President Trump cuts down the Environmental Protective Agency budget and the pollution of NYC is increasing. A source I found was on nytimes.com where an article about the dirtiness of the City is presented. It speaks of how the air is so dirty that you could have felt it at a point. Now there’s fear of that time of NYC to come back with all the budget constraints. This article is a non scholarly source as it was written in a news article. So far, the research for my essay is going well, as there are multiple sources and perspectives to the problem of air pollution in NYC.

So what I’ve collected about the differences between popular sources and scholarly sources is the actual context of the source, which I believe is whether or not there are reporters or actual chemical evidence of contaminated water. I feel like a popular source can be authoritative if there are multiple sources, including an investigation. And the biggest questions to ask is how reliable is the source, is it a ‘.com’, ‘.org’, or a .gov’, does it have a bibliography with different references?

I’ve found another source that I believe is a scholarly source which actually questions the chemical property within New York water and discusses how Long Island has the most contaminated water in the state. This source has numerous footnotes that relate back to other sources that have evidence of nineteen different emerging contaminants were detected in Long Island, and that Nassau County has the highest number of water systems that have detections of contaminated water. The most prominent contaminant is strontium, which I’ve found in a different article from the American Bone Health that ingesting high amounts of strontium can have dangerous side effects. It can cause, to name just a few, liver inflammation and disturbances in thinking. And to think that Long Island’s water system has a high amount of strontium is worrying, especially since Nassau County borders many cities in Queens, NY.

Dvarskas, Anthony. “Mapping Ecosystem Services Supply Chains for Coastal Long Island Communities: Implications for Resilience Planning.” Ecosystem Services, vol. 30, 2018, pp. 14–26.

Dvarskas discusses enabling economic inputs that are related to coastal ecosystem activities, such as fishing, boating, and recreational beach use. Enabling economic inputs in this paper means the economic industries that may be impacted by changes in the coastal ecosystem. Using natural and human produced assets he analyzes the entirety of Long Island, also known as hot spot analysis, Dvarskas was able to identify which coastal ecosystems may need financial assistance in order to survive changes in coastal ecosystems. Hot spot analysis viewed each part of Long Island and took into account how many people live there, the unemployment rate, the median household income, and the poverty rate, along with industries found in the respective areas into order to see which areas are a priority when defending against changes in the coastal ecosystem.

This peer reviewed journal is meant for those who enjoy or rely on coastal ecosystem activities, such as fishermen, surfers, restaurants, marinas, and sightseeing groups. Dvarskas shows the readers which areas are most vulnerable and which areas need to be protected the most, to allow for the reader to be more prepared for climate change relating to the coastal ecosystem.

This article showed me that climate change is too far gone for us to keep things the way we have it. We need to see what is most important to our economy and our livelihood and protect that with all we have. I feel this source can be a real eye opener for those who are not aware of how bad the situation is showing them how much time and resources are needed to protect what we already have, as opposed to using that time and resources to further our society.