Green World By Sherman Alexie

The text "Green World", by Sherman Alexie, tells the story of a man who is hired by an Indian reservation to pick up birds that the twelve windmills have chopped up with their blades. The man is sickened by this work, but endures it anyways because the job is honest and pays well. Then one day he encounters an Indian man with a shotgun who, when seeing the dead birds, threatens the man. Instead of shooting him, though, the Indian man shoots the windmills. In this piece, I would argue that the primary psychological conflict of the speaker is if the "green" energy that the windmills supply justifies the carnage that they leave behind, which connects to the larger issue of when it comes to energy technology, what consequences could and are arising …show more content…
In order to get the other side, then, the author presents the Indian man with the shotgun. The aftermath of the windmills deeply affect the man : "He...picked up a carcass [and] hugged that corpse close to his chest, as if he were holding something of his own, and wept for some long moments". This reaction causes the reader to question the necessity of the windmills, and asks if they are really worth all this destruction. To counter this, the speaker says "I wanted to tell him that it was necessary and predictable. We humans have to kill in order to live. No, every living thing on earth kills in order to survive." It sounds like the speaker is wanting to convince himself of this fact, more so than Indian man. He is trying to justify the outcome, to justify his work. It does not seem to work, though, because afterwards the speaker, even though he was "not a religious man" and was "not even sure [he] believe[d] in God, he "knelt in the snow and …show more content…
When people try produce make greener energy, they are in a sense trying to make energy technologies that will have less harmful effects than the current ways of producing energy. However, with technology like the windmill, other, perhaps unforeseen, consequences emerged. The question here is that because these consequences were not directly related to the ones that were people were trying to fix, does that mean they do not matter as much? Yes, these windmills did what they were supposed to do: produce cleaner energy that other ways. But, they had hugely negative effects on the wildlife, and they continue to be used