reflective

Reflective Rough Draft

When writing a paper, I always try to make the subject relate to something that I am interested or passionate about. When my teacher announced to the class that we would be talking about Technology this semester in English 102, I really didn’t know what to expect. I just recently graduated early from high school in January, and I quickly realized that I would have a lot of freedoms in this English class. It definitely was not what I was use to. I was nervous about English because I had always had a hard problem relating to my topics in high school. In high school, if I was told to write about Romeo and Juliet, I would simply talk about the book and never really engage the text like English 102 has taught me. I quickly discovered that engaging the text and analyzing the authors opinions with those of other authors, I was easily interested and happy to be writing my paper. I was also really excited when I found out that my teacher WANTED me to use words like I and they. In my previous classes teachers had always said that in a research paper, personal opinions should not be included. I really suffered with this concept because to me, the personal opinion of an author is what attracts me into reading any paper.
So, there I was in English 102 completely flabbergasted by this new idea of writing. I finally had an English teacher that wanted to hear what I had to say about a topic. The topic which we spent our time discussing was Technology. I found myself really becoming entranced with all these different questions which Nye, Vonnegut, and Vincente were asking their readers to think about. The authors never gave answers to these questions, which allowed my mind to continuously analyze their ideas over and over. I found myself becoming very passionate about the conclusions and beliefs I would come to about technology and its pros and cons. I actually became so passionate about it, that I often found myself leaving class upset over some remarks and views of a former classmate who definitely had a more arrogant outlook on things. Luckily for me, that student only came to class for two weeks before dropping out.
When we first began exploring the texts and writing papers about them, the piece of writing that stood out to me the most was the “Human Factor”. It really amazed me to see how many of mans everyday disasters were caused by technology being placed in the hands of people who were not educated well enough to use it. When we began reading Cats Cradle I began thinking about how technology sort of allows us to play God and alter with the natural way which nature works. And then there was Nye, who just absolutely sent my mind in all directions with his questions like whether technology shapes us or we it, is it creating social uniformity or diversity, destroying jobs or creating jobs, making us more secure or insecure, expanding our minds or making us too dependant on machines, improving our lives or limiting our very existence?
I found the topic of my final research paper when I was asked to write a paper analyzing Nye and two other resources which he used in his book. I became very interested in a “technique” which Ellul talked about in her book. To me, “technique” refers to the way which we go about our daily tasks. Growing up I was always really fascinated when I would go to the museum or watch old TV shows and see the way which our ancestors survived. I found their way of life so much more interesting and rewarding. As a child I would always imagine myself living like the kids on Little House on the Prairie, or back in the Gilded Age. I have always been into art, and I just found the “technique” which we once produced goods to be so much more unique. I have always felt that technology is taking away from these arts, and taking the beauty out of many things. I don’t understand why we feel the need to change these past times. I often find myself wondering what it would be like if we just stopped everything and went back to these modern ways.
When I started thinking about our constant need to evolve, I began trying to search for examples of technologies we have created to help, which ended up causing more problems. After sitting on my couch for about 5 minutes pondering, pesticides finally jumped into my brain. To me, pesticides was the perfect topic for me to talk about. I knew that I needed a topic which I was interested in, and also a topic which let me explore all my previous ideas. Pesticides allowed me to think about the modern ways which we use to farm and irrigate our land, while also focusing in the human factor which technology has.
