’t compare to the destruction we still impede upon the Earth. Creating restoration space and allowing natural forestation sadly cannot counteract the problem, it’s a rebuilding process. Humanity needs to not only try and recover, but also fix the problems still harming the many ecosystems of the world. Any step towards a healthier earth is a good step, but more steps need to be taken.

Works Cited:

1.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPgZfhnCAdI

2.      http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat

3.     http://www.takepart.com/oceans/plastic-pollution

Marsh, Bill. "Where the Human Footprint Is Lightest." Nytimes.com. The New York Times        Company, 31 July 2005. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.            <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/weekinreview/31marsh.html>.

"SAGE, Sustainable Agriculture Education." SAGE RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2014. <http://www.sagecenter.org/>.

Stratton, Emily M., "New Ruralism" (2009). . Paper 18.      http://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/landuse/18

Science Journalism is Still just Journalism

When standing in line at the grocery store, a special rack advertises celebutante’s faces tying to sell magazines through the gossip of the rich and famous. “This isn’t news, who reports this?” And yet there is a large, hard working business of writers and photojournalists and editors staying up through the night to get their products to print in the next issue. The sci/tech sphere of journalisms similarities to celebrity news sadly doesn’t end at the writing staff. Although, yes, a scientific study is much more acceptable to read and call “news”, the way in which both types of articles are written, selected for print, and published parallel in more ways than just facts in a magazine.

In M. Killingsworth and Jaqueline Palmer’s book EcoSpeak, the pairing and conflicts of news and human interest plays an obvious role in the overarching process of journalism. Because news can be a transmission of any new information, human interest “is the leading factor in determining what scientific activities will be covered as big stories” (Killingsworth Palmer 134). Depending on what is going on in the individual spheres of all of the readers of the news source, stories are chosen as to what will be most read and liked by the readers. In their example, Killingsworth and Palmer talk of the 1988 drought and the domination of news reports on global warming. “Despairingly called the ‘popular image of science’”, the more read science news sources including Time and Newsweek played heavily to the global warming epidemic because of it’s affect on the masses, sometimes overplaying the issue, even so far as to making “the ‘Endangered Earth’ the ‘Planet of the Year’” (141). Although global warming was a legitimate issue that needed to be addressed, its urgency with the populace and the peaking of peoples’ interest created an exigence to produce as much information as possible on the matter. A chapter in EcoSpeak starts with the quote by Stephen Schieder, saying “The public’s perceptions, of course, are primarily shaped by… the media, which thrive on the four D’s: drama, disaster, debate, and dichotomy.” The selection of what gets front page treatment with a magazine, whether it’s a science magazine or a paparazzi tabloid, depends heavily on it’s popularity with the readers before the articles are even printed.

When a target audience is chosen, (the largest audience, preferably), the journalist must pander to his audience. In the article “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Science Facts” by Jeanne Fahnestock, the intelligence of a mass audience is analyzed and can hinder the efficiency and information in the article itself. An inserted quote by Einstein sums up the argument by saying an author “succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension”. Because the target audience of the article would not be as scientifically aware as the rhetor or rhetors who produced the story, either a necessary and long explanation is in order or the information must be spoon fed to a comprehensible level. Einstein goes on to say that the author has the other option of giving “an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further” (Fahnestock 276). For the sake of both the audience and the success of the article, the appeasement of the audience’s intelligence on the matter needs to be kept in mind.

The sad truth is that celebrity gossip capitalizes on both aspects that the science community must work towards to retain readership: they are simple, easy reads that the common audience feels relates to them and peaks their interest.

A Deep Analysis of Dennis Baron's "A Right To Be Forgotten"

With the current explosion of electronic, technological, and Internet based advancements in recent years, information has bloomed and grown and spread to all corners of the globe. Social media and blogging and news sources have connected causes, rallied revolutions, and have allowed previously small voices to be heard, permeating the masses. In an interesting turn of events, Dennis Baron wrote an article, “The Right To Be Forgotten” which tackles an unexpected result of this increasing of public voice: when a voice chooses to silence itself. Baron’s article describes the news story of Mario Costeja González, who enacted nearly a reversal of free speech, in that he wished to have information previously released about himself deleted from Google.

This article tackles many different exigencies, delivering an array of philosophical quandaries from a purely factual article. Sci/Tech blogs employ the logical and thesis driven explanations of scientific analysis, while enabling rhetoric to add to unanswered ideologies of life, the universe, and existence.

Specifically, Baron presents the exigency of conflicting human rights, the rights to “free speech and an explicit right to privacy” (Baron). In an ever invasive internet world where deeply kept secrets along with the least private aspects of someone’s writing can be shared through the same machine, an increase in the use of free speech and a demand to one’s own privacy is critical, and very incongruous. Costeja González’s case spawned from a news snippet written about him a full eleven years before the court case, about his home being seized and foreclosed upon. Because this was the extent of any news written about him, the article was the first link to appear through a Google search. Although this information was previously public and existed through Costeja González’s actions, his lawsuit challenges whether or not his personal privacy trumps the newspapers use of free press. The need for the discourse arises in the ruling: Costeja González did the impossible and won a court case against Google. His information was eliminated from Google in Europe and replaced with a “notice of removal”. Unfortunately sparking an information recession, in some sense, Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González ignited thousands of copycat lawsuits to remove information from Google’s endless database.

Although the court case itself was an odd event and rather difficult to decipher its true exigence, Baron makes it very clear what his article is trying to accomplish. By starting the essay with a quote from a Roman poet saying, “the word, once sent, can never be recalled,” Baron is warning his readers, and this serves as the thesis statement, attempting to deliver the articles exigence as simply and coherently as possible. Although, on the surface, news of a man having his dirty laundry deleted from the Internet counters this quote, but speculating the lengths that were taken to finally reach a verdict of the court case, as well as the popularity of the story outgrowing the original exigence in the first place, Baron ironically uses a counterpoint he refutes to deliver his caution to the exigence. By building off of the technology news article, Baron delivers his message to an audience that is probably well informed on the subject of Internet freedom as well as Internet privacy, but the article serves as an analysis of their somewhat-contrasting beliefs.

Baron, Dennis. "The Right to Be Forgotten." Web log post. The Web of Language. N.p., 24 Aug. 2014. Web. 7 Sept. 2014.