Read the paragraph from “Rivers and Stories,” Part 1. Though the names are still magic—Amazon, Congo, Mississippi, Niger, Plate, Volga, Tiber, Seine, Ganges, Mekong, Rhine, Colorado, Marne, Orinoco, Rio Grande—the rivers themselves have almost disappeared from consciousness in the modern world. Insofar as they exist in our imaginations, that existence is nostalgic. We have turned our memory of the Mississippi into a Mark Twain theme park at Disneyland. Our railroads followed the contours of the rivers and then our highways followed the contours of the rail lines. Traveling, we move as a river moves, at two removes. Our children don’t know where their electricity comes from, they don’t know where the water they drink comes from, and in many places on the earth the turgid backwaters of dammed rivers are inflicting on local children an epidemic of the old riverside diseases: dysentery, schistosomiasis, “river blindness.” Rivers and the river gods that defined our civilizations have become the sublimated symbols of everything we have done to the planet in the last two hundred years. And the rivers themselves have come to function as trace memories of what we have repressed in the name of our technical mastery. They are the ecological unconscious.

Which pieces of evidence best help you to identify the author’s perspective on the topic discussed in the paragraph: that rivers should be respected more?

The author describes the memories of rivers as nostalgic.

The author describes how railroads and highways replaced rivers.

The author describes the names of rivers as “magic.”

The author describes how children don’t know what rivers are used for.