Dead Zone Article Analysis

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In today’s society, the environmental issues that appear on television the most include overpopulation, air pollution, climate change, and water pollution. In this essay, I would like to focus on an aspect of water pollution that has been overlooked by the general public. This lurking environmental danger in the ocean is called a Dead Zone. In Tom Levitt’s article for CNN, Levitt writes: “Aquatic "dead zones" are a tragic illustration of human beings' negative impact on the world's oceans. They are areas so overloaded with pollutants that they have difficulty sustaining any life.” Dead Zones are created by fertilizer and pollution run off from our very own backyards. These harmful chemicals use our river and stream systems as an easy alley-way type access to our coastal areas. Because of all the chemical run offs from farms that are near the coastline, countries that thrive off of agricultural activity have extremely high contents of population in the ocean surrounding them. With all the chemicals being dumped into the ocean, this creates large patches of ocean along the coastline that have absolutely no oxygen, therefore earning the nickname “dead zone”. Due to the Dead Zone’s lack of oxygen, no living organism can survive in any given patch of that type of water. This means that areas such as the Dead Zone off the Gulf of Mexico or the Dead Zone in the Baltic Sea can’t be used to catch fish or as a vacationing area. Levitt writes: “Globally, there are more than 530 Dead Zones to date that encompass over 95,000 square miles of the ocean. “ Throughout the course so far, one reoccurring theme that has caught my interest would be the theme of environmental worldviews and the need for stewardship. The stewardship worldview, according to authors Tyler Miller Jr. and Scott Spoolman is: “To have an ethical responsibility to be caring and responsible managers,

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