Sandra Steingraber In These Times Despair Not Summary

Turn the Other Cheek
Is climate change real? Are we at fault? Most of us don’t go to bed at night thinking about those questions, but, should we be thinking about those questions? Should we ask ourselves what we are doing to the planet we live on, also, what are we doing to this one body we are given or do we just turn the other cheek and ignore what going on around us? . Should we be blind to all the things going on environmentally, like we did years ago to slavery, or should we stand up and speak out in mass? This is the question that Sandra Steingraber an ecologist, mother, and cancer survivor ask us in her article for an online journal In These Times: Despair Not.
In the Steingraber essay she ties the connection of slavery to the environmental

Steingraber writes “ In the spirit of Elijah Lovejoy---the man who is the namesake of my nine- year-old son the time has come for outspoken, full-throated heroism in the face of the great moral issue of our own day: the environmental crisis an unfolding calamity whose main victims are our own children and grandchildren.” (745) she really grabs the audience attention emotionally by pointing out the fact that our children and grandchildren are the victims she really goes on in this essay with that emotional appeal by making her audience think about question that our children my one day be asking us to answer. Steingraber wonders if our grandchildren one day will ask the question about creatures that no longer exist, as parents and grandparents what our response will be. When our children read books at species that are extinction how will we explain why they disappeared? Those species that have disappeared will our children what too wear costumes as those animals? Or will their troubles be greater than the loss of those loveable species? Though Steingraber emotional appeals are strong in her essay,

children has a learning disability, and nearly 1 in 10 has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. [altogether], special education services now consume 22 percent of U.S. school spending–about $77.3 billion per year at last count. Neurodevelopmental disorders have significant associations with exposures to air pollution, organophosphate pesticides like diazinon, and the heavy metals lead, mercury, and arsenic, among others’’(746) She gives the audience statistic stating the trends which shows she has researched the topic in-depth which leads the audience to believe she is trustworthy and knowledge in her field of study, it gives the readers time to processes the emotional appeals by backing them up with fact base information which is a bit scary when the information is broken down into data that show how its affecting children today and how it will effect children later on if we don’t do something about it now. . Streingraber then draws the audience attention to on why they don’t always think about this things before they go to bed at