RHETORIC ANALYSIS: It's the Water, Stupid!

David M. Lodge's essay “'It's the Water, Stupid!'” asserts that the world needs to find a

win-win-win situation and a balance in the use of water resources for environmental, public health, and commerce problems in order to ensure the safety of human beings and halt dramatic changes to aquatic species and their environments. Lodge develops his point with environmental and public health statistics as well as numerous references that show the relationship between the necessity of water resources to live and our environmental problems. Lodge discusses the world problems of water resources and the needed better management of them in order to spread awareness about the topic as it is an overlooked, global problem. Lodge's essay is written in BioScience which is read by the well educated, but his essay seems to be targeted at a wider audience considering the weight of the issue and the easy readability of the piece.

Lodge is a professor of biological sciences and director of the Center for Aquatic Conservation at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on conversational biology and aquatic invasive species. Lodge also administrates a number of committees and organizations that concentrate on invasive species including the direction of the NSF-funded ISIS (Integrated Systems for Invasive Species) project (“David M. Lodge”). This article appeared in the January issue of BioScience, which is a heavily edited and peer reviewed journal of research and essays on biology. Despite some of the complexity of the articles in BioScience, Lodge's thesis is significant to humanity so the article was written for a larger audience. Lodge covers three important topics relative to his thesis that are broad enough for anyone to understand,...

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...his knowledge, he executes his ideas on paper very well with examples and devices, but his writing seemed to stutter at moments with writing style inconsistencies. Nonetheless, his essay is basic enough and intuitive that it is understandable by wide range of people. His sources on the subject are narrow and only supportive of his thesis, but common sense generally agrees that harming ourselves and/or the environment is not a good thing, even though we can't see it sometimes because we are blinded by greed. I found his piece insightful and interesting, but can also take from his writing style and ability because he has written a strong essay.

Works Cited

“David M. Lodge // Department of Biological Sciences // University of Notre Dame.” University of Notre Dame. 2009. Web.1 Mar. 2010.

Lodge, David M. “It's the Water, Stupid!” BioScience Jan. 2010: 6-7. PDF file.