TOW #3

Save Money, Save Salmon, Save Mike: Free the Snake

Steve Hawley

The Cleanest Line (Blog by Patagonia)

            The Snake River is dying, and Hawley is charging four with the crime. The killers are four dams choking the life out of this vital artery to ecosystems across the northwest. Hawley is an environmental journalist who himself lives along the Columbia River in Oregon. He is helping to raise awareness about the removal of these dams: Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Monumental and Lower Granite Dams. The idea of removing a dam is relatively new to the American public so to convince his reader that these are very real killers he intros with a narrative about an Orca named Mike. The reader learns that the number of little Orcas that Mike babysits has been declining due to a lack of Chinook salmon, their main food source. The salmon spawn in small tributaries to the Snake thousands of miles inland. Once they are big enough they travel to the ocean, and every year they make the journey back upstream to spawn the next generation. The only problem, the four dams blocking their journey. These dams are also responsible for turning a once swift flowing river into “a deadly heat sink.” The water temperature rises beyond what the salmon can survive, and beyond what the law allows. Hawley then places in pictures of several salmon that fell victim to this deadly combination. Finally he rams his point home with a powerful statistic, “80% of the Salmon run are dead or dying.” To conclude his argument Hawley paints a picture of what the region could look like with the snake free flowing. He writes, “Doing so would grant unfettered access to 5,500 miles of heat resistant high-elevation salmon-bearing streams, the arteries and veins of 4.4 million acres of wilderness habitat in Oregon, Washington and Idaho.” This issue is one that is ongoing but anyone who reads this article will be convinced to sign the petition to remove the dams, there is a link to this conveniently placed at the bottom of the article.

TOW #2

The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’

Rachel L. Swarns

The New York Times

            It seems like every week there is a new story about the police doing something they shouldn’t. This article focuses on the incident where an undercover New York Police officer tackled, handcuffed, and detained retired tennis star James Blake. Blake was mistaken for a suspect they had a picture of. Now this was not just a recount of the event as the author assumes the audience is already familiar with the incident. She wants to look beyond the obvious overuse of force and look into why Blake was misidentified in the first place. She states that most people see it as an example of “Racism, pure and simple” however there is phycology behind this misidentification and countless others. Phycologists call it the “other-race effect” where the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other racial groups makes more difficult for us to distinguish people of other races. The article starts off with a recent racial incident and Swarns then argues how it can be partially explained by a theory backed by prominent phycologists. To further her point she then employs two examples of famous people of the same race who often find themselves mixed up. But the reader doesn’t just have to take Swarns’s word for it, she shows the celebrities side by side. I can’t speak for everyone but I could definitely see myself confusing them and they don’t even look alike. Her argument and credibility are strengthened when she talks about how when she was a Washington correspondent she was often told how similar she looked to Condoleezza Rice (she then states that she doesn’t even look like her). Swarn wants to show how we shouldn’t be offended when we are confused with another person of our race because it is an issue of ability not “bias or bigotry.” However it is one that can be fixed, you just need to spend a lot of time with people of another race and your ability to “decode faces across color lines” will improve.” This was an extremely eye opening article that puts science where many have just seen racism. 

TOW #1

"Dying in Space: An American Dream"

Megan Garber

The Atlantic 

The article first hits the reader as extremely morbid. But as I delved into the text I realized that the idea of one way space trips is the only way to practically explore Mars during our generation. The focus of this article is the nonprofit organization “Mars One”. They are a nonprofit organization that promises that it will be sending a one way mission to colonize space by 2023. Online applications are open now and thousands have already submitted their applications. Garber is clearly in favor of this plan and seems to be persuading the reader that the idea that they won’t be coming back is “a feature, not a bug.” Garber insists that we must get away from the Apollo way of thinking where there is always a return trip. Former NASA Engineer says, “To maintain project inertia, the concept must have a goal that accomplishes the manned landing within as short a time as possible." The best way to achieve all that? A "one-man, one-way" trip.” Garber has been writing for the Atlantic for three years and is an accomplished writer but she is not a scientist or an engineer so she herself is not an expert on the topic either. So to build credibility Barber uses quotes from experts like the one above, and points out that this is not the first time that we have thought of one way journeys into space. During the early stages of the Apollo program NASA played with the idea of sending a man alone to stay on the moon for about a year until they designed a return vehicle. This was the result of a race to beat the Russians now we are using this method to start a new era in space exploration. This will transform our travels from visits to colonization. The latter being the future of our planet and our species.

IRB TOW #1

“American Caesar”

William Manchester

Jay Mudambi

This book was recommended to me by my brother who insisted it was the best biography he had ever read, so far it’s turning out to be just that. This biography details the extraordinary life of an American legend, Douglas MacArthur. The introduction called him “larger than life” and “a great thundering paradox of a man”. Yet for someone who is such a controversial figure in American history, people know surprisingly little about him. George C. Kenney stated, “Very few people really know Douglas MacArthur,” William Manchester set out to change that. But the story does not start with him, the book starts with his father Arthur MacArthur, and tells the story of how he gained glory and rank at the battle of Missionary Ridge overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee. You could say that Douglas MacArthur was destined for greatness. He grew up the son of a Civil War hero and spent his childhood moving between forts across the American West. He learned to ride a horse and shoot a gun before he was seven. Yet his mother also kept his hair long and dressed him in skirts up until he was ten. Manchester’s descriptions of the paradoxes that made this man who he was is a common theme through the books far. He doesn’t want people who read this book to walk away with one perception of MacArthur, he wants them to see the complexities that made up this American icon. Manchester was no stranger to the Second World War either, he served in the pacific theater on Okinawa and was severely wounded in action. I am 214 pages into this chronologically organized book and the Second World War is still a long ways off. This shows the amount of detail that Manchester has gathered on MacArthur’s life. There are also quotes from people in all stages of MacArthur’s life talking about him. These people range from Members of Congress when he had to testify before them while at West Point, to Dwight D. Eisenhower when he was MacArthur’s aid in the Philippines. MacArthur was a Victorian trapped in the 20^th century, yet he still managed to define the first half of that century.

MacArthur at West Point