The Dark Side Of The American Lawn Analysis

Environment Today Recently the point of saving our environment has came up. Many think that the environment is worsening, but actually is getting better thanks to writers of pieces that deal with ecocriticism in many forms. Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an integrative standpoint. Over the past few decades, many authors have stepped up to tell their readers what humans are doing to the environment in many writing ways. In The Silent Springs and The Dark Side of The American Lawn the authors use scare-tactics to alarm the readers about what’s happening. In other pieces, like The Green Movement at 50 and Moths of the Limberlost, the authors use nature as a symbol of beauty to persuade the readers to want to

Rachel Carson says “The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials (Rachel Carson, 1962)” to not sugar-coat the pollution problem. She states it as it is too almost to ‘scare’ the reader. McKay Jenkins works the same writing technique as Carson. For example, when Jenkins (2016) talks asks “Is American’s want for a perfect lawn causing a rise in their risk factors for cancer?” she tries to get the reader to imagine an unknown side to the effects of lawn care products and other everyday actions American’s take. Writers do this technique to “scare” the reader to get into their minds and make them think of what they are doing to the environment, themselves, and future

For example, in Moths of the Limberlost when Porter says, “Then the Winter Swamp had all the lacy exquisite beauty of such locations when snow and frost draped, while from May until October it was practically tropical jungle. (Gene Stratton Porter, 1912)” by her words you can visualize such a beautiful location. She makes you think ‘why would anyone want to harm such an innocent place?’. Michael McCarthy writes similarly in The Green Movement at 50. When he says “The pesticide falls on the leaf, and the leaf falls to the ground where it is consumed by worms, who also consume the pesticide; and robins consume the worms and consume the pesticide too, and so they die. (Michael McCarthy, 2012)” he talks about the chain reaction on nature caused by the use of DDT to show the ‘behind the scenes’ effects on the environment and organisms that live in it. Both authors show the reader’s the goof about what is in and around the environment and what is provides us