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California Blue Essay

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California Blue is a novel about a seventeen-year-old boy named John Rodger. John is in his last year of high school in a small northern California town where the majority of the townspeople, including John's father, work in the lumber industry. As the youngest son of a father who was a champion athlete, John has always felt pressured to excel in his sport of choice, distance running. Because his father considers biologist's opposition to clear cutting of redwoods a threat to the timber industry and his livelihood, John's father also disapproves of John's interest in biology as a major area of study. John doesn't follow either of his father's wishes. In the middle of his senior year John learns that his father has leukemia and that …show more content…

He runs away. With help of Miss Merrill, his biology teacher, he returns home to a "separate peace" with his father and a new understanding of the trade-offs between loyalty and responsibility.
Decisions regarding environmental problems require both knowledge and values. Placing value on specific issues can be sorted into four categories of justification: utilitarian, ecological, aesthetic and moral. California Blue focuses on the interplay of environmental issues and ethics emphasizing the conflict between industry and species preservation. Timber cutting in the Northwest United States is a mainstay of the economy. Although clear cutting is not as environmentally sensitive as selective harvesting and redwood cutting, some is essential to America's continued growth and prosperity. To ban timber operations and to throw people out of work, all to preserve an endangered blue butterfly, is to test the limits and logic of ecological priorities. The national policy of preserving endangered species serves the purpose of promoting biological diversity, which if not followed might threaten the ecosystem. This national policy of species preservation is a matter of social policy balanced with the competing interests of the local economy and human needs. Under the utilitarian approach one must balance the benefits of species preservation with the detriment of stopping human activity which threatens that species or the environment in which the

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