Evaluation of 2 Essays Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Evaluation of 2 Essays - Essay Example The second essay was written by Eric Mortenson of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, originally published in the Oregonian, and he is a farmer and discusses how his family saved their farm and their heritage by going organic and selling locally. The two essays examined are supporting almost completely opposite positions on farming and food consumption, but they are not really at odds, because they are talking about two different subjects: consumption and production. Both essays make logical sense and they prove their points very well. Pelletier discusses the futility of trying to get everyone to consume locally, even if it were the answer to global warming. He shows that doing this for food consumption would be difficult enough, if not impossible, and that it would simply not make a useful difference unless all consumption becomes local, and he shows that this simply cannot be done, because the local climate cannot support enough warm weather fruit and the land cannot support profitable meat ranching. He says that only 48% of local consumption is covered by local production. Of course, coffee, tea, chocolate, cotton and many more products cannot be produced locally in Vancouver. If this extends around the world, many people would be hungry, and hungry people make wars, which have the biggest carbon footprint of all human activities. Pelletier cites evidence that if everyone switched to locally produced consumption, it would knock civilization back to the stone age, with poor diets, horse and buggy transport and wood-burning stoves for heat. We could survive this if it were an absolute necessity, but he argues that it is not even very useful. Pelletier says it is a common misconception that consuming only locally produced food would actually lower its carbon footprint. Pelletier says that trains and boats have lower carbon footprints than the small trucks that deliver locally. Eric Mortensen has turned his farm into organic production