Essay on "Applied Arguments and Counters"

Essay 4 pages (1267 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Xeriscaping

An Analysis of the Arguments against Xeriscaping

The person I interviewed about the green lawn in front of his house was my uncle. He did not know off hand how much it cost to maintain the lawn and did not appear to think it too important. On the other hand, he did mention that he had been considering getting an artificial turf.

When I asked if he would consider replacing the green lawn with a xeriscape of California Native plants or drought tolerant plants, he said he was not very interested in that idea -- if he had been he would have done it by now, he said. Apparently, he was familiar with the idea of xeriscaping, and he mentioned the name of a family who lived nearby who had replaced their lawn with a xeriscape of California Native plants. While my uncle agreed that it suited that house and did not look bad, he believed that if the whole neighborhood starting doing it, the place would start to feel too much like a desert. My uncle liked the feeling of being in a kind of manufactured oasis.

When I asked him if he knew or cared that we have a water crisis in Los Angeles, he just chuckled to himself and dismissed the idea as if it were liberal propaganda. He said he would believe we had a water crisis when no more water came out of his tap -- and then he might think about xeriscaping.

At that point I asked him for his main arguments against xeriscaping. In the order in which he gave them, they were:

1) It is not particularly pleasant. It is good for one or two houses -- breaks the feel of monotony -- but nothing can beat a green lawn. At this point, he again reiterated the fact that he would be more inclined to get an artificial turf rather than invest in native flora.

2) If there really is a water problem, we should be looking for ways to solve it -- not trying to get everyone to redo their lawns in ways in which they are not satisfied.

3) Xeriscaping is just the latest push by the liberal agenda to create a bunch of hype regarding a non-problem. All the water we use to keep our lawns green just goes right back into the environment -- nothing is lost. This idea about conserving water is just a scam -- like buying up diamonds or oil: there is no shortage -- it's only a way of monopolizing and making money, and, of course, getting people to buy into it. If there really were a water problem, they would all be looking at agriculture industry -- which uses about 80% of water in CA.

Part II: the Essay

I must admit that my uncle made some interesting arguments, and I was interested in identifying them.

The first of my uncle's arguments was based on his own subjective assessment of what is beautiful and what is not. This was a tricky argument to identify -- first, because its premise was not grounded in objective reasoning: for him, the preference of green lawn over xeriscaping was one of taste.

To answer this argument it would be necessary to convince my uncle to alter his initial premise of what is aesthetically pleasing and what is not. To do this, one could recreate an image of xeriscaping that would be full of natural beauty and taste. On the other hand, he did not say that xeriscaping itself was bad, but that too much of it would not be good. Perhaps, then, one could argue that a little xeriscaping was better than none at all: in this manner, one might convince my uncle to at least apply the technique… READ MORE

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