Thursday, September 5, 2013

Rhetorical Analysis to Climate Wars and Climate Peace

Katie Huber
6 September 2013
Effective Writing 120-40
Author: Dr. Vandana Shiva is an Indian environmental activist. She set up her own Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Technology in the Himalaya. She received many awards for her findings and research throughout her environmentalist career and was even recognized by Time Magazine as an “environmental hero” in 2003.  
Title: Making Peace with the Earth “Climate Wars and Climate Peace”
Date of Publication: 2013
Publisher: This book was first published in 2012 by Women Unlimited. This edition of the book was published in 2013 by Pluto Press. Pluto Press was founded in 1969. It is a British book publisher based in London, England. It is distributed to the United States by Palgrave Macmillan. Pluto Press has been an individual publishing company since 1979.
Tone, Syntax, Language: In my opinion, the author has a variety of different tones. First, I think she is desperate to make people aware of the situation with climate control; she is also trying to convince people to not only care, but to do something about it to help; I finally think she is being informative of water deprivation and ice melting and their effects on society.
Intended Audience: I think Shiva is trying to reach out to those who are ignorant to climate control, those who want to help, those who don’t know how to help and most importantly, those who don’t have the knowledge of what has been taking place regarding the climate.
Context: Shiva begins talking about how serious the problem of climate control really is in that emissions must be cut by eighty percent in order to keep the climate from rising two degrees Celsius. She then goes into detail about which countries, including the United States, chose to sign the Copenhagen Accord and which countries refused to sign. The entire purpose of the accord was to break the United Nations Climate Treaty to ultimately continue climate pollution. Shiva proceeds to tell the reader that floods and melting glaciers as a result of global warming and dramatic climate changes are the causes of a multitude of deaths in places such as Ladakh, India, the Artic and the Antarctic. She explains that as the glaciers continue to melt, extensive flooding will take place, as well as agonizing droughts during the summers. Also, in different areas around the world, they are experiences major water deprivations, which end up with the many losses of life. Also within the same areas, many farmers had to stop using their land for crops due to the scarce amount of rainfall they received. Shiva then proceeds to comment on the Himalayan glaciers and how they are the quickest to deteriorate. The author ends this section by saying that the number one thing that will allow people to make a change in the environmental climate change is knowledge of the situation and what they choose to do with it.
Purpose: I think Shiva’s purpose is to make people aware of climate control, to help people discover what they can do to help, to inform those who want to help what they can do in order to help. I also think it is a possibility that Shiva wants to show the readers what people have done wrong thus far in the journey to fix this environmental climate issue.
Author’s Process: The author begins this part of the book talking about the Un Climate Summit in Copenhagen and how so many people were present in order to control the climate. I think she started off in a very negative manner to prove to her readers that there is so much going on regarding climate control that we do not know about and there is so much that we could do to make it better. She continues to add many different statistics of water deprivation and other environmental conditions to show how destructive these issues can be towards society. I think she does this to show that something really needs to be done to help, but the only way to do that is to inform oneself of what is actually going on and then choosing to do something with that knowledge.  

Shiva, Vandana. "Climate Wars and Climate Peace." Making Peace with the Earth. London: Pluto Press, 2013. 98-110. Print.

"Vandana Shiva (India)." The Right Livelihood Award. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Sept. 2013.

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