Thursday, October 1, 2009
#5 Thoughts on Greenness
Although the speaker was highly respected in the world and a very honorable guest, I felt as if her speech was like any other "green" speech. She pointed out many problems, and even new ones that I have never really thought of, but didn't really give many examples to solve these problems. Sure, she talked about conserving energy, changing to energy-efficient light bulbs, walking, and biking, but haven't we all heard these before? She pointed out problems I didnt really think about such as the Los Angeles pollution and the concentration of toxic power plants around low-income and colored neighborhoods. Just because these low-income families are not politically active or politically influential does not mean they can be bombarded with factories that produce pollution, endangering their lives. I thought she did make one good point in a way of solving these problems. She answered a student, when asked what we should do to really try and help, that we should try to write to our congressmen to really get our opinions voiced and really get the congressmen aware of what is going on in communities across our cities. But overall, if I had to tell her where to really work on her speech would be to provide more solutions, because she is such a professoinal in this topic and also to cut down on talking about herself so much.
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Sethi's speech does indeed sound like another "green speech," and I've heard a lot of those in school assemblies. She would have really distinguished herself if she proposed unique and innovative solutions that have not yet been disseminated in public. I also agree that she should have cut down on the personal information; she seemed to talk about herself at odd points in her speech.
ReplyDeleteSethi's speech did seem like white noise. How many times have we heard the same speech over and over again? Seems like another attempt at "An Inconvenient Truth" if you ask me. She should have cut out the majority of personal information she included because, frankly, it seemed that she thought we would be impressed by her accomplishments and in turn we would listen to what she had to say.
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with your last statement that Simran Sethi should have provided more solutions. After all, the title of her presentation was "Can We Save this Planet"! What do you think she could have done to improve her rhetoric?
ReplyDeleteI feel like other "green" speeches gave more solutions than her's did. She down played "the list" of things usually said, saying we each needed to find our own way to go green. While she talked about a lot about what she did, I agree with you in that she gave students very little direction of what they can do to save the planet.
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