Essay #2 -- Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

English —2^nd  Formal Essay —McFarland--Spring—2014

For this essay we will be investigating issues related to our book, Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, and to the movie, Crude Awakening. One of the intriguing arguments that gets built in both the book and the movie is that this contemporary life that many of us take for granted, is actually the result of specific events in history, especially including the discovery and rise of Oil.

For this paper you will be examining this claim and taking a stand about whether or not you think this is true.  The following questions are intended to offer some guidance to you as you build your paper. You don’t need to answer every question. You can come up with your own questions. And it is OK to argue more than one side of a question if that is how you feel. There are a lot of questions here. You don’t need to answer them all. And you can explore other questions that you come up with yourself, but be sure to run them by me first.

1.     How do you explain the amazing population growth that we see in the chart in the book on page 15?

2.     What are some consequences of adding this additional 5 billion people to the planet?

3.     Why do we allow these consequences to happen?

4.     What is your own relationship to energy use?

5.     Hartmann argues that we are modern day Slaves; what is your opinion of this metaphor as a way to explain our situation?

6.     How do we gain freedom from this slavery?

7.     What is your own relationship to nature?

8.     How do you feel about the fact that we rarely find worms in our perfect apples anymore?

In order to support your points, you need to use the ideas found in the book, the movie, your research, and in any other handouts, books, etc. that we have access to.

You must average a minimum of 3 short quotes per page. You should try to include more than one quote per paragraph whenever possible, two is good! Quote length in a paper of this length should be no more than 1-2 lines.

The essay’s page minimum is 6 full pages…(BNDJTM…)

Be careful that you don’t simply retell the history of the how humans have used energy over the years. Use these moments in history to SUPPORT the analytic points you want to make. Paragraph topic sentences should start with concepts. Paragraph topic sentences should also feature KEYWORDS, which are taken from the essay assignments tasks.

The paper is due: for the Tues night class, the paper is due April 1st. For the Wed night class, and the M/W classes, the paper is due Wed, April 2nd. 

Best of Luck!!