Using the Nature readings, write a “persuasive” essay [emotional appeal with some facts] about The importance of developing an “ecological conscience.”
Considerations:
1. Always create an effective TITLE. For example—Education: Into a Black Hole
2. Thesis/central focus: Locate this in your 1st paragraph. It should contain a key word that is used throughout your essay.
USE AUTHOR + SIGNAL WORD COMBINATIONS TO:
Introduce “quotes”
Introduce paraphrases
Introduce longer paraphrases (summaries)
Note: Signal Words should be in the “present” tense. Example: Forbes believes, “We should honor our past leaders by following their wise leadership” (56).
Note: Use that to replace the comma in many situations. Example: Forbes believes that “We should honor our past leaders by following their wise leadership” (56).
Note: Use the author’s last name after the full name has been introduced. After the last name is used then use a pronoun he or she or they. Alternate the last name with the pronoun equivalent, with the pronoun equivalent being the most used option. Example: He insists that “leadership examples are necessary markers for learning” (34). He also insists……………
Note: Quotes of 4 + lines are called Block Quotes and are indented an extra ¼” (2 tabs in) + NO quote marks are used. At the end the period is place after the last word, not the citation.
Note: Use a WORD BRIDGE [as needed] before the author’s last name or the pronoun equivalent. Example: Moreover, Forbes (or he) believes, “We should honor our past leaders by following their wise leadership” (56).
Note: Avoid “Floating Quotes” [quotes in sentences by themselves]. Always introduce the quote with a single word or an Author + Signal Word combination. Example where no author is included in the sentence: However, “vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv” (Jones 23).
The nature poems:
Aldo Leopold writes: from a speech and article
(1) “The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and esthetically right; as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the community, and the community includes soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
It cannot be right, in the ecological sense, for a farmer to drain the last marsh, graze the last woods, or slash the last grove in his community, because in doing so he evicts a fauna, a flora, and a landscape whose membership in the community is older than his own, and is equally entitled to respect.
It cannot be right, in the ecological sense, for a farmer to channelize his creek or pasture his steep slopes, because in doing so, he passes flood trouble to his neighbors below, just as his neighbors above him have passed it to him. In cities we do not get rid of nuisances by throwing them across the fence onto the neighbor’s lawn, but in water-management we still do just that.
It cannot be right, in the ecological sense, for the deer hunter to maintain his sport by browsing out the forest, or for the bird-hunter to maintain his by decimating the hawks and owls, or for the fisherman to maintain his by decimating the herons, kingfishers, terns, and otters. Such tactics seek to achieve one kind of conservation by destroying another, and thus they subvert the integrity and stability of the community.
If we grant the premise that an ecological conscience is possible and needed, then its first tenet must be this: economic provocation is no longer a satisfactory excuse for unsocial land-use (or, to use somewhat stronger words, for ecological atrocities). This, however, is a negative statement. I would rather assert positively that decent land-use should be accorded social rewards proportionate to its social importance.
I have no illusions about the speed or the accuracy with which an ecological conscience can become functional. It has required 19 centuries to define decent man-to-man conduct and the process is only half done; it may take as long to evolve a code of decency for man-to-land conduct. In such matters, we should not worry too much about anything except the direction in which we travel. The direction is clear and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.”
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Rachel Carson writes: From “Under the Sea Wind”
(2) “Before sunset, the skies lightened and the wind abated. While it was yet light the sanderlings left the barrier island and set out across the sound. Beneath them as they wheeled over the inlet was the deep green ribbon of the channel that wound, with many curvings, across the lighter shallows of the sound. They followed the channel, passing between the leaning red spar buoys, past the tide rips where the water streamed, broken into swirls and eddies, over a sunken reef of oyster shell, and came at last to the island. There they joined a company of several hundred white-rumped sandpipers, least sandpipers, and ring-necked plovers that were resting on the sand.
While the tide was still ebbing, the sanderlings fed on the island beach…. As they slept, and as the earth rolled from darkness toward light, birds from many feeding places along the coast were hurrying along the flyways that led to the north. For with the passing of the storm the air currents came fresh again and the wind blew clean and steady from the southwest. All through the night the cries of curlews and plovers and knots, of sandpipers and turnstones and yellowlegs, drifted down from the sky. The mockingbirds who lived on the island listened to the cries. The next day they would have many new notes in their rippling, chuckling songs to charm their mates and delight themselves.
About an hour before dawn the sanderling flock gathered together on the island beach, where the gentle tide was shifting the windrows of shells. The little band of brown-mottled birds mounted into the darkness and, as the island grew small beneath them, set out toward the north.”
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Loren Eiseley writes: from The Immense Journey 1957
(3).”Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know-even man himself-would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.”
(4) “Man is no more natural than the world. In reality he is . . . the creator of a phantom universe, the universe we call culture – a formidable realm of cloud shapes, ideas, potentialities, gods, and cities, which with man’s death will collapse into dust and vanish back into “expected” nature.”
(5) “the nature of the human predicament is how nature is to be reentered; how man, the relatively unthinking and proud creator of the second world – the world of culture – may revivify and restore the first world which cherished and brought him into being.”
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Jane Goodal writes: from a Time magazine article
(6) “Can we overcome apathy? Yes, but only if we have hope. One reason for hope lies in the extraordinary nature of human intellectual accomplishment. A hundred years ago, the idea of a 747, of a man on the moon, of the Internet remained in the realm of science fiction. Yet we have seen those things and much, much more. So, now that we have finally faced up to the terrible damage we have inflicted on our environment, our ingenuity is working overtime to find technological solutions. But technology alone is not enough. We must engage with our hearts also. And it’s happening around the world.”
