Why Bother Michael Pollan Analysis

In her article she writes about how the earth is being affected by all the pollutions and greenhouse gases that are being emitted. She explains about how the food industry contributes by “Most produce is shipped many miles before it is sold to consumers, and shipping our food for long distances is costly in both the amount of fossil fuel it uses and the greenhouse gases it produces” (93). This adds to her argument that buying local will help reduce the amount of air pollution from transporting food. In an article by Environmental Board the authors claim “If you buy locally, you protect and make the environment more sustainable because you don’t have to truck the food thousands of miles across the country or import it from other countries which takes a lot of energy. It is a lot better for the climate and region” (1). This information provides evidence to support her theory in which buying local can help reduce harmful

The environment is among some of the top issues to be looked upon by the human population in the world today. Sustainability is a word often times used when speaking of this subject. This is a concept represented in the articles “Sustainability” by Christian R. Weisser and “Attention Whole Foods Shoppers” by Robert Paarlberg. Each author addresses the issue in different ways; one giving examples of this issue and the other clearly defining it. Each author is writing to spread awareness of this issue. As overlapping topics, each article has similarities and differences to the other.

Have you ever thought about how your actions or opinions affected the environment around you? We’re constantly unaware of what we do that impacts the environment’s condition. One author named Wendell Berry blames the public in his article regarding the way society and the industry has treated the environment and its natural resources. This raises concerns whether we should be putting more importance on the economy or the land that we live in for the sake of our future survival. While I agree with most of Berry’s points and perspectives I slightly disagree with a few of his opinions, but nonetheless he brings up a great matter in today’s modern society.

Americans, as a whole, do not care about the environment anymore. When we watch the news or simply talk about our day, there are always more pressing topics that come up. However, as a nation, the threat of a failing environment seems to be forgotten because the effects are not as obvious as other threats. Bill McKibben’s “Waste Not, Want Not” discusses how much time, money, resources, and people America has actually wasted and how little effort has been made to try to change. McKibben causes readers to think it is too late to save the environment from our wastefulness because we put our efforts into systems that do not help the environment, spend more money and resources than necessary, and refuse to acknowledge how much were wasting.

Pollan goes on to explain how the evolution and change in our food of choice and diet of choice has significantly impacted our environment. Bringing up the different types of farming; factory farming, organic farms, industrial farms, grass farms, and mixed farms and the different beliefs and systems each of those farms have on their property and how they choose to farm their stock and the impact each of these systems has on the enviornment. Pollan visits multiple different types of farms and explains to us the different pros and cons each farm uses to take care of their produce and animals. A common theme has found

The only downfall from this timely conception is the damage to the soil if the crops are not rotated every few years. Berry speaks about the fact that some individuals focus on the production of crops instead of the health of their land; this irresponsibility causes problems for the environment. Berry states, “Once one’s farm and one’s thoughts have been sufficiently mechanized, industrial agriculture’s focus on production, as opposed to maintenance, becomes merely logical…The farm and all concerns not immediately associated with production have in effect disappeared from sight” (Berry, p. 2, p. 3). Some of America’s Society do not care about the consequences of constantly harvesting. Instead, people concern themselves with meeting the supply and demands. Berry expresses his views about soil science and its uses of replacing the lost nutrients from the overuse of the land.

Flocks of American men, outraged from the Pearl Harbor incident, voluntarily signed up for the army and navy. Those Americans who couldn’t join the armed forces helped the war effort by volunteering to grow their own vegetables in make-shift gardens. In 1941 the Secretary of Agriculture formally suggested the use of these “victory gardens”. The “victory gardens” were planted anywhere they could be, in such places as vacant lots and jails. The gardens soon accounted for 40% of the countries vegetables (Nash, 525).

Many try to deny it, but there is no secret that our world is changing—and not in a positive way. The climates are changing, along with many other things, and wreaking havoc on thousands of ecosystems worldwide. Now is not the time to push environmental issues aside. Even the little things count, like planting a garden or growing a single family growing their own food. That garden helps much more than that family family’s sustainability, it also can promote their good health and be a mood-booster to those who pass by, as mentioned by Ron Finely in his TED Talks’ video.

Sustainability and environmental awareness is a newer addition to the United States’ urban agriculture model that has come with the trend of “Green-washing” in marketing, lifestyles and overall environmental awareness. This

The next two stages highlight the decline of interest within environmental issues, resulting in an immense decline in euphoric enthusiasm. Thus, the third stage of the issue-attention cycle is realizing the cost of significant progress. This entails the spread of a gradual realization that the cost of solving the problem is much higher than originally expected. More specifically, it would take a great deal of money and resources, as well as “major sacrifices by large groups in the population.” This results in a realization by the public that the problem is usually a direct result from some extremely beneficial aspect of their lives. For example, smog and air pollution can be a result from the increased use of cars, so not only would cutting down on how often one drives a car decrease this pollution, but would also decrease in the advantages that owning a car contains. For some people, sacrificing these advantages comes as no easy task, and most don’t want to sacrifice at all.

The main point the authors are raising concerns the way in which the society, aware on the intrinsic need to change in order to adapt to new challenges faced by climate change, can actually find the motivation, means, and capacity to do this. More precisely, the authors raise the issues of "What represents a "sustainable lifestyle," and how might competing visions of this be

With as many environmental problems that plague the world today, they all fall within three different aspects of everyday life: political systems, economic systems, and material structures and resources. The following theories conceptualize the root of environmental problems in these different areas of society but are able to offer solutions independent of each other. In the selections of From Welfare State to Ecostate, James Meadowcraft suggests that the key to solving environmental problems lies within political systems and that we must rebuild those systems so that the environment will be considered in every decision that gets made. Anthony Weston, in his book Mobilizing the Green Imagination, feels that environmental problems lie in economic systems and that the solution would be to revamp how products are made and distributed to limit the impact that production has on the environment. Finally, in Techno-Fix Michael and Joyce Huesemann see environmental problems stemming from material structures and resources and that the way to combat problems in this aspect is to reinvent technology that is sustainable, rather than having society function on resources that are unsustainable (fossil fuels, for example).

Over the last two decades, the world's consumption habits have changed fundamentally with regard to environmental and health issues and people are increasingly willing to act on those concerns (Martinez-Carrasco et al., 2004; Smith and Marsden, 2004). Numerous studies indicate that there is a remarkable growth in consumers who are concerned with the environmental impact of their purchase decisions (paragraph problem (Tallontire, Rentsendorj & Blowfield 2001).

Quote A and Quote B show a connection between consumer’s behavior and the environmental changes. Thus, the unsustainable patterns of natural resources production and consumption are having social and environmental impacts in America. The urbanization and industrialization requires huge amount of resources for sustainability and development. Coal mining, coal processing, and iron and steel industries, and now natural gas particularly have far-reaching consequences for ecosystems due to the large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, wasted product from these industry contaminated the land, air, and water while the act of mining destroy the land structure as well as the ecosystem. Furthermore, these acts create social problem and

2012). Combing the ecological, political and cultural definitions to come to this conclusion. Very early on the book the importance of sustainability is stressed, linking it both the human and physical geographical viewpoints in its analysis. Stating that the overconsumption, coupled with the dramatic increase in our population, taxing the earth in what they argue in a way our species has not done so before (Cabezas et al. 2012). Before delving into the history of sustainability, and its various related disciplines. The book then proceeds to discuss the subject from a biological point of view, before discussing the other disciplines views relating to the subject.