Blog Post #3

  Sarah Foss

   For Project #3, I have chosen to explore outside the theme of Ethics in Higher Education. The reason for this is because I thought my writing would turn out better if I chose a topic that I'm interested in. I am a music performance major at Colorado State University; however, I have chosen a topic that differs from this, because I am interested in the changing factors of the environment. The topics I explored for the activities in class included factors that effect our environment negatively. This could be the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere, deforestation, electricity, issues with fossil fuels, oil spills, water poisoning, etc. All of the issues corresponding with the above categories are largely caused by humans. This led me to develop my research/inquiry question about 3 of these categories.
     My research question asks: "How are man-caused disasters such as deforestation, oil spills, and water poisoning effecting Earth's environment today?" The strategies I used to arrive at this question were narrowing down the most important issues that are currently effecting the environment. Deforestation is a large issue, because the amount of deforestation in the Amazon continues to increase, destroying habitats and decreasing the amount of oxygen in the region. Oil spills are further poisoning the ocean, creating a negative prediction of what life will look like in the ocean in coming years. Water poisoning is not only bad for the bodies of water being poisoned, but it is also bad for the people and animals that rely on that water source. The overall theme/topic for this project is environmentalism or environmental health. Though there are negative connotations that come with all of the aforementioned issues, all of these issues can be prevented, which provides us with hope.

Below you can see the effects oil spills can have on the environment and the creatures that suffer due to these disasters:

Below is a list of potential stakeholders for my argument:

• EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) 
• FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
• Environmentalists 
• Geologists 
• PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) 

All of these stakeholders appeal well to the information I am trying to get across. However, all of these stakeholders agree with my side of this argument and the issues I am presenting. Because of this, I will be persuading a stakeholder who already agrees with my issue, and I will also have to provide a viable solution to convince them to implement my ideas. EPA would be one of the largest stakeholders that I would have to convince, because they are already very educated about the issues I am presenting, and I will have to provide a well thought out solution in order to get them to implement my solution. 

My largest concern about P3 is finding the most credible sources to include in my annotated bibliography and my research paper. It will be a bit of a struggle to find the most credible sources, because there are already so many articles about the issues I am presenting, making it harder to find the most effective ones. To improve this process in class, we could do more work with narrowing down articles on CSU library's database. I am still not completely fluent on how to narrow these down, so it would be helpful if we had further instruction on this.