Kyle Madsen brought up interesting arguments against my article “Why Bother?” One of his points was that the angle of vision I take on dealing with climate change is too dominant to gain acceptance by neutral readers. It is true that I have an intense angle of vision and use dramatic language, but I shock a neutral audience with an extreme solution. Overwhelming a neutral audience with an impossible proposition will cause them to accept a more neutral solution such as Kyle’s proposition of sustainable consumerism. This technique will get a semi-concerned individual out of the “why bother?” mentality. The suggestion to grow individual gardens as the best solution to climate change makes simpler actions such as “going green” look like much more reasonable solutions that an individual can bother to take.
Kyle refers to the language I use in my article as “occasionally alarmist and overly dramatic”. My purpose for this is to create an extremist and almost satirical tone. Just as Jonathon Swift suggest eating babies to ease the economic troubles of poor Irish families, I propose planting individual gardens to abolish the specialization in society in a somewhat of a similar satirical tone. The sarcasm is scattered throughout my article such as when I say, “Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.” Or when I say “Will you get a load of that zucchini?!” This combination of satire and focusing on one complicated solution causes the audience to recognize the wrong in saying “why bother?” and helps then to see what they can do to fix our society and slow the rate that climate is changing.
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