My biggest problem I encountered in this paper was keeping the discussion of pesticides in terms which I could understand. I began researching pesticides thinking “okay I have narrowed down my topic pretty well, there cant be that much information for me to cover.” I was really wrong. I began getting caught up in the history of pesticides, different agricultural techniques, the different types of land, etc. I was not an expert in farming or pesticides, and I would often sit there re reading passages trying to understand what the author was trying to say. I began writing a paper with little passion, and just plain old facts. Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to throw out that paper and realize that I didn’t need to talk about the history and different terms used in describing agriculture. I began focusing on the impacts it has had on animals and humans. For me, the idea that we willingly put these harmful chemicals into our food is just absurd. There is no excuse or logical reason behind it. In my eyes, the only stake holders here are us humans and our health, animals, and our land. There is no pros and cons pesticides as far as I am concerned. I was going to focus on businesses and large companies that benefit from this new way of farming or taking care of weeds, but at the end of the day these people are humans and are affected by their actions just like everyone else. Throughout my time researching I did not find one good pro to using these pesticides besides greed and money. Money is never more important than our health and existence on this world. If it seems like my paper is a little one sided, its because that’s how pesticides are, they are one sided. There is no good or bad to them as farm as I am concerned. I often felt like the people who were for the use of pesticides were like those cigarette executives they poke fun at in all those commercials against smoking. Their reasoning was just a joke, no good was coming from the use of pesticides. What good is it to have millions of dollars, but your dying from a cancer or disease that cannot be cured?
When writing my paper I chose passages which to me were just appalling. I wanted to grab the readers attention. I also chose to add some information that helped explain why pesticides were ever used and why it took so long for people to begin speaking against it. It was hard for people to say, “hey should we really be putting chemicals into the earth?” when it was currently saving soldiers in the war. I really wanted to get the point across that our actions are having a huge affect on the world, and that we are killing ourselves. I chose to use a quote from Albert Schweitzer because he sums up my whole paper and way which I view technology in one single sentence. I don’t think that technology is bad. I think that the way which we use technology is bad though. We are the only species that feels the need to constantly change and evolve through the use of technology. I see this as a major down fall. I am a firm believer in the saying “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” Our need to constantly fix the unbroken has caused us to harm ourselves and take high risks. We don’t look to the future at the impacts which pesticides are going to have on us in 100 years if we don’t stop now, we don’t worry about he animals which will no longer be in existence if we continue to use pesticides, and we don’t seem very concerned about the polluted water supply which we will be encountering. We take good food, and water for granted. It amazes me that we can so carelessly pollute the two things which we cannot survive without.
Okay, I am done ranting and raving now. Every time I begin talking about pesticides and the way which we are destroying the earth, I go into a mad rant. I guess that’s a good thing though, because I accomplished my mission of writing something that I am passionate about instead of just the old boring research papers which I was encountered in high school. I wish I had known back then how to relate my topics to issues which concerned me. I would really like to have discovered where my mind would of taken me in some of my previous discussions and learn more about my view points of topics which I fail to analyze on a daily basis. I guess I am only human, and fail to look to my future and take a closer look at things. After writing this paper, I have become so much more aware of the harmful chemicals I am putting into my body. I wonder what other aspects of my life I have been over looking and blinded to. Like most humans I don’t easily see the impact of technology on my life for better or worse. I hope that this paper helps people become more concerned about what they are feeding their kids, and themselves. We just seem to assume that everything we buy from the store is going to be healthy. We need to be aware of how we are handling our food supplies and how we are using technology to change the natural cycles of nature.

Blog Assignment 10

The very first choice I made in revising my rough draft was to add more personal voice. I got lost in all the facts about pesticides and the history so much that I began to forget why this subject ever interested me in the first place.I began reading the book Silent Spring which I had read many articles about. I found that Rachel Carson focused more on the issues that I find concerning and it really helped me to start righting with passion and feeling instead of quoting some scholarly resources which I found hard to comprehend and relate to. Once I found quotes which inspired me, I began focusing on expanding more on quotes. The group conference helped me realize that I really needed to expan more on my quote about technique and why I chose to include that in my paper. It also helped me realize of ways I could tie in previous writings to help enhance my paper. After the group conferences I felt more free to to expand on other ideas and I realized that although the paper is suppose to be very engaged on one part of technology, It is still okay to include other examples. Basically, I just felt more free in my writing which makes it alot easier for me to write. I dont like restrictions and I think that was my main problem I encountered when I first began writing. The conferences made me realize that we really have many options for how we approach our topic and that we should really engage the other texts and find ways that Nye, Vonnegut, and the other authors which we read had a voice in our topics. I personally just always get more out of a conversation when it's face to face. Therefore I really liked the face to face conversations and found it easier to communicate ideas. I think many of us found that when we were explaning our goal of our paper, we ended up saying it better than we did in our paper.

