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Foreword To The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Rhetorical Analysis

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Former US President Jimmy Carter addresses the potential for the industrialization of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in “Foreword to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, A Photographic Journey” by Subhankar Banerjee. In this piece, Carter fights for maintaining the Wildlife Refuge by reasoning, with powerful stylistic features, that the beauty and vast importance it plays, overrules the wants of the industries. Carter uses his own journey through and support of the Arctic Refuge as evidence against the industries and their agenda. He outlines his own trip through the Arctic Refuge, writing of the wonders him and his wife Rosalynn experienced. By describing his own personal experience, he provides readers with evidence of the specialness the refuge is. He goes further by also showing his own effort to support it: “I signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, monumental legislation that safeguarded more than 100 million acres of national parks, refuges, and forests in Alaska.” This evidence of care from a former US President, a representative of the US, gives the piece a persuasive element, showing the people of the …show more content…

He describes the “roads and pipelines, drilling rigs and industrial facilities” that would take over a place so wild and beautiful as the Arctic Refuge. He describes animals’ homes being lost, a wildness no longer wild, he reasons that for this to be lost would be a “tragedy”. A tragedy that would also be for so little. Carter explains that “At best, the Arctic Refuge [could] provide 1 to 2 percent of the oil [the] country consumes each day” – a fractional profit for such a major loss. His reasoning stretches from the sentimentality of the beauty that would be lost, to the incredible losses unchallenged by miniscule

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