My response to An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore

After reading his book and seeing his movie, I feel Al Gore does communicate important facts to his audience. I also feel however, that this was not his agenda, because of his large useage of the pathos element in his work. To me it seemed he was more commited to making us empathize for his two decade old tragedy involving his family, rather then using the facts he presents to make well informed decisions on how to benefit our environment through our actions. I think this affected the way people responded to this in our government. Gore mentioned how he was caught off guard by the governments underwhelming response to his claims, but i can see why they would choose to do so. Not everyone can be sold with sob stories, especially if you are approaching a global audience. That is not to say that An Inconvenient Truth is a gathering of Al Gore's sob stories though, but rather that they appear too frequently for some to take his work seriously. Imagine a judge let a murderer go because his lawyer began to discuss how the lawyers mother never loved the lawyer. It has no place in the trial and is irrelevant information to their arguement of the accused person's innocence. The same can be said about Gore's use of pathos in regard to the issue of global warming. I feel he actually turned some away with his methods because he was not enforcing the factual data as much as he could have.

English H.W. blog #1

What do you see as the most important issue facing our environment today and why?

In all honesty i feel the most important issue facing our environment is the huge amount of undereducated people who can be working to see there are NO issues facing todays environment. Personally i feel that by choosing to let other people think in regards to the environment is very lazy but most of the the world's population is guilty of this. Think of all the valid opinions that drown in an ocean of ignorance. This is the biggest issue because if enough people are able to logically understand the environment and are educated on all the factors affecting it then problems would be significantly reduced. I cannot quite place one specific issue in regards to the environment as more important than this one because i feel it would go unresolved until this situation were taken care of first.