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The essay “Waste” by Wendell Berry, written in 1989, is a powerful and insightful essay in which Berry claims that we are all part of the waste problem; however, some of us are more guilty than others. Manufacturers and businesses have more blame to carry than the average consumer. Through a growing dependence on industries, like the food industry, we significantly hurt the economic system and have caused the source of unemployment. Although Berry makes significant appeals to logos in “Waste,” his appeals to ethos and pathos are what he primarily uses to create his persuasive argument.
Berry uses four principle appeals to the ethos at the beginning of his essay to create a persona and bolster his credibility. He appeals to three personal pieces of evidence and one impersonal one. In his first line, he starts by saying that he is a “country person” (Berry 126). This comment begins to set up a framework for the reader to understand Berry’s persona that will be filled in throughout his essay. By conveying that he is a country person, Berry is implying to the reader that he cares for the land that he lives on and is part of its larger story. He emphasizes this concept when he identifies himself as a farmer who must go out and clear his fields of garbage washed up from the flooded river before he can plant his crops (Berry 126). He continues this idea by placing himself “on the Kentucky River about ten miles from where it makes its entrance into Ohio” (Berry 126). Since he lives there and deals with the pollutants, he is to be trusted that this is a serious issue. Berry also expands his credibility when he shows the irony between the old Iroquois word for the Ohio River (Oyo, which means “beautiful river”) and what it is today (Berry 126). This illustrates that he is knowledgeable through his grasp of language, but more importantly, he also uses it to create a persona that connects him to the land to create the effect that he is stepping back into the past to show the discontinuity between what was reality then and what is now.
Not only does Berry use personal, informal examples to establish his persona, but he also uses statistics in a narrative to support his credibility to speak on the issue of waste. He writes, “In our county, we now have a ‘sanitary landfill’ which daily receives, in addition to our local production, fifty to sixty large truckloads of garbage from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York” (Berry 126). This statistic inside his narrative impresses on his readers the depth of the problem. Trash from localities up to 700 miles away has no better place to go than the middle of Kentucky. The final resting place of the trash is entirely disconnected from the people that created it. From the responsible perspective that Berry is writing from, this system of disposal that affects others first is clearly not the way that human stewardship of the earth is supposed to be.
From appealing to ethos to strengthen his persona and credibility, Berry moves to call his readers to react emotionally through an appeal to pathos. Berry makes use of descriptive lists, identity markers, and colorful language to appeal to pathos to build up emotions in his audience. Berry’s use of descriptive lists is very effective at using the imagery of everyday life to evoke a negative response in his readers. The first instance of this method happens on page 126 where Berry writes,
Moreover, a close inspection of our countryside would reveal, strewn over it from one end to the other, thousands of derelict and worthless automobiles, house trailers, refrigerators, stoves, freezers, washing machines, and dryers; as well as thousands of unregulated dumps in hollows and sink holes, on streambanks and roadsides, filled not only with ‘disposable’ containers but also with broken toasters, television sets, toys of all kinds, furniture, lamps, stereos, radios, scales, coffee makers, mixers, blenders, corn poppers, hair dryers, and microwave ovens. (Berry 126)
By using this common language, Berry is accentuating the wastefulness of our current society. He concludes the previous paragraph with a vital line of the essay: “Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to” (Berry 127). By using a series of common images- perhaps a river, an abandoned lot, or some other place- Berry compels us to remember a time when we saw such brokenness and waste in our own lives. Berry employs the emotions caused by these images to break down some of the barriers and begin to get his readers invested in what he is saying.
Not only does Berry use descriptive lists to connect with his audience through pathos, but he also uses identity markers. Berry connects with his audience personally by identifying with them. On page 127, he refers to himself and the audience as “we Americans, all of us…” (Berry 127). Throughout history and in modern American culture today, there is a profound sense of pride that comes when someone identifies with the United States of America. By identifying something that Berry and his audience have in common, He is uniting everyone on a common ground only to strengthen the effectiveness of his use of colorful language when it comes. He also appeals to the emotional state of victimhood as a kind of identity marker. He writes, “We are all unwilling victims, perhaps; and some of us even are unwilling perpetrators, but we must count ourselves guilty nonetheless” (Berry 127). Victimhood is a powerful emotional state, and humans tend to be very prone to its way of thinking. It can bind very different people together against a person, thing, or system. However, Berry is more nuanced than the stereotype of an environmentalist. He concedes that Americans are not only the victims but also the perpetrators (Berry 127). This apparent contradiction broadens Berry’s argument and keeps the essay away from purely blaming systems out of their control. It also helps make his audience feel responsible for the present situation. If they were just passive victims, there would be nothing they could really do, but being perpetrators, they have the power to do something about the state they are in.
Berry utilizes severe contrast and colorful language to unsettle his audience and persuade them to listen. He writes, “The truth is that we Americans, all of us, have become a kind of human trash, living our lives in the midst of a ubiquitous damned mess of which we are at once the victims and the perpetrators” (Berry 127). The effect of this contrast jars the reader. The vocabulary that Berry uses here is very aggressive, especially when compared to what he has already written in his essay. By stating that all Americans “have become a kind of human trash,” Berry is offending the very core of our patriotic sensibilities (Berry 127). He also uses the contrast of a presupposed image. For Americans, America is the place of beauty. They treasure the song, “America the Beautiful.” For their exceptional land of “spacious skies and amber waves of grain” that they live to be described as a “ubiquitous damned mess” is shocking in the extreme (Berry 127). Another place that Berry uses colorful language to induce emotion is when he writes, “There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands” (Berry 127). Once again Berry appeals to pathos through the identity marker of being patriotic in order to show them something that they are seriously overlooking. By jolting his readers through the use of colorful language, Berry motivates them to pay attention to what he is saying by causing them to feel a sense of shame in order to transition to the true core of his argument.
Berry does make an appeal to logos in his essay; however, in comparison to his earlier arguments, it is a weak one. He follows the basic form of an argument, similar to the pattern of Stasis Theory. In Stasis Theory the author moves through statements of fact, definitions, and evaluations of the issue, argues for a primary cause for the issue, and concludes with a policy that would offer a solution to the issue. In “Waste,” Berry logically moves through a statement of the problem, an examination of its extent, a definition of what the waste is, the cause of the waste, and then an implied way of how the issue can be fixed. One issue that this essay has is that there does appear to be a jump between Berry’s evaluation of the issue and his conclusion of the cause. However, if the essay is read slowly multiple times, it is possible to begin to grasp what Berry is getting at. This is a serious flaw, however, and one that many that are persuaded by his appeals to ethos and pathos will find difficult to understand.
Throughout “Waste,” Wendell Berry appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos in order to formulate his argument. Unfortunately, his appeals to logos are not as strong on the surface as they could be. If Berry were able to expand what he means from the bottom of page 127 to the end, which really holds the powerful implications of his argument, then his argument would be much more persuasive to a broader and newer audience. People who have read Berry before and recognize some of his attitudes and themes might be more persuaded than a new audience. Nevertheless, through his four appeals to ethos to establish a persona and strengthen his credibility, and because of his appeals to the pathos of descriptive lists, identity markers, and colorful language, Berry constructs a well-crafted and persuasive argument.
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