Allison Hawthorn
Deming is a smart woman. Smarter than me. She’s got a lot going on up top. She knows the history
of the environmental essay. She has ideas on how it should progress. She
recognizes the problems of our culture and conveys the dilemmas we as a society
are facing. She says, “But this level of advocacy and activism seems pallid to
me when compared to the severity of our malaise and instability… We have poor
people whom we ignore, leave stranded on their roofs in a flood, or cast out
onto the street.”
I would argue
that Allison Hawthorn Deming is alienating the poor and uneducated herself in
this essay. Her writing is not put in simplistic terms. She’s not making her
essay accessible. But I think it goes beyond this essay. How do we make
environmental issues relevant to the underprivileged and uneducated? We are
leaving them stranded by relying on big words and big science books that only
few of the means to access, let alone understand.
The movement to
make environmentalism a top priority starts with the citizens, the
constituents. To vote people into positions of power that will make the Earth their
top priority.
But how can we do
that if our citizens don’t know the depth of what’s going on around them
because no one has made a large enough effort to get the information to them?
Maybe thats what she wants the future of the essay to be.
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ReplyDeleteAllison Hawthorne has seemed to plague everyone with a bit of hopelessness on the subject. The language showed tallberrybee that we are alienating the uneducated from the topic of environmental issues. John doe agrees that our polarization of believes in the modern world is plaguing our ability to work things out. Though these, and all the other facts pitched by Hawthorne, can leave readers a sad overwhelmed by doubt. There is a solution.
DeletePitched by the fellow Cephalopod who unfortunately is missing his father, if we start now there is hope? I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist. The point of Hawthorne’s essay is to propose a new future for the essay. In OctopusWithoutAFather’s post he brings up the theory of the butterfly effect. In short, this theory created by Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder is proposing the terrors of time travel because a butterfly’s wing could cause an effect to history/future generations. The theory is science fiction meant as anti-time travel, but why not nature? We know changes made today will change the future. Like the butterfly, maybe we [writers] need to flap our wings and share our nature essay’s in order to make nature important for the future generations.
Week #4 META post makeup
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ReplyDeleteAllison Hawthorne Deming certainly missed her mark according to launch posters, and I would like to agree. She is all over the place, not really speaking in a language that we seemed to understand, or even began to want to understand. It seems I and the other members of this group overall, are still a little confused about the article, however there are some really great things brought up in this too, and I think some things we can certainly connect to our class environment as a whole.
I think what the tallberrybee stated about me is very true, and I know for a fact has been brought fourth in class. We can not even begin to communicate climate change to the masses if we can not communicate its sever impact in plain language.
We are all likely at least juniors, but likely mostly seniors in this course. That means we have likely at least had three to four years of formal education after high school. If we, as people who have gotten the benefit of having a little bit more education than the masses, are struggling to understand Deming, is her message kind of pointless?
We all have discussed this in class sessions about other works we have had the opportunity to have read. Not to say that there should never be articles written like this, there certainly should because people as intelligent as Deming have a lot to show the world, however she missed her mark on her urgency by not appealing to the masses.
This can really seem like somehow this woman thinks that the only catalysts for climate change are those who are wealthy and and can be educated. This is ridiculous, as most people are not rich, and very few are educated.
Moving the conversation along, how can we make sure the message and urgency of climate change can be felt and understood by all?