Sandra Steingraber's 'Despair Not'

Society portrays the Earth as a resource, a place that provides an abundance of tools that are beneficial to one’s way of living. As time continues on, humanity’s definition of sustainability with the ecosystem becomes minor, meaning that it is not essential to their own lives. Thus, leading to the environment becoming polluted and affecting the human population.
These ideas are demonstrated through these four sources: “Despair Not” by Sandra Steingraber, which provides the author’s perspective on the environmental crisis in terms of climate change. “As the World Burns” by Derrick Jensen and Stephanie McMillan, is presented in the form of a graphic novel. It illustrates the irony of humanity believing that little tasks they complete help the

Steingraber uses a fallacy in the beginning of her climate change argument by mentioning the story of Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist that was killed for speaking out his opinion on slavery in the 1800s (Steingraber 671). Although Steingraber did not make the connection between those two, her meaning behind it was to inform the reader about the deep relationship within the issues. That relationship being that the environmental crisis today is as relevant as slavery was during that time period, but society will not stand up and address it. Because of the lack of explanation with her opinion and the analogy, there was no general evidence of what she was actually arguing about. Therefore, creating the ignorance of the climate change crisis that she was primarily

Although the argument is persuasive, the overall idea appears unorthodox for the reader at the beginning. This is because when the reader first thinks of global warming, the first to come to mind is fossil fuels and chemicals emitting in the air from factories and other manufacturing. The graph below is from a study completed by the World Resources Institute, showing the percentages and locations of where and how much greenhouse gases are involved with global