Rhetorical Analysis

Extinction: A Radical History is a book published by writer, professor and activist Ashley Dawson. It was published on the 22nd of April 2016. Dawson talks about multiple broad subjects in his book like how Capitalism is the main source of mass extinction. By doing so, he takes into account the lengthy history of the Homo Sapiens species, their activities and their discoveries and how us, humans, have affected today’s biodiversity, and probably the future of our planet Earth. He also offers solutions but are they realistically possible? Today, we no longer face natural risks like asteroids and comets. As Dawson states we now face anthropogenic risks like climate change and biodiversity loss which leads to a change in the earth’s ecosystem.

My argument is about the bakery owners who refused to sell the same sex couple a cake for their wedding. I do not agree that they should've had to pay "$135,000 in emotional damages". The Christian owners of this bakery denied to bake the cake for the couple because they do not believe in same sex marriage. "

Starting a conversation on literature, I can see where I struggle to look deeper into a source for its rhetorical significance. An example of this is in my Immigration and belonging essay as I state, “Reyes’s narrative argues for understanding from the reader with his genre.” (PAGE). While this line sounds significant, I find the preceding sentence struggling to support this claim as there are no quotations or paraphrases that highlight how this sentence is seen emotionally in the article. Following that idea, rhetoric can be easily found by looking at the ethos, logos, and pathos. However, I find that when using this method for finding rhetorical information, my analysis of the source is surface level (as seen in the above example).

In a world that we, as humans, have begun to destroy and shape for the worse, there is still so much that we are oblivious to. From the illegal endangered animal trade to harmful CO2 and methane, Racing Extinction has revealed to both myself and society the constantly ticking clock that is Earth.

In 2008, Richard Louv wrote “Last Child in the Woods” emphasizing the greatly growing gap between people and nature, and how people should be more connected to the world and not the new advancing technology. He critiques this issue as evidenced by flashbacks to both positive and negative moments, as well as appealing to the logic of his audience.

It is no secret anylonger that the ecological crisis puts mankind as a whole to an existential test which have to be solved in practice and in theory. So, by this the vast amount of literature can be explained which consequently led to the emergence of an own "genre" — the so called "ecoliterature" which herself is really dissonant and ambigious. In the meantime — besides other sources — almost all sciences take part in such kind of discussions what obviously can be traced back to the fact that the ecological crisis is such a substantial phenomena which leads therefore to numerous perceptions and different point of views.

Kolbert’s argues that our alterations towards the environment have not had the best results. She presumes that the we are currently stuck in the next wave of mass extinction. Extinction is seen as a natural occurrence which acts in repetition as a component of the evolutionary cycle. Now the big question is “How can we prevent history from reoccurring, how can I assure my position and not be a part of the next extinction?”

In the article “In Time of crisis”, because of the world has been changing rapidly, the author of this article believes that the entire humanity is facing the most critical era since the life has been made. Furthermore, according to the author, Dave Foreman, 30 million of creatures are challenging a fundamental alteration due to the high extinction rat in the biological diversity. According to the author, one quarter to one third of all creatures will be lost and reduced within forty years due to the negative attitude towards the natural resources such as the high rate of commercial fishing as well as destroying the large mammals like whales.

In the course of Earth’s history, there have been five major extinction events: the Ordovician-Silurian, Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, and Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction events. Now, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert, we are entering another one that is caused by a single species: ours. Human beings have decimated the rainforest, hunted animals like the great auk to extinction, pumped billions of tons of pollution into our atmosphere and oceans, and almost completely reassembled the biosphere. Even more frighteningly, these facts come from 2014, and in the four years since The Sixth Extinction’s initial release, we haven’t slowed down a bit. Kolbert closes her book with a call to action,

Explicitly countering human exceptionalism, Van Dooren narrates humans as entangled within the co-evolving multispecies community through five edge-of-extinction stories, foreshadowing the possible sixth extinction that may have already begun as a result of human exploits of nature. He seeks to bring death to life – moving beyond species classifications (including humans) to show how we are all caught up with each other vis-à-vis the possibility of some kind of extinction – and tell us that species are “flight ways;” they are not life forms, but forms of

As the semester comes to ending, a reflection becomes necessary to understand and analyze the literature that was either chewed, swallowed, or digested. Within these past few months it has become apparent that several patterns have arose across several pieces, yet one struck most astoundingly. The necessity for intuition comes into play as the optimal connection through nearly all of the pieces discussed due to the factors that best understand the impact of society on nature must be taken into future oriented and global perspective.

We are now threatened by self-inflicted, swiftly moving environmental shifts whose long-term biological and ecological consequences result in the depletion of the protective ozone layer, global warming observed in the last 150 years, obliteration of an acre of forest every second, rapid-fire extinction of species and the prospect of a global nuclear war which can threaten the survival of both plants and animals. There may be other such risks we are unaware off at present. Individually and cumulatively, these dangers designate the presence of a trap being set for human species. However principled and lofty the justifications may have been for the activities that brought forth these dangers,

“Between the wars and the planet slowly dying, a decline in the global population took place that the world had not seen since the bubonic plague almost a thousand years earlier. It was a mass extinction which grew to the point where it was on the verge of making mankind extinct.

What has been considered a watershed moment in a variety of fields, the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species as well as his lesser known yet equally important The Descent of Man,

"The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History," by Elizabeth Kolbert, explores previous cases of mass extinction throughout history, and how they translate to present time. The novel begins with the in-depth investigation within specific species and ecological events that have been negatively impacted by human intervention. Throughout the book, Kolbert continues this argument by reviewing Earth's environmental and biological aspects and how they are changing the world as well as its inhabitants. She names the phenomenon the "Sixth Extinction," noting that this process is caused and compromised almost entirely of the humans that walk the planet. The author sets out to find evidence that backs up her hypothesis through travel in order to find a connection between past events to current forms of mass extinction.