Both Emma Marris and Bill McKibben take time to address the ways humanity has affected the world over the years. While McKibben takes a pessimistic view of humanity's impact, saying that nature is completely gone, Marris looks at nature from a different perspective, insisting that nature is all around us, in the most unlikely places. I noticed that both of them seemed to talk mostly about plant life. McKibben recounts his walk through the forest, and Marris rings up a few different examples of plant life springing up, such as the man who let his yard go unmowed for years, or the naturally-formed meadow in the middle of Philadelphia.
There was one thing that Marris talked about that really caught my ear, however, She mentions that "we have added little plastic particles to the sand on ocean beaches." This got me thinking about the ocean, which that neither McKibben or Marris really talk about much, After doing some quick research, I found an interesting National Geographic article about the rise of pollution in oceans in the form of tiny microscopic plastic particles, just as Marris said. The ocean has definitely been affected by humanity, but what do you guys think about it in regards to the things Marris and McKibben talked about? Have we completely ruined the ocean, as well, as McKibben might argue? Should we have completely untouched beaches, or should we be allowed to touch nature, like Marris advocates. And what about the deepest parts of the ocean, where we're still finding new discoveries even to this day? (Scientists recently discovered a strange glowing, orb-like object under the sea, and they evidently still haven't figured out what it is...) Could this be an untouched bastion of nature that McKibben desires? Thanks for reading!
I personally felt like the comment about about the particles of plastic in the ocean and the air was that all nature has been touched in some shape or form if not by pollution and the particles of plastic prove it. I wish she would had dove deeper into the concept. We can throw away a small portion of land or choose to keep it, but I do wonder what we can we do about a mass of water with depths that no human extinguish. If McKibben desires untouched nature, then shouldn't he desire the discovery of nature to cease since the moment it happens nature is "touched?"
ReplyDeleteI think that the oceans have been harmed, perhaps not as much as land, but if we look at how humanity has treated the oceans -- what good have we done? I think that we should leave the oceans alone, as I think we can only do harm. We have created devices that can catch the trash that is in the oceans to help clean them up, but that is just a remedy for a human made problem.
ReplyDeleteWe are lucky that the ocean is so vast that we have not COMPLETELY ruined it, we have only harmed it. I agree with McKibben that we shouldn't meddle with nature. I think that if humanity found ways to build shopping centers and hotels and condominiums on or under the ocean, that we would jump on it and try to claim it all as our own. So much of humanity is hellbent to harness any and everything that nature has to offer with little regard to what the consequences might be. In regard to the oceans, we already have major oil drilling operations that have spilled and harmed the ocean, yet we still do it.