A Response to Martin Krieger's What's Wrong with Plastic Trees
"Technologies, which may involve physical processes or social organization and processes, determine how reproducible an object is, for we may make a copy of the original, or we may transfer to another object the significance attached to the original. (Copying natural environments may be easier than copying artistic objects because the qualities of replicas and forgeries are not as well characterized in the case of the natural environment.) Insofar as we are incapable of doing either of these, we may desire to preserve the original environment." (220:A:2) This excerpt provides a good idea of the types of issues Martin
Krieger raises in his paper entitled
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By the time of Preservationists such as Muir
(influenced, of course by the Romantics), the "natural world" was being increasingly gobbled up by "civilization, and thus they focused our attention on the need to preserve nature as "places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike." On the other hand, the Conservationists, such as Pinchot, borrowed from the Utilitarians and Modernists and thus focused on the wise management of nature so as to extract the most benefit from it. Krieger slices cleanly through this messy interrelated history of America's concept of nature by declaring that in the same way that Muir focused on the wilderness and its untouched rarity, we could shift our societal attention to another aspect of nature. In that way it would not really matter if wilderness would destroyed, because we could "transfer to another object the significance attached to the original."
Maybe he is correct that *if* through "social action"(220:A:2) we could "make whole"(243) some component of the loss of nature, but only if we were to forget what is meant by the term in its strongest form. I refer here to the component of nature which might also be termed
"wilderness." As Robert Elliot describes, this has "causal continuity with the past," (230:A:1), "a specific genesis and history"(229:A:3) "outside our domain" or "independent of us"
Cady Heron grew up in africa and was homeschooled by her scientist parents. Cady moves to Illinois and enters the scary reality of public high school. She is a hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school. They are gorgeous, rich, exclusive girls led by a evil Barbie doll named Regina George. Cady be friends with social outcasts Janis and Damian. She makes the mistake of liking Aaron Samuels, Regina’s ex boyfriend. Regina is quick to resolve the problem resulting in a very angry Cady. Cady stays close to The Plastics in order to give Regina a dose of her own medicine. The trouble is, the more Cady pretends to be a Plastic, the more she becomes one. She sets out to teach Regina a lesson, but learns a valuable one herself:
a significant increase in the cost recycling the plastic, and the resulting product will have lower market value due to lower quality.
One hot-ticket issue that has been addressed extensively in the past few months is one that we’ve seen impact our local environments. These ghostly white entities can be seen wrapped around reeds in the wetlands, tangled around the necks of finely-plumed egrets, in the throats of sea turtles, dotting the landscape like strange flowers, and buried deep in the mud of the Newport Back Bay, visible when the tide recedes. Plastic bags can be found in excess everywhere in natural and man-made habitats.
“The amount of plastic the world consumes annually has steadily risen over the past seventy years, from almost nil in 1940 to closing in on six hundred billion pounds today. We became plastic people really just in the space of a single generation” (Freinkel, 2011, p. 7). This quote is from the first chapter of Susan Freinkel ’s book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. She talks about how much plastic has taken over our world, but specifically in the past decade, she notes, we have produced more plastic than we did the entire 20th century (Freinkel, 2011, p. 10).
When garbage or waste materials are tossed into a landfill, people are just asking for nauseating odors and polluted land sites. In Kathy P. Anderson’s article, “THE ENVIRONMENT: Reducing Waste,” she describes that liners are located beneath landfills and when the weather becomes a problem, those liners can leak, allowing leachate to attract to the surface. Saying this, she writes about the quality of environment after a leak: “The leachate then carries pollutants through the soil under the landfill to groundwater and to nearby rivers and lakes. When people or wildlife drink the poisoned water, they can get sick or die” (Anderson). If a liner were to leak, pollutants could be poisonous in the water and be harmful to not only individuals but
At least one time a week someone lies to family, friends, even strangers. People of all ages, genders, religions do wrong, it's a way of life. It is sometimes acceptable to be immoral or unethical, for no one is perfect, it allows them to learn and grow, and not everything is black and white.