Blog assignment #8 Pesticides

( This is definately a rough rough draft. I have a few points which I want to make and the introduction, but the conclusion is not in here yet and there are more things which i want to expland on after more research)
Technological Impact on Nature Through Pesticides
One of Nye’s main focuses in his book Technology Matters is the impact that technology is having on society and the environment. Technology seems to be a driving force that is compelling society to change. Nye writes that “ The public has an appetite for proclamations that new technologies have beneficent “natural” effects with little government intervention or public planning. Externalist arguments attribute to a technology as a dominant place with society, without focusing much on invention or technical details” (27). Nye uses the source of Jacques Ellul to show a more severe and pessimistic view of technology. “ Jacques Ellul paid little attention to the origins of individual inventions, but argued instead that an abstract “Technique” had permeated all aspects of society and had become the new “milieu” that Western societies substituted for Nature. Readers of Ellul’s book The Technological Society were told that “Technique was an autonomous and unrelenting substitution of means for ends. Modern society’s vast ensemble of techniques had become self-endangering and had accelerated out of humanity’s control.” (28). When reading Ellul’s book you can take a close look at what she meant when she said “Technique”. “Standardization creates impersonality, in the sense that organization relies more on methods and instructions than on individuals. We thus have all the marks of a technique. What are the consequences? The first is that the problems created by mechanical technique will be heightened to a degree yet incalculable, as a result of the application of technique to administration and to all spheres of life. Toynbee believes that this organization which is succeeding technique is in some way a counterbalance to it, and a remedy (and that is a comforting view of history). But it seems to me that the exact opposite is true, that this development adds to the technical problems by offering a partial solution to old problems, itself based on the very methods that created the problems in the first place. This is the age-old procedure of digging a new hole to fill up the old one.”(12). I think that Ellul is absolutely correct in this statement. The affects of new technology on our society and environment is incalculable. There is no way of knowing the affects that these new inventions will have on us over time. We create new technologies to fix problems, which in turn cause more problems. There are many scenarios which we do not take into consideration. One such example of an invention which we created out of the desire to be bigger and better was pesticides. We created pesticides to make agriculture more productive, but we were in no way prepared for the countless health effects they were to have on both humans and animals.
Pesticides were introduced to the World during World War II. It was meant to fight some of man’s worst diseases such as malaria, and they were intentionally made to be toxic. One of the first and most successful pesticides was DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane ). “Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was first used as an insecticide in 1939. Just a few grains of the white powder would miraculously wipe out colonies of mosquito larvae. During World War II, B-25 bombers sprayed DDT prior to invasions in the Pacific. After the war, DDT would all but wipe out malaria in the developed world and drastically reduce it elsewhere. (The National Academy of Sciences reported in 1970 that DDT had saved more than 500 million lives from malaria.) Paul Müller, the chemist who first turned it on unsuspecting flies, won a Nobel Prize in 1948 for his work.” (Smithsonian/ Silent Spring) It is easy to see why no one seemed to be concerned about the possible health effects of this toxin since the first effects of it being released into the environment showed such marvelous benefits. How could anyone show concerns about an invention that had saved so many of our troops over seas?
