Michael Pollan's Why Bother By Michael Pollan

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Recommended: Recycling impact on society

Christina Nguyen
Prof. Harder
English 4
May 6, 2014
One Change at a Time
We, as human beings, tend to take advantage of the things that we receive in this world. Due to this reason, we do not seem to care about the problems occurring amongst us, but instead only complain and point fingers when a problem occurs. In Why Bother by Michael Pollan, he brings up a point explaining how we rely on the specialist to fix our problems as we do not bother to fix the problems on our own. With the term of specialization, it is an act of being restricted to something specific meaning in this case a study of something specific so that there is more of an understanding. This is viewed as a negative term in Pollan’s view because with specialization, everyone in the society thinks that any problem we have has its own specialized person that can work on it. Due to that reason, no one will step up and fix the problem right in front of them because they assume someone else got it. An example he brought up to visualize his point of how a change can make a difference is the idea of planting a garden. There is no specialization there, but what is needed is the shining of the sun, the planning, and planting of people. With this, a garden is made by just a typical person as all was required were their own thoughts and actions. Just like the visualization of the garden, I believe if small changes are done, this will help improve the world making it a better and healthier place rather than relying on someone else since that really would not bring any changes. Also, the people who makes the changes will also gain positive aspects out of this doing. We should not always rely on other people to make changes, but instead “do bother” according to Pollan.
Recycl...

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...ple to clean after us so one thing we can do is help pick up any trash we see even though it is not ours. With this doing, we are providing service as well as making the world a better place for everyone, including the animals.
There will always be people around the world that do not seem to care about what is happening around the world, but all they do is complain if a problem was to occur. Also, there are many people that do see a problem, but they seem to rely on others to fix it. In the end, a problem would not be fixed if one was to not take action, so it is our own choice and doing if we want a change to occur. Small changes like recycling, saving water, and picking up trash will make a huge difference for our environment. Just take it one step at a time and every change we do will not only make our world a better place, but we become better people as well.

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