World Of The Future We Thristed By Naomi Shihab Nye

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World of the Future, We Thristed by Naomi Shihab Nye tackles the significant impact humans have on the environment within the twenty-seven lines. In this poem, the speaker illustrates the lengths of littering and pollution and how our ignorance and selfishness have led to long-term environmental effects and dependence on urbanized technology. Throughout the poem, there are a plethora of strategies the speaker utilizes to convey the crucial role humans play in the mass environmental damage from littering, but a reoccurring technique Nye employs is a pluralized first-person perspective. In the second stanza, the speaker asks the rhetorical question “--who did we imagine would pick them up?” (line 12) to introduce human shortcomings and humanity's …show more content…

Humanity just kept pushing and has grown so reliant on everyday plastic commodities shows how they have become desensitized to the major effects of plastics on the ecosystem. Furthermore, the quote “we poured high-potency energy tonics or Coke/down our throats, because this time in history/had sapped us so thoroughly and/we were desperate” (lines 4-7) demonstrates humanity’s selfishness and failure to take accountability. The personification of time “sapp(ing)” humanity dry is used to show the numerous excuses humanity has made for their naiveness. This observation explains that humanity seemingly has little to no care for the world around them and excuses themselves in the case that it was an act of “desperation,” selfishly disregarding the rising effects of littering and mass plastic production. By continuing to use plastic products, the speaker implies that humanity found the presence of plastic technology beneficiary and easy to them, so they took advantage of it and abused it to the point it has made a massive impact on the environment everywhere and refused to look at their fault in this decline. Similarly, while Nye utilizes the perspective, she also incorporates many other strategies to illustrate humanity’s fault, as such through the language