The notes for the environmentalism unit are located in this folder. The quiz will cover: Introduction to Environmentalism/Historical Context Henry David Thoreau Aldo Leopold Rachel Carson Response to/Criticism of Environmentalism
Probably the most terrible example of mass slaughter in the history of wildlife was not the bison but the passenger pigeon – a
story that almost defies belief. The early Europeans in North America frequently commented on the huge numbers of blue, long-tailed, fast and graceful pigeons in the country. One of the first settlers in Virginia wrote that, `There are wild pigeons in winter beyond number or imagination, myself have seen three or four hours together flocks in the air, so thick that even have they shadowed the sky from us.’
Their roosting sites were correspondingly enormous- some covered an area five miles by twelve with up to ninety nests in a single tree – branches broke and whole trees were toppled by the sheer weight of roosting birds, often standing on top of each other, and leaving a pile of droppings several inches deep under the trees. The exact number of passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans arrived is not known but the best guess is 5 billion- about a third of all the birds in North America at the time and the same as the total number of birds to be found today in the United States.
Read two of the following works of non-fiction thoroughly. When you return to school in the fall, you should be able to write intelligently about the ideas, arguments, concepts, and writing style of each work. Pay particular attention to the central argument(s) of each work, and how the author connects with her audience. Some of […]
More than four decades later, not only have we failed to eradicate poverty, but the very idea of such an undertaking is barely contemplated in the mainstream public discourse. At best, poverty is considered a low-priority issue. The poor in the United States, so it is imagined, do not really have it so bad and their poverty, in any case, is due primarily to their own self-destructive behaviors. On occasion, elected officials and political pundits do reflect on the plight of the poor, but mainly to worry about how to reduce “welfare dependency” or how members of the “underclass” might be persuaded to conform to conventional norms.3 In 2005, Hurricane Katrina brought into public view the harsh realities of class and racial inequality in the United States, fueling speculation that a renewed war on poverty might be on the horizon, but the shocking images from New Orleans quickly faded, and the subsequent promise of “bold action” from the government remains unfulfilled.
What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side, that “Silent Majority.” The “nonshouters.” The middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban, and rural coalition who call themselves, now, “Values voters,” “people of faith,” “patriots,” or even, simply, “Republicans”—and who […]