In a recent New York Times article, columnist Leslie Kaufman discusses new trends in waste management and recycling. Kaufman highlights many initiatives by organizations and individuals across the United States to reduce the amount of garbage sent to landfills and incinerators. These include diverting organic waste to compost systems, sending more recyclable materials to recycling programs and using more biodegradable products. Kaufman points out that many Americans, like many people internationally, have become very aware of these waste issues and are part of a growing movement toward producing less trash.
Kaufman writes “Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash”. This phrase requires conceptual analysis to avoid misunderstanding.
The author may have meant that when comparing all nationalities, Americans are doing the most to reduce the amount of trash sent to landfills or incinerators. A champion is generally defined as the one person (or group of people) who performs at the highest standard of a certain endeavour. The main context of the article is reducing trash, therefore this could be the endeavour.
But the author could also have meant that when comparing all nationalities, Americans produce the most amount of trash sent to landfills and incinerators. The article also discusses producing trash, so this could also be considered the endeavour.
The ambiguity lies in a number of concepts. Firstly, there is no indication as to the action or verb relating to trash. Are Americans the champions of producing trashing or reducing trash? This is not clear in the phrase.
Secondly, the word champion suggests the leader of a positive pursuit, while trash is a negative thing. Therefore it is not clear if Americans are doing something positive against a negative thing, or if they are the leaders in doing that negative thing.
Finally, Kaufman follows the phrase by saying that Americans produce 4.6 pounds per person per day of trash. However there are no other statistics for comparison. Therefore, we don’t know if Americans are producing less trash than they did in previous times. Further, we don’t know if they produce more or less trash than other nationalities.
References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/science/earth/20trash.html?_r=2&hp
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I think that this blog is very interesting and I absolutely agree with what you said about how the article is ambiguous. The two different meanings of the sentence stating that americans are the champions trash gives two ideas that change the whole point and argument of the article.
ReplyDeleteI also think that what you said about how the author did not provide other data or statistice about how much trash everyone else produces is very true in that if there is nothing to compare the data against, then it is not significant at all to the author's argument. I think that you did a very good job of explaining and describing conceptual analysis in this article.