Assignment Subject: Environmental Problem and Solution Essay: Select an essay topic regarding the negative impact humans cause upon any or all non-human life. You may focus upon environmental policies or practices or on specific causes and specific negative effects of human actions on non-human life. You may focus upon individual species or categories of species. You may focus upon a region, maybe your home town. But the focus needs to be primarily on non-human life. [Dont write about how air pollution kills 30,000 people in the LA Basin per year; dont write about how plastics in our food system is causing cancer and other human illnesses.] Its appropriate to include a small percentage of content toward negative or positive human health issues, but the primary focus needs to be on non-human life.
Narrow the topic down to something appropriate for the length limitation of this assignment, and provide a specific opinion about that topic, which you will then create an argument in support of. Offer, in your thesis and in your essay, a solution(s) to the problem.
A topic like “ocean pollution” is way way way too big for a baby little essay like ours. Agriculture chemical run-off into streams, lakes, and oceans can work well. Climate change? Way too big. A focus on specific climate change causes/effects, can work well. Mineral mine in Bristol Bay Alaska and the centuries of toxic runoff that may follow and the negative effect on the world’s most valuable wild salmon fishery in the world works really really really well. (The reason I say this is not because I have an opinion on it–I actually know very little about this issue–it’s because it’s a specific topic.) Narrow your topic down, as we have been practicing all semester. You may want to focus on a particular species (gorillas, sharks, frogs, butterflies, elephants, desert turtles, etc.) or on a particular form of human action that is leading to negative effects (plastic straws, diesel engines, tanker ships off the port of Long Beach belching pollution, factory farms, solar farms, overpopulation, meat consumption, destructive fishing practices, etc.).
Your essay needs to establish a problem and offer a solution. (Solution=positive steps, strategies to help address the problem.)
A section of your essay (or more) must evaluate underlying assumptions toward the environment that drives some of these destructive or restorative human behaviors. What is the root cause of this or these assumptions, what cultural values have been instilled that result in the assumptions? These assumptions may be positive or negative in regards to our opinions about the environment. (Look for attitudes that suggest, perhaps, the earth is ours to do what we want to make life better for us, and too bad if other non-human life goes extinct, for instance. Where does this opinion come from?”)
