Close Reading: please read closely and discuss the four passages printed below. Explain, in each case, where the passage is from, what its context is, and what issues are at stake. How are these issues addressed in the passage itself and in the larger text from which it is taken? (200-250 words each)
(a) “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf`s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”
(b) “On a global basis we have exceeded carrying capacity; global climate change is one outcome of a degraded biospheric system. Is this the negative feedback that will correct our overshooting of carrying capacity?”
(c) “A related critique, by the Australian philosopher and ethicist Clive Hamilton, is that geoengineering springs from the same faith in technology and the same hubris that got us into this mess. It lets people ignore the possibility that ‘there’s something profoundly wrong in our economic and political system,’ Hamilton said on the progressive news show Democracy Now! ‘because geoengineering comes along and says, ‘Well, look the system can solve the problem.’”
(d) “If my world became a farm and a single, tiny town, I could chart and understand every person and his connections, every acre, each plant, each animal, the trajectory of each thought, emotion, and action. I wanted to believe that such a circumscribed life could be sorted and organized, in the way that the nineteenth-century naturalists cataloged all known living things, from kingdom to species, categories and subcategories that were not simple, exactly, but at least made sense. – It was, of course, nothing like that.”