Writing for a 300-year span of time, he does not spare the rough, the crude, the greedy and the mean. He uses an historical approach combining the economic, the political, the sociological, the psychological and the anthropological. There is much information that only a native like Caudill himself could have gathered from family, friends and the hills themselves. A fine lawyer by profession, he was even better as a storyteller. Caudill knew as much about the problems of this part of Appalachia as anyone and could accurately describe its symptoms. However, in terms of corrective measures, his prescriptions for cure fall largely off the mark. Solutions to the chronic, severe and long-standing problems in this region of the country are not easy and not fast. The coal counties in southern Appalachians are still losing population. Mountain top removal and valley fills, a type of coal mining just starting when Caudill completed his book are destroying tens of thousands of acres of southern hardwood forest. The landscape is permanently altered and will never recover after this type of mining has taken place. I’m sure if Caudill were around today, he would have more than enough material to write a book on this subject…
The book Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen, is about a boy named Brian who lives in New York. One day he is sent to visit his dad in the summer on a one passenger plane. On his way there, he suddenly realizes that the pilot is having a heart-attack. So Brian does what he thinks he should do and crash lands the plane in the middle of a lake. So from then on into the book, Brian is stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a hatchet he had gotten from his mother a few years back.…
The reading that I choose to do my reading note is Jared Diamond’s article, “ The World As a Polder.” I find this reading particularly significant because the content of the reading is related to our daily life. This reading is about environmental problems that human is facing in present society. The environmental problems that we are facing included natural habitats destruction, air and water pollution, overpopulation, species extinction, soil degradation, energy shortage, and chemical pollution. These environmental problems have been slowly affecting lifes on earth, and the phenomenon is slowly showing.…
Diamond’s model is an explanation by Jared Diamond of how our society have collapsed in the past and how it will collapse in the future. It discussed five set of factors that indicate the causes of society breakdown. Diamond explained this model clearly with examples from Greenland Norse in the past and Montana environment in the time when the book was made. The first factor is environmental damage that caused by people, such as deforestation and mining that usually connected to the second factor which is climate change. In fact, climate change is natural forces without any relation with humans. The next factor is hostile neighbors that illustrate the bad relationship with the neighbor which affect the existence of society. Conversely, support…
“Canyons” by Gary Paulsen is a great book that can be enjoyed by all middle school readers. The story canyons is mostly based in canyons, caves, and a camping ground. Itis also based in highschool sometimes throughout the story. Brennan and he is fifteen years old…
Reading the book Blue Cascade by Mike Scotti, who by the way is a brilliant writer, was a very whole-hearted and touching story. This book was about a Marine who returned home from a two-year tour duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. He didn’t feel the same when he returned home and knew that something was wrong. He suffered from post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but after a while he overcame it. As he began to heal, he said, “ The plan was to go to graduate school to get an MBA.…
In the short story, “The Interlopers,” by Saki, Ulrich Von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym have a feud over a strip of forest land. As they confront each other and are faced with a difficult situation they set aside their differences and become friends. Throughout the story, we have twists, suspense, and tragedy that will take this story to a whole new level. As they were holding their guns at each other and fighting a tree comes down and pinned them to the ground.…
The Easter Islanders did not have a severe climate change. One of their problems was that they had to completely rely on themselves because they did not have any trade partners and so they didn’t have a way of getting different foods, wood, etc. They did, however, have hostile neighbors. For example, Peruvian ships captured half of their population and Europeans brought over new diseases they did not have antibodies for. Although they seemed doomed from the start, they were able to adapt to their environment. For example, they couldn’t catch many fish so they ate birds and rats and they stopped burning wood when trees on the island were endangered and burned grasses instead. In my opinion, the environmental damage they caused was the most significant. They wiped out birds, used to be biggest breeding ground, 21 species of trees making items such as rope to erect their statues and burning bodies. The trees that vanished from the island were up to 100 feet tall and gone by 1722. On page 106, the author states that “Deforestation must have begun sometime after human arrival.” They just didn’t think of what they would do when all their resources were…
Everyone has their own opinion about environmentalism. Some support it all the way, some people absolutely can’t stand it, and then there are those like me that fall in between. A Sand County Almanac and Silent Springs are two of the most influential pieces of environmental literature ever written. Parts of them didn’t exactly convince me and parts of them shocked me so much I think twice on certain aspects of my life. In this short response paper I will talk about what stood out the most to me and what I think society was most influenced by.…
At first, Beavan is concerned with the largely publicized environmental problems. However, throughout the project, he becomes more and more concerned with the small hometown problems. It started at initially when the news of global warming (already out for twenty years) actually entered Beavan’s “liberal subconscious,” (6). One example was that of polar bears in the arctic that were drowning as a result of the melting ice (8). He went on, using global warming to explain other current disasters, such as plagues, disease, natural disasters,…
The dignified journey of the chapter “Emergency” created by Denis Johnson, created a concrete dialog of the religion practice Christianity. As the chapter progresses the reader explores the content of the two characters F-head and Georgie, and stimulates the differences between spiritual reality and original reality. Denis Johnson specified the events in the chapter “Emergency” with moments that occur in the hospital in connection to the experiences outside of the work place. However, the main concept suggested that the theme would be the visualization of the seeing eye. Therefore, the interpretation of the theme symbolizes the connection towards the visual concept, and the differences between the realities portrayed in the chapter “Emergency.”…
The common topic of debate that is if all civilizations are doomed to collapse because it hold the ability to prevent or slow down the collapse of any civilization. Historians such as Tainter (In Collapse and Sustainability: Rome, the Maya, and the Modern World)and Greer (In How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse) have created analyzing both fallen and modern civilizations, both of these authors believe to some extent that a lack of resources is the beginning cause of a collapse of a civilization. There are some historians that believe that not all civilizations are doomed to collapse due to that previous civilizations were not able to properly and accurately handle their problems and as long as you sustain stability than…
In short story “a fable for tomorrow,” Rachel Carson describes a small town in America that was once a beautiful town but then became devastated by pollution.…
The factors that lead to the "collapse" of civilizations are almost directly related to those that created it. Archaeologists characterize collapse by a number of elements, some of which we have evidence for, others we do not. Most archaeologists are unsure of exactly what caused the decline of most civilizations in the ancient world, yet there are many clues to some of the events that could have contributed. The collapse of the ancient Roman Empire, the Mesoamerican Mayan, and the Egyptian cultures will be discussed in the following paragraphs, with a focus on the uniqueness of each.…
By combining a historical perspective with scientific advances, Diamond's five-point framework strongly supports his claim that society's ignorance and disregard for the environment could lead to their collapse. Thus, to fully understand how water pollution could contribute to a possible collapse, a deeper explanation of Diamond's five-point framework is required.…