Too many deer in nature's backyard

In a world growing more technological and industrialized daily, Americans don’t have the best reputation for taking care of the environment. Recently there has been an increased emphasis on “green” ideals and more efficient ways of existing on the earth without destroying it. Our ever increasing population and building projects have encroached on nature’s backyard but in the article “Sprawl Is Not Harmful to Wildlife,” Jane Shaw cleverly tries to convince home owning Americans that expanding developments are not damaging to the environment by careful word choice and distracting from the point.
Shaw uses a quote from the Audubon magazine that says, “Paradoxically, part of the reason for the deer’s comeback may lie in the increasing development of the area.” She starts out her sentence by using the word “paradoxically” because she knows that the audience may originally have an opposing view and she recognizes that. The word “paradoxically” has the meaning that the result is really the opposite of what we expect and this is the perfect opportunity to set the reader up to change their mind. Normally, we think of increased development as automatically bad for the wildlife but Shaw opens in this way to open the reader’s mind and but a positive spin on development from the beginning.
The author also distracts from the main point by bringing up an alternative problem of too much wildlife and spends time discussing how to deal with that issue instead of directly addressing the main point of the article. She says that “Americans are grappling with new problems--the growing hazard of automobile collisions with deer…” Shaw implies that more house development could not really be a problem because there are so many deer that we have other problems to deal with. By distracting from the main issue of whether or not increased development has a negative impact on wildlife, she causes the reader to feel like increased development is not a real problem. Auto collisions are things that everyone tries to avoid and by drawing attention to a negative problem, the reader’s attention is pulled from the real issue towards something more directly applicable and commonplace like car crashes. Diverting the reader’s attention successfully causes the reader to give more credit to the argument that Sprawl is not harmful to wildlife.