Humanities Homework Help

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Pollution Discussion

 

I agree with the statement that “Humans have – and will continue to have – negative impacts on the natural environment if our society continues to progress in the fashion that it has over the past two centuries.”

I was really impressed by what Rothman (2000) illustrated in his book “The American landscape was not as beautiful as Americans perceived it had once been. Its shores were covered with broken glass, its highways littered with food wrappers and bottles”. It seems like I could see those shores and highways with my own eyes while I was reading this sentence. In my opinion, we could not live without nature, and we are not the master of nature. It’s because of natural resources that we could develop our civilization, our science and technology, etc. However, we have already polluted many beautiful sceneries and kept over-exploiting natural resources for development, which cause more negative effects than benefits. Many people who realized that people should protect the environment created the Modern Environmental Movement. These activists made significant contributions to awaken people’s awareness of environmental protection. Rachel Carson, who published the famous book, Silent Spring, has greatly “helped awaken American society to the agricultural and household chemicals” (Rothman, 2000). But awakening people’s awareness was not enough at all. The Cuyahoga River pollution just showed how difficult it is for those activists to do something against the capital. According to the video (WKYC-TV, 1967), “the wheel of changes turned exceedingly slow with an eye on the net profit.” So, in brief, that’s why I believe we can’t continue to progress in the fashion that it has over the past two centuries.

1)Reply to this discussion post agreeing with the author. Use at least one in-text citation from the reference mentioned below only. 150 words

References:

Rothman, H. K. (2000). Saving the Planet. Ivan R Dee., Chicago, IL.

WKYC-TV. (1967). The Cuyahoga River Pollution. Retrieved from