Analysis of My Rhetorical Situation

woodleywonderworks, "Blue Marble (Planet Earth)" 02/05/2016 via flickr.com
Public Domain Dedication License

The Porter Ranch gas leak is being labeled the "BP oil spill on land." Almost one hundred metric tons of gas has been spilt since October of last year, all from one faulty well. The slow reaction by the Los Angeles SoCal gas company has caused outrage in not only the community affected by the contamination, Porter Ranch, but also the nation that is watching through television screens.

• Who is the audience?
• Well, that depends on your perspective. Environmental activists and enthusiasts from across the nation have tuned their ears the to development of the story, as the result of the litigation may have an affect on how we handle environmental disasters in the future. These are the people who are interested in living in a more environmentally friendly way, and in pushing the nation into a green age. Another large portion of the audience would be professors and classrooms that are using the event to analyze how we get our energy and the way it can do more harm than good. Personally, my old environmental sciences teacher had turned me toward this event, as I had no idea that it had occurred. I theorize that it it because it seems to only have been broadcasted on Californian stations to a California audience. It is also the case that, depending on the station's political affiliation, the whole situation may have been down casted on more conservative media, skewing the audience to the more liberal side of the spectrum. 

• What is the purpose?
• I want this project to work as an agent for environmental activism. Firstly, I want to bring attention to a disaster that is at the level of the BP oil spill, yet is getting less than a portion of the spotlight. I want my audience to feel not only nervous about the issue, but also outraged at the lack of motivation to clean up the leak. I want them to understand the urgency of the situation and how it is affecting real, live human beings with not only relocation requirements, but also illness. It may go over the audience's head about how this spill even happened and the technical details about how it must be cleaned up, so I really want to present the sequence of events in an easy to understand way, but also I want to make sure that the information is still correct. It is important to identify not only the people who are directly affected, the population of Porter Ranch and SoCal Gas Company, but also the lawyers that represent them, the city officials that are involved, and the rest of the nation. The location of the actual leak is Allison Canyon, about 2 miles from Porter Ranch, but the affected area reaches miles beyond that through the neighborhood and other parts of L.A. The time period in which this happened is very important; this type of energy extraction did not exist a decade ago, and therefore this event could not have happened a decade ago. I think the really important thing for my audience to know is the affect of this event on our world as a whole. No only may it establish a precedence for cleaner energy extractions and restrictions, but it's immediate effect on our atmosphere is pretty terrifying.

• Who is the author?
• I have been interested in environmental disasters for many years now. My senior project was a structured solution to the lack of food production in my own town, and it's implementation would greatly reduce our dependancies on foriegn food that is mass produced and not environmentally friendly. I think my enthusiasm and personal interest would allow me to present this to my peers in an engaging and easy to understand way. My passion to create a better planet will really drive this project home; we need to care more about the way we treat our planet and not let big utilities companies control our lives behind our backs.