Unfortunately, more people should have been concerned. It did not take long before DDT was being used regularly throughout America. “By the late 1950s, DDT production had nearly quintupled from World War II levels as municipal authorities took to spraying the chemical on American suburbs to eradicate tent caterpillars, gypsy moths and the beetles that carried Dutch elm disease.” (Smithsonian/ Silent Spring). It would appear as though DDT was one of man’s best inventions. However, DDT was a strong toxin that stayed in the environment for a long period of time. It also began infecting animals because it accumulates easily in their fat tissues. It did not take very long before humans were consuming these toxins through meat, water supply, and their fruits and vegetables. In the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, she urges people to become more aware of the health effects that pesticides such as DDT are having on humans. *go into further detail about this book and author*
Today, pesticides are still being used despite the banning of DDT in 1972. "Rachel
Carson's book was a brilliant piece of writing and a seminal work, but it's clear now that
she was more fearful of pesticides than was warranted," says Dennis Avery, former senior
agriculture expert with the State Department and author of Saving the Planet With
Pesticides and Plastic. While admitting that some dangers exist to the farmers who handle
concentrated amounts of pesticides, Avery maintains that the "Green Revolution" of
fertilizers, pesticides and genetically improved seeds has tripled crop yields since 1950 and
saved 12 million square miles of natural habitat that otherwise would have been cleared for
farmland in order to maintain the nation's food supply. But veteran environmentalist Barry
Commoner insists that pesticides remain a significant danger to the environment and
human health. "Enough is known now that we could greatly reduce and eventually
eliminate the harm caused by our use of pesticides and herbicides through organic farming
and integrated pest management," he says. "We are still exposed to pesticides in our diet,
and not much is known about their medical consequences. Since Silent Spring, the only
real improvement has been for the birds. Thanks to the elimination of DDT, the osprey are
better off, but I don't think we are." (Smithsonian/ Silent Spring). Barry Commoner is
absolutely correct. There are still many issues facing the way which we use pesticides and
cultivate our land.
In the last half century agricultural management has ignored the lessons of nature
and changed the way which we cultivate the land. Robert Traer focuses on this issue of
environmental ethics in his book Doing Environmental Ethics. “The use of artificial
fertilizer has produced higher crop yields, but degraded the soil. In fields watered by rain
only about 40 percent of the nitrogen in artificial fertilizer is taken up by the crops, and in
rice paddies as little as 20 percent of the nitrogen in fertilizer is utilized. Agricultural
runoff compounds into streams has led to at least fifty dead zones in the oceans, one the
size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico.(201) Through the use of fertilizers and new
machinery we are changing the way which mother nature once provided us with fertile
land. “The use of artificial fertilizer raises levels of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium
in the soil increase plants growth, but disrupts the natural cycles of these elements.
Furthermore, using pesticides with artificial fertilizers, which is standard practice in
industrial agriculture, degrades the humus that maintains soil fertility.” (202) “Mother
earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains
are taken to preserve the soil and to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed
vegetable and animals wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the process of
growth and the process of decay balance one another; the greatest care is taken to store
the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease.
Industrial agriculture ignores these lessons. It replaces farm animals with machines,
diverse crops and crop rotation with a single crop, natural fertilizer with artificial fertilizer,
and grazing with barns and stockyards where livestock are fed grain laced with hormones
and antibiotics to fatten the animals and resist bacteria that thrive in such artificial
environments. (203) Once again it is hard for us to see the costly effects our new way of
life based on technology will have on future generations. At this point in time many do not
see the need to be concerned with machines replacing farm animals and hormones and
antibiotics to fatten animals, but we need to be concerned. Humans cannot exist without
food, and the idea that we are tampering with our food and water supplies is a very scary
idea.
We are already begun to see some of the affects that previous actions are having
on new agricultural inventions. “ The development of higher yield hybrid seeds led to what
is called the Green Revolution. Between 1950 and 1984, as the Green Revolution
transformed agriculture around the globe, world grain production increased by 250
percent. By 1994, however, it took four hundred gallons of oil to feed each US citizen.
Since 1994 the energy input in Agriculture has continued to grow, but this increased input
has not meant a higher yield, because the soil has been degraded and pesticides have
become less effective.” Many farms are now growing a single crop because it makes using
machinery easier to cultivate and fertilize, but it also attracts pests. This causes about 1.2
billion pounds of pesticides to be used in the US annually. “But pests have evolved
resistance to these chemicals. Despite a tenfold increase in pesticide use since the 1950’s,
crop losses to pests have doubled.” This is by far the scariest factor in this new technology
of agriculture. As we continue to become stronger through our inventions of pesticides,
the pests are also becoming stronger in their resistance. Eventually one species will
outsmart the other, and the consequence could be fatal to human existence.