Nichole Mcgee
Presence of the Past
4 March 2018
The World’s Response to Danger
The talk Monday evening was a grim glance into our reality with pollution.The speaker brought up a lot of good points. However, the one point of the discussion that I would like to further evaluate is how we respond to pollution. Some of those responses were deliberate like the London Plane Tree. While other responses were just the effects of pollution taking its toll on society such as the asthma levels in Fresno, California. The trend between these two situations is how society attempts to make everything else adapt to the harm of pollution.
The speaker started with his years at Vassar College. He brought to our attention one of the famous trees that is centered in the college. The London Plane tree was developed in order to be adapted to climate change. With the toxic air slowly taking over, the government looked for ways to sustain nature while still sustaining the level of pollution. I thought it was also interesting to make this the center of the college. In a way, it is attempting to glorify how the world can modernize to deal with disaster. The tree can also symbolize an acceptance of the past history of Vassar as it was funded by big breweries that produced a lot of pollution.Although the concept of the tree is very interesting, but it comes to a certain point where we will no longer be able to make everything else around us learn to adapt but instead we will have to adapt our behavior.
Another situation is the toxic air levels effect on people. Fresno, California has the worst level of pollution. And to add to that, they also hold the top rank for amount of people with asthma. Do you think that has stopped big business from polluting so much? Do you think that they have slowed down intake at all? However, I can guarantee that instead they are expecting humans to adapt and prescribing varying types of medicine to combat the asthma. People even go so far as to wearing mask when they go out because the air is too bad. You should not be punished with lung problems from breathing the air from the world you live in. And you should not be expected to find a solution to deal with the problems that come with pollution, but the government should do more to protect us from the harsh toxins that surround us by cutting back on big production.
While it is great that the world is so advanced, it is also a scary downside to the power of technology. Soon, we will not know when enough is enough. We can not change our surroundings to constantly adapt to our destruction. One of the questions after the lecture was what can we do to help make a change. Although it start with making a small part with ourselves such as not littering and not participating in anything that may endanger animals, it is also starts with those in higher positions realizes that this world is not invincible and that you cannot always come back from our actions.