20 Unraveling Urgency

Wake up, America, your home is on fire. The beetles are eating trees, dying pines are taking agonal gasps, bears are looting towns, and now your children will have no future. This is certainly not the time to light up a cigarette in bed according to Brook Bhagat and Gaurav Bhagat in their article “Wildfires Point to Global Warming.” Published in 2013 in the Blue Planet Journal, the article makes a compelling and urgent plea to connect the recent wildfires in America’s west with a warming planet. In a narrative causal chain punctuated with dates and dollars, Bhagat and Bhagat demonstrate the effects of urgency in a rhetorical situation.

The authors waste no time in alerting readers to the narrative quality of their essay. The first line contains five adjectives and a simile comparing the sun’s rays to varicose veins. Readers may be shocked to find that the story that follows this first line becomes more of a causal argument supported by figures and facts than sky-watching story-time. The first few lines engage readers in the sight of the destruction in a figurative and creative way and then immediately turn to the current fire fueling this smoky skyline.

The opening lines do more than setup the narrative quality of the article; they set a specific location for the starting point of a causal chain that Bhagat and Bhagat use as an organizational structure in their essay. In just the first paragraph, readers learn that the argument stems from something occurring in Colorado but that the smoke “can be seen from space”; clearly this is an issue that impacts more than just the Rocky Mountain region. The article moves from an area local to the authors to places as far away as European airspace. The widening of this lens increases the urgency of this issue as it draws in a larger audience who could be affected by the events in the article.

Demonstrating the broad impact of wildfires is just one way that the authors increase the urgency of this argument. By the time readers learn that human lives have been lost in each of three separate wildfire situations, the pressing occasion becomes more severe. Nine million dollar sums and lists of losses push the urgency of this narrative, building to a crescendo in the reference to the Yarnell Hill Fire that resulted in a tragic loss of nineteen firefighters. Most readers would be moved to a sense of urgency considering loss on this grand of a scale. Even if readers are not persuaded by the numbers of acres and structures, nor the extinction of “countless lives of animals,” the loss of human lives adds to the sense of urgency in this issue.

While many Americans believe climate change demands immediate action, the science included in the article does not exactly match the exigency evoked in the first few paragraphs. According to the article, “when a mature tree dies, it releases large amounts [of] pent-up carbon dioxide into the atmosphere” (Bhagat and Bhagat). Scientifically, though, this process happens over decades. Climate data is slow science.

The contrast between the emergency presented by increasingly destructive wildfires and the eighty-year-old data needed to explain the current situation creates a dissonant sense of urgency. Readers shown a red sun and human death toll may not have the patience required to watch under the bark of a pine tree to see a beetle create destruction that takes years to participate in the chain of events the authors conclude is happening. Solutions like ceasing driving and writing politicians may further disempower readers to act now. Besides, how many light bulbs does the reader need to change out before they offset the 100 companies who produce 70% of greenhouse gas emissions (Hyman)?

Most individual households cannot stop the increasing dangers posed by global warming. If we cannot stop a quarter-inch insect from contributing to this problem, how are we going to convince our government to act? Readers confronted with an urgent issue they may not be readily able to change often results in a panicked audience with a growing sense of helplessness. In this way, Brook Bhagat and Gaurav Bhagat’s article is a good example of the way urgency can move an audience into immediate action, or faced with certain doom in light of a global problem, send them spiraling into despair.

Works Cited

Bhagat, Brook and Gaurav Bhagat. “Wildfires Point to Global Warming.” Blue Planet Journal, 2013, http://www.blueplanetjournal.com/ecology/wildfires-point-to-global-warming.html.

Hyman, Elliott. “Who’s Really Responsible for Climate Change?” Harvard Political Review, 2 Jan. 2020, https://harvardpolitics.com/climate-change-responsibility/.