Fouling Our Own Nests Robert Glennon Analysis

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A nuclear holocaust would result in more deaths than water pollution. Robert Glennon highlights the absence of interest people have when it come to the water crisis in “Fouling Our Own Nests” as he opens the chapter with women walking around half naked and having no concern for the filth surrounding them, being in the United State’s largest city without a sewer system, Lake Havasu (Glennon 65). Glennon believes humans are contaminating their valuable water supply and are unaware of the seriousness of consuming tainted water. He argues that people are at fault for the water pollution and that something needs to be done to salvage our existing water supply. The evidence Glennon uses to support his claim, however, are biased, overblown, and improbable. …show more content…

He discusses the overflows local wastewater systems experience because “cities combine sewage and stormwater in a single collection system”(66). The tone present is not supportive and shows the author’s bias against the collection system that has given plenty of citizens drinkable water. As he describes the incident in Milwaukee and the District of Columbia, Glennon makes it seem like the government purposefully “dumped” raw sewage to harm its citizens. Nowhere in his grounds does he include the benefits that come with having a collection system. He continues on to talk about a teenage boy who “became the sixth victim of Naegleria forvleri after being infected while swimming in Lake Havasu”(67). Glennon throws in opinionated words like “grisly” and “disgusting” to make more of an impact on the audience, and this displays his bias against water pollution. He describes the results of a couple of parasites, but does not specifically state where the parasites originate from, thus disqualifying that the death of the boy was a result of raw sewage being dumped in the lake the boy was swimming in, as the parasite could have appeared from other sources. Glennon proceeds with a qualifier... “almost 2,000 people in Idaho and Utah suffered from infection by cryptosporidium, believed to have been spread at “splash parks” where children play”(67). Using the word “believed”, undermines the true source of

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