Unfortunately, the very important message that they are trying to convey is littered with fallacies, inconsistencies, vague statements, and emotionally charged language, all of which detract from their arguments. The knowledge of the meaning of words and their role in persuasion is quite valuable. To illustrate, environmentalists have criticized the term 'resource' for it's implication that such things as fish, fossil fuels, and rainforests are commodities to be exploited, as opposed to interdependent parts of biological systems. Based on the aforementioned statistics, Gordon and Suzuki postulate the various consequences of continued pollutant emission and natural habitat destruction by Homo Sapiens.
Every major indicator shows a deterioration in the earth's natural systems.
Gordon and Suzuki end their analysis of the environmental situation by indicating the populations that have taken steps to reduce factors that are presently contributing to global pollution. In fact, the emotionally charged language is so frequent that it becomes difficult both to assess the facts without being bias and to limit examples of this technique to a paultry three. In addition, between August 1987 and May 1988, five shipments of drums containing toxic sludge were smuggled to Koko, West Africa from Pisa, Italy to be stored in the backyard of a man who had rented it out for a few dollars. Gordon and Suzuki continually bombard the reader with numerical statistics of almost unimaginable proportions in an attempt to quell the myth that nature is infinite, but I would argue that the reader perceives just the opposite. In addition, these vast figures are often coupled with concepts that vague, ambiguous or even misleading.