Newport, Dave. “Campus Sustainability: It’s About People.” The Chronicle. The Chronicle of Higher Education, n.d. Web. 14 Oct. 2012. <http://chronicle.com/article/Campus-Sustainability-Its/131370/>.
This is an article written by Dave Newport, the director of the Environmental Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and secretary of the board of directors of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. It was written in order to bring a very important issue in the sustainability movement to light. This issue is that many people simply do not care enough about sustainability in order for it to be executed to its fullest extent. This is because, as Newport notes, there is much more worry about social justice than there is about environmental justice. Simply put, people are more worried about themselves than the animals that others want to save. This is very helpful to readers because it notifies them of a possible problem that sustainability movements may face in the future. Newport, however, being a powerful figure in the sustainability movements, fills his article with bias, and seems to insinuate that sustainability is impossible to achieve without full support from all people, while the reality is that there has been major advancements in sustainability since it has become a focus, and although there may be many people that do not care about it, they have not been as much of a deterring factor as Dave Newport would have his readers believe.
When you talk about “the reality” and refute the author’s claim, what sorts of data do you have to support your claim about the advancements? Think about what data you would use to enhance your argument against Newport.