Edward Abbey Eco-Defense Analysis

Wei An
ENG-122 Academic Writing
Frances Coley
14 NOV 2014

Natural Resource and Human Responsibility

Every year, billion tons of natural resources been extracted from our natural environment; these including water, energy, minerals, materials and fertile lands. While human population is expanding fast and our consumption is growing rapidly, humanity is causing severe damage to the natural environment and resources. For example, forests, fish stocks and water reserves are dwindling because of over logging and fishing; mineral supply is depleting because of aggressive energy product extraction; urban city development and landscape destroy fertile land and causes animal species becoming extinct. But what happen if those natural resources are
The majority of us understand the importance of natural environment and resources, but there still people do not care about anything but profits. They are willing to jeopardize the mother nature of our home in exchange of their own benefits. Unfortunately, some of them have power and authority. In Edward Abbey’s work “Eco-Defense,” he compares those people to our enemy who broken into our house, and called them “three-piece-suited gangsters.”(Eco-Defense. Abbey.) Clearly, Abbey was frustrated because those people controls the government and major corporations; therefore, they are hard to reach and very difficult to correct their actions. And because the frustration, Abbey advocates tree spiking method in hopes to stop the violence against the nature; which is an ineffective solution for the issue. Instead of spiking the trees, perhaps the protest against those violent actions is the better option. In fact, there are many different forms of protest taken place in the past; from individual statements to mass demonstration. For example, more than 300,000 people joined a 2 mile protest march in New York city in September 21, 2014. Such a mass event which protesting a proposed extension of the Keystone pipeline that stretches from Canada to Texas (Daily News, NY.) Although, these actions seems to have little effect on the result of environmental degradation, but
There are many ways to conserve natural resources, all we need to do is look around and find a way to minimize the usage of natural resource that we using everyday. For example, turn off the lights when we leave the house; minimize the waste produced by buying less packaged goods and reusable products, and recycling. These are little things we can do to help, and these does not take much effort to do; however, if everybody does the same, we can still make that difference. In the big picture, we can consider using more renewable natural resources such as hydro-power and solar-power. These energy resources are the best ways to conserve natural resource such as fossil fuel. Fortunately, many energy conservative products have been invented: hybrid or electric cars and energy-efficient home appliances. These are the reflections of people’s concern towards the natural resources depletion. On the whole, we need to start do our share to conserve the energy and resource as part of our responsibility to the natural