Dear Man on the moon,

          What do you see when you look down on us? Do the green areas recede daily, do the blue waters darken? Can you see the new “islands” forming? Can you see through the haze clouds that aren’t clouds, the cities and towns of treetops that aren’t trees? Do you see the barren area where mountains use to peak, where valleys use to be, where rivers and lakes use to run and reside? Can you see the maze of circles we travel and the cement colored fields we create? Do you watch as the white ice disappears from the worlds poles? Do you notice the forests shrinking the deserts growing and the migrations change? Do our lights keep you awake at night? Do you notice the decline of species the unrivaled growth of mankind, the storms that effect the globe? Can you see the world trembling under the pressures it has, the seasons slipping from their normal rotations? Do the wild fires burn the world like paper being lit only leaving blackened scars upon the land? Can you smell the smoke from there? Do you see the mounds of trash pile high to make new mountains, the oil fields and stained seas? What does a storm that covers the whole northeast side of the Americas in white blankets look like? What did you think when you saw the spiraling giant one thousand miles in diameter travel up that eastern coast? Do you see the exhausted fields where crops use to be where dust is carried in the wind? Do you hear the cries as thousands lose their loved ones, their homes, suddenly as the waves wash past the shores or notice the new silence when mud buries them? Do you like to watch as we write in the sky, like a round etch-a-sketch crisscrossing the planet with our airborne leaps that land but leave lasting remnants of waste that floats and carries to be choked on? Can you play connect the dots with the twisters that form rapidly and in great numbers each year up and down the alleys of the Midwest? Will it be checkmate when we finish checkering the map and all our boundaries are crossed? Man on the moon, do you feel this is a dangerous game we play? Is the pull you have on us your way of warning, a plea, a cosmic comment, that you fear our home may one day become as barren as yours? Is it by your drifting away two centimeters each year a sign you are losing hope in us? How long have we been your friend in the blackness of space, and through all of the changes you have seen since the beginning of that time, will you grieve when it is at an end?

                                                        From a person who Sincerely wants to know.

   Statement of Goals and Choices:

       My goal for this open letter was to make the readers realize, right from the start, it’s not meant for “the man on the moon,” but understand, without me saying it, why I would choose to address it to him. My ultimate goal is to show clearly that all of us need to see the world in its entirety as well as how rapidly it is changing, because only then will we realize that we have to think not only locally but globally as well. I recently opened a fortune cookie and the little slip of paper inside said “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” and I thought that cannot be any truer as it is with my message here. I attempted to embed within this letter all the rhetorical methods hitting all hearts, minds and persons with it. I showed how we may not always see all of these things happening all the time, but all the time they are happening all around us and that we have effectively made it all happen. I made my topics broad and made you see it from a bird’s eye view to emphasize the spanned of it. But despite that, these things hit home for a lot of people not just the ones they directly affect, since we all live here and not on the moon. Only in an open letter to the world using this view could I make this point without taking the pointing finger position.

       When I first starting thinking of what I should write about and who to write to I thought to write to my mother who I have not seen in a very long time. But to be honest, I decided against it because I didn’t want to write something so “Emo.” Then I thought about writing to the EPA but thought that was the opposite of who I wanted to truly address. Next I thought of writing NASA but again thought that would narrow my audience and knowing my writing style may make it too much like fiction for so deadly real this topic is and should be for everyone. So as I stared up at the sky while attending a concert and the moon rose from behind the stage the idea hit me because he was literally starting me in the face and I just had to ask him what he saw.

Above and Beyond Activities

Personal Letter

Letter to Self

Statement of Goals and Choices:

          In this Prezi I am attempting to give the facts in a more visual way that engages my audience and to help them learn the importance of this issue. Though it was very difficult to do with a topic this large, I attempted to narrow the focus and to present some of the facts about oil and coal in an unbiased fashion using scientific research primarily in the form of charts and graphs. By doing this my audience can decide for themselves if this is an issue that needs to be a higher focus in our government, our communities, and our daily choices. I tried to focus on just one instance we all, in one way or another, contribute to these troubling trends--our transportation. My hope is that with all this data the person viewing it will at least question the validity and practicality of the continual use of either, coal or oil. If they do feel these are trends that should not be continued, as I hope they do at those points in the presentation I flip the Prezi (literally) to show how, there are ways to improve everything we do from writing to the government, down to the little things we do every day.

           Though I cannot offer a fix-all solution to my audience, since sadly there isn’t one to my knowledge that would encompass all the ways we use both coal and oil; I instead highlight alternatives. I offer more environmentally friendly ways we can lessen our usage that doesn’t degrade our quality of life but in many ways, enrich it. By showing these options I am using logos to show the benefit that can be had by this change and the impact it could make. I also appeal to the ethos because of how this problem affects us as people around the globe every day. Lastly this information should impact my reader with its pathos, when they can see that it's not just numbers, it's something that could reshape society and our lives in a very real and negative way if left unchecked.

         The decisions I made veered down to one topic of the many I see as problems with the way we have chosen to live, which is excessively and not in harmony with the way nature intended. This project was formatted to ultimately give my audience a new way to see very real trends and to decide for themselves based on the facts of how each and everyone one of us contribute to this problem. No one is blameless in this and we all need to accept responsibility for it if we want to have a future and I give ways that we have found that can begin to accomplish that. The genre I used is engaging and simplified so even if my audience knows very little about the topic, they can build on the information here to formulate their own opinion. If they don’t find any of the solutions I set out useful to their situation, I also give extra resources for them to explore to continue the process of research into this topic. I choose a Prezi to relay this topic because it was a new way for me to give this information in an organized way that I hadn’t before attempted and because I didn’t want to just have a stationary infographic. Just as I hope this project will get people moving and challenge some of the fence-riders to face the facts, I challenged myself with a new form of relaying information by putting it in motion.