Sandra Steingraber's Despair Not

Do you want an environment crisis to happen? Do you know what causes it? Do you know what it is and what will happen? Heat trapping gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane, pollutants. There are also fossil fuels, primarily coal, petroleum, and natural gases. There are droughts, floods, acidifying oceans, dissolving coral reefs, and faltering plankton stocks caused by those things (745). All of these things can and will cause a devastating crisis in the world. The past, present, and the future have and will be exposed and affected by all of those things. Some of the insects we need now to take care of this earth and to help the animal and human population survive, may not be here in the future. The animals are getting affected by the environmental

Steingraber, a cancer survivor, enjoys writing about the environmental crisis because it does link to cancer. She writes through experiences that she has had through being a survivor, mother, and a ecologist. There are many ways she also backs up her evidence as well. She mainly focuses on the causes and effects that are making the environmental crisis, that has already happened, and that it will only get worse in the next generations. Steingraber explains many times in her essay what is happening because of the environmental crisis. She is mainly raising awareness. She is optimistic because she is hopeful but at the same time she is pessimistic because she even titled her essay “Despair Not”. Steingraber successfully claims and uses ethos, pathos, and logos to express a valuable statement about the environmental crisis. All of the ethos, pathos, and logos Steingraber uses all relate to one

An emotional appeal is this crisis is causing some public health issues. One of these public health issues she describes in her essay is, sunburns at the beach is linked to the stability of the ozone layer. Another public health issue is the highly explosive raw materials used for manufacturing a kitchen floor (748).

The statistics in this essay also pull on the heartstrings. Steingraber explains through many statistics how children are getting diseases such as asthma, having behavioral problems, intellectual impairments, and mothers having preterm birth because of many things in the environment such chemical exposures. This could also be a logical appeal as well because of the statistics. Steingraber has five different statistics in her essay about chronic childhood diseases linked to toxic chemical exposure. One of those statistics is one in 110 children has autism…annual costs are $35 billion…exposure to chemical agents in early pregnancy is one of several suspected contributors (746). Toxic chemicals which could easily be prevented are causing so much money just in childhood diseases today. Within all of Steingraber’s statistics she adds in her essay, almost $165.3 billion is spent annually only between premature births, asthma, learning disabilities, autism, and early puberty and breast development.