53 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan Safran FoerWe Are the Weather
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4 Summary: “Dispute with the Soul
This chapter returns to Part 1, Chapter 1 and the Egyptian suicide note in which one person argues with his soul about whether the soul should consent to death by suicide.
In this chapter, Foer takes up his own dispute with the soul in the form of a question-and-answer format. Foer discusses an environmentally conscious friend who refuses to read Eating Animals, even though it outlines a cause to which he would relate. The friend will not read the book because he understands it will ask him to make a change he is not prepared to make.
The chapter explores the many reasons why Foer’s friend, and Foer himself, are hesitant to make that change. Only 14% of Americans deny climate change, which is significantly lower than Americans who deny evolution or that the Earth is round and that it orbits around the sun. Is that a source of hope, asks the soul? For Foer, it is not. He has managed to convince himself of the climate dangers of factory animal farming, but that doesn’t mean much since he already believed it. Foer then talks about the Bangladeshis again and discusses how they discharge the least amount of damage to the climate but, because of the rest of us, take on the outcomes of climate change. This is not fair.
Won’t farmers lose their jobs if factory farming ends? This is the big question. But Foer is reminded that since the advent of factory farming, the number of people actually farming has declined significantly. The number of jobs that would open up in climate change technologies would more than make up for the loss. Foer continues his dispute with the soul by using various arguments to give up hope for climate change and to give up talking to people about it, but the soul always rebuts Foer’s arguments, which include that vegetarianism is elitist, not all animal products are bad for the environment, and the numbers are vague. For instance, some say that farming contributes 14% of the emissions that make global warming worse, and some say 51% is the real number, but the soul reminds him that the lower percentage doesn’t take in variables like the destruction of the Amazon and other conditions caused by factory farming. Foer presents even more statistics about global climate change throughout the chapter while maintaining his stance that he doesn’t have hope. In the end, the soul isn’t worried about whether Foer believes; the soul is worried that the readers won’t believe his disbelief that he can do anything about climate change.
Part 4 Analysis
In this single, lengthy chapter, Foer returns to the opening of the book where he introduces the suicide note he read about when he was a boy. Readers recall that in the book’s first pages, Foer describes the very first suicide letter in history as a conversation between the soul and the person. This 4,000-year-old suicide note, we learn in this chapter, was a set-up for one of the most important themes of the book. This theme is in the form of a question: Should we die by suicide, by doing nothing to stop global climate change, or should we sacrifice our comforts and do what we can—in this case, stop eating meat?
To that end, this section corresponds exactly to the Aristotelian argumentation section known as the confirmation and/or refutation (Confirmatio and/or Refutatio). Because most arguments have two sides, at this point, the speaker provides positive and negative proofs for the argument. Foer chose to use the suicide note as a place to exhibit all his arguments for and refutations against changing his lifestyle for the sake of climate change. It develops in the form of his soul and his person arguing with each other. Foer presents all the refutations to climate change, and the soul counters with what the readers by now know to be factual and true. The soul attempts to convince Foer to change and believe we can stop climate change. Foer argues about hopelessness, and the soul responds that if hope is the primary motivation, he is in trouble. The soul also tells him to remember not to underestimate the science deniers who say there is no climate change.
Again, as an argumentative section, the dispute with the soul allows Foer to present the many sides along the spectrum of science deniers to science believers. This section also becomes an avenue for the author to reiterate some of the facts and statistics presented in the second section of the book. In this way, this section becomes both concessionary and argumentative to those not inclined to believe in climate change. The repetition of the facts is yet another way the author can convince the reader that climate change is real and reversing it is an urgent matter.
The end of the argument is ambiguous. The soul worries not that Foer will change but whether the world will believe his disbelief. And this is the moment that brings the chapter to its fulcrum: There is no not acting. Foer knows it, and his argument is won by the soul, who repeats the refutations to Foer’s unease about the situation and about his position. Foer’s position remains the same: Each one of us has to change the way we eat to end factory farming; it must be a collective effort.
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