In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that ocean-based sources, such as cargo ships and cruise liners had dumped 14 billion pounds of garbage into the ocean. Over 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by pollution every year. Pollution is a hot topic, but people don't want to talk about it as much as we should. Plastic bags are a huge source of pollution, and they cause a lot of damage. In my opinion, putting a .25 cent tax on plastic bags will help promote reusable bags, and make it affordable to use recyclable bags as well!
Plastic debris and litter is a serious pollution that is currently affecting oceans, waterways and coastal lines. Plastic is a man made tangible substance made from a range of organic polymers such as polyethylene, PVC, and nylon. This material is high on demand with the human kind but takes an average of 450 years to disintegrate. This product is impacting the marine environment, wildlife, and then eventually circling back to humans. Currently, the world’s biggest plastic patch is located north in the Pacific Ocean, trapped in what’s called a gyre (known as an ocean rip). There are also another two plastic islands located in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. These three plastic patches contain a higher amount of plastic but to today's count, in total there are 5 forward. Sea Education Society scientists studied plastics in the Atlantic and calculated there are 580,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer. Causes of plastic are endless, but trash is the main contributor. Plastic is located in almost every item around, and once it's in the trash, all the garbage gets dumped in land fills and seeps into the ground and soil affecting wildlife. Plastic is cheap and substantially available, so over production of plastic is high. The cause of plastic filling up land and oceans is a couple of reasons. People normally have a one-time use for plastic then throw it away but after that, the plastic is hard to eradicate. Burning plastic leads
I recently viewed a video on “The economic injustice of plastic” by Van Jones. The film started off by talking about the fact that the petrochemical corporations use oil and concentrate it into plastic; which in turn kills individuals. Van Jones discusses the demise of people who are underprivileged because they can only manage to pay for the products that are hazardous to them. Additionally, poverty-stricken people also assume the burden to dispose of plastic bottles and containers.
In the past, there have been a number of discussions about the risks plastic puts us in, not just with regards to the planet and environment, but our personal health. The debates didn't relent, and eventually changes were made to some plastics, with the plastic chemicals in these ones being considered safer. Unfortunately, these safer plastic chemicals aren't necessarily as safe as plastics manufacturers wanted you to think they were. A new study from the NYU Langone Medical Center suggests that a couple of chemicals found in plastics regarded as safe can actually have potential harm on children and adolescents, increasing their risk of diabetes and high blood pressure.
Plastic Pollution Outline Thesis Statement: Plastic pollution is an ongoing issue that is quickly growing as time passes by, and if humans don’t try to put an end to it, it will affect them in the long term. It is a serious issue that needs to be addressed because it is affecting humans, animals, and the environment. Plastic pollution affects humans even if they don’t realize it. Plastic pollution harms people’s endocrine system. Chemicals like BPA and phthalates causes development problems.
Plastic bags disturb the environment in a very serious way. The plastic bags get into the soil and as time passes they slowly release toxic chemicals. Eventually the plastic bags break down into the soil and the unfortunate consequence is that the animals will eat the plastic, choke on it and then die!
The film, Plastic Paradise, has brought attention to the global issue of over consumption of plastic products and the environmental effects it has on the ocean. The most profound aspect of this film was when Angela Sun visited Midway Atoll and revealed the consequences of this excessive consumption. Midway Atoll is located in Pacific Ocean right in the middle of the United States and Japan. It amidst the North Pacific Gyre, dubbed the Great Pacific garbage patch. The island and its reefs act as a comb and is a disturbing indicator of how polluted our ocean is.
The significance of this image is for people to become aware of the harmful impacts of plastic pollution in the oceans. Over the years, plastic pollution has emerged as a serious threat to marine life. This visual combines skilfull use of color and persuasive text for the purpose of encouraging plastic waste reduction.
The overuse of plastics in today's society has become major environmental issue for our oceans. Plastic pollution is the dumping, littering, or disposing of any type of man-made plastic that has been produced and has ended up in our ocean and has not been recycled.