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Summary Of Why Bother By Michael Pollan

712 Words3 Pages

The Temperatures are rising, carbon emissions are increasing, ice caps are melting at a faster rate than most scientists expected, and planet earth is experiencing ecological and environmental issues due to global warming. Earth as we know it might change drastically in the next couple of decades, and it is our responsibility to preserve the environment and preserve earth. Michael Pollan's Why Bother? opens the reader's eyes in a powerful way to global warming and related environmental crises. Pollan uses rhetorical strategies such as current and past events, logos and pathos to persuade the reader "to bother"(218) and start thinking of the environment as an issue that involves all the people. Pollan approaches the reader from different standing …show more content…

He uses pronouns which include himself in the predicament that his audience, Americans, find themselves in. His use of we, us ,and our are an example of how he uses diction within his persuasive appeal of ethos. By presenting himself as a fellow American, who is also experiencing the same struggles with global warming as his audience. Pollan greatly relies on ethos in the introductory to strengthen his argument. By asserting the different aspects, both scientific and personal, of global warming that he has considered and researched. Pollan effectively establishes credibility and authority as an author on this particular issue, especially given that his audience consists of American people whose lives are affected by global warming and other environmental …show more content…

He uses Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to support his argument and give the reader a hint about what his article is going to be about. Pollan makes a connection with the reader when he describes his own feeling about the documentary when saying "Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change."(Pollan 312) Pollan also references the analysis of Wendell Berry, a Kentucky farmer and writer, to support his argument of the people's dependency for solutions on specialists. He quotes these well known people to make himself seem

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