Excerpt from Term Paper:
Cassandra
Assuming Cassandra: A great Optimist Discusses a Pessimist’s World is actually a book about the environment, the blunderings, plus the sustainability of our world. This really is a book for folks trying to understand our complex world and exactly how it is faltering and doing well. I found the approach this book takes for the environment to get entertaining and worthwhile, for not just the details it provides, however the fresh point of view it offers in environmental issues. The author restores the reader’s optimism in the world and explains how we may do better yet for the future. The individuals who have predicted the end on the planet, AtKisson says, “have proven wrong, and still have served to relegate every environmentally concerned comments for the fate of Cassandra’s mutterings: They are overlooked. And so they needs to be. ” (p. 12) He says, the earth can be not a shed cause. So in retrospect he’s drafted the book.
According to AtKisson, “the definition of durability is nor vague neither abstract; it is quite specific and is also tied to considerable criteria conveying how methods are used and distributed. Several of what at present gets named ‘sustainable development’ is no such thing, but that does not mean the concept must be dismissed, any more than the concept of democracy should be ignored when it is misappropriated by a dictatorship. Sustainability, like democracy, is an ideal toward which we work, a journey more than a destination. ” (p. 200) This quote likely summarizes the entire theme and opinion of the author wonderful book. The writer not only talks about what we should dismiss and that which you investigate about our environment, but encourages all of us to face every concept and problem with honesty and positive outlook.
The publication spends much of its period explaining idea of sustainability and putting it in to terms the average environmentalist can easily understand. “Sustainability’ is dying of improper use, and drying, and decrease to a buzzword. It is declining because it is mounted on too may possibly initiatives that pretend to be “sustainability” when they are demonstrably not really…. Let us along abandon the use of the text sustainability and sustainable advancement, as they were chosen for the twentieth Century. Allow us to therefore file sustainability dead – and immediately proceed to revive it…. ” (p. 189) AtKisson clearly says the urgency with which we must develop lasting cultures, basing this want on the quickly deteriorating condition of the earth’s ecology, as well as the calamitous outcomes that are certain to follow. Get away from all that we certainly have heard, this individual insists, and develop fresh improved ideas on the same concerns.
What makes this book a better examine than a dried out textbook will be the clever analogies the author uses to illustrate his points, such as assessing sustainability to democracy. “Democracy was a fresh idea in the past, and it had been scoffed by by many people. It took hundreds of years to develop and turn a controllable reality, and it is still definately not perfect. inches (p. 47) We are just like passengers in an airplane inside the clouds, says Atkisson, going directly into the medial side of a mountain. Some of the individuals have trapped a glimpse of the tragedy lying in advance, but their alerts fall about deaf hearing. I really related to this example because it position the environment in terms that plainly illustrate what’s happening around us. It also reminds us that people are all inside the same situation. I was on that plane with everyone else. The optimism the author presents exposes readers, the “Cassandras, ” including me personally, to the concept that we can continue to plan a route to an optimistic future intended for our varieties and world if we work together.
Mcdougal says these kinds of “Cassandras” who have say the climate is changing, the environments are vanishing, the human enterprise is unsustainable and heading for disaster, are the ones creating the disasters, they are the ones cursing us all as a result of gift of prophecy. Although Atkisson states “that although some of
