Land Conservation: For Humanity or for the Sake of the Wilderness

858 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The rise of environmental movement essay

Pinocht ,one of the earliest men to even consider conserving the forest , gave rise to the government to set aside more land under the forest protection. With more regulation set in place it pacified the fear of running out of resources faster than the nation could provide. Pinocht believed that to set aside the forests and later on other resources such as water, be set aside for the present generation to develop. In his essay, ‘The Fight for Conservation’, he quotes, “ The development for our natural resources and the fullest use of them for the present generation is the first duty of this generation.” Also from his essay Pinocht explains even though the resources are for the present, it is also the responsibility of those to prevent waste , which causes sickness in the environment. He experienced such a thing in the forest fires of the early 1910’s. “ we understand forest fires are wholly within the control of men”( Pinocht, Fight for Conservation, 2).
Leopold another conservationist, thought the land as a community coinciding with man. He defined conservation as protecting the land and protecting our individual culture. He firmly believed that the wilderness gave us identity as a society and as a civilization that rose we had to master our environment. He suggests that we owe a great deal to the wilderness for it made us who we are and by that we should respect the wilderness. As industrialization takes a more complex form, our world is becoming more uniform, even in the most distant places. Culture and values follows with living with the land and protecting what gave us our modern world. In his essay, “A Sand County Almanac”, he explains how people abuse the land and only starts to realize the value of the environmen...

... middle of paper ...

...nd on opposite sides of the spectrum of conservation, both extremely believing an all or nothing type of mentality. Between these men stands one who believes a balance of the two is what is required to fully live an acceptable life. What Leopold suggests is that we become more land ethic and learn to respect the land that gave us rise to what we are now, he represents a compromise suggested to those who want to protect the land yet still live in the standard we are use to.

Although these men claim to be conservationists, they all define what is means to be a conservationist differently. Pinocht like Park defines conservation in favor of humans as Brower views conservation as protecting the wilderness and land from the extraction of resources from private companies.

Works Cited

Pinchot, Gifford. The Fight for Conservation. Seattle: U of Washington, 1967. Print.

Show More
Related

  • Frederick Jackson Turner’s Reliance on the Myth of an Unoccupied American Wilderness

    1542 Words  | 4 Pages

    Cronon, William “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90

    Read More

  • Of Ants And Men: Film Analysis

    1054 Words  | 3 Pages

    Leopold would most likely approve of the work being done to preserve Gorongosa National Park and would agree with Wilson in that nature is our home and we should treat it as such, but Leopold, unlike Wilson, argues that it is our moral obligation, and not just our pleasure, to respect nature. Additionally, Wilson seems to focus specifically on the plants and animals that make up an ecosystem, but Leopold extends his focus to non-living components such as soil and water because they are instrumental in maintaining the integrity of land communities. Leopold might urge Wilson to make sure that he is not simply educating people at Gorongosa, but really help them genuinely understand land ethics. This way, humans can evolve a sense of praise and approval for preserving the integrity and beauty of the biotic community (262), and social disapproval for doing the exact

    Read More

  • Aldo Leopold’s Illinois Bus Ride

    1030 Words  | 3 Pages

    Leopold’s mind’s eye is displayed from the start when he imagines the giant cottonwood as it once may have served as a buoy to roaming buffalo or to pigeons. As a father and his son labor to topple the landmark, he question the motive behind their work. The tree was a crucial part of the prairie life then, now its cotton is nothing more than a burden.

    Read More

  • Humility In Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild

    981 Words  | 2 Pages

    The wild is a place to push yourself to the limit and take a look at who you truly are inside. “Wilderness areas have value as symbols of unselfishness” (Nash). Roderick Nash’s philosophy states that the wilderness gives people an opportunity to learn humility but they fight this because they do not have a true desire to be humble. Human-kind wants to give out the illusion that they are nature lovers when in reality, they are far from it. “When we go to designated wilderness we are, as the 1964 act says, "visitors" in someone else's home” (Nash). People do not like what they cannot control and nature is uncontrollable. Ecocentrism, the belief that nature is the most important element of life, is not widely accepted. The novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer depicts a young boy who goes on an exploration to teach himself the true concept of humility. Chris McCandless, the protagonist, does not place confidence in the universal ideology that human beings are the most significant species on the planet, anthropocentrism.

    Read More

  • Desert Solititaire Critical Analysis

    1798 Words  | 4 Pages

    He is unable to understand why they can’t leave nature alone. His frustration stems from the fact that so much valuable land is being destroyed, to accommodate the ways of the lazy. It seems as though he believes that people who are unwilling to enjoy nature as is don’t deserve to experience it at all. He’s indirectly conveying the idea that humans who destroy nature are destroying themselves, as nature is only a mechanism that aids the society. In Desert Solitaire Abbey reminds the audience, of any age and year of the significance of the wild, enlightening and cautioning the human population into consciousness and liability through the use of isolation as material to ponder upon and presenting judgments to aid sheltering of the nature he

    Read More

  • Conservation In The Progressive Era

    918 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Conservation movement was a driving force at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was a time during which Americans were coming to terms with their wasteful ways, and learning to conserve what they quickly realized to be limited resources. In the article from the Ladies’ Home Journal, the author points out that in times past, Americans took advantage of what they thought of as inexhaustible resources. For example, "if they wanted lumber for their houses, rails for their fences, fuel for their stoves, they would cut down half a forest at a time; and whatever they could not use or sell they would leave to rot on the ground. They never bothered their heads to inquire where more wood was coming from when this was gone" (33). The twentieth century opened with a vision towards the future, towards preserving the land that had previously been taken for granted. The Conservation movement came along around the same time as one of the first major waves of the feminist movement. With the two struggles going on: one for the freedom of nature and the other for the freedom of women, it stands to follow that they coincided. As homemakers, activists, and citizens of the United States of America, women have had an important role in Conservation.

    Read More

  • The Development of the American Conservation Movement

    1601 Words  | 4 Pages

    .... The conservation movement had grown and spread as a result of the industrialization of America. John Muir became a leader of this movement to protect the natural world for all generations. His outspoken actions were major influences in the protection of many national parks as well as the formal arrangement of the National Park System which today still protects our natural world.

    Read More

  • The Damnation Of A Canyon Summary

    2223 Words  | 5 Pages

    He wrote, in part, about the human condition and man’s role in the disregard and destruction of the natural world. In essence, he favored the environment in its natural state and saw the elimination of its beauty as another means of control by the rich and powerful. To Abbey the damming of Lake Powell was a damn thing, not good for anyone or anything except the “upper-middle-class American slob” (99) and he abhorred the technological society that develops at the expense of nature’s environmental resources. This disdain is captured perfectly in the double entendre used to encapsulate the subject laid out before us by Abbey: The Damnation of a

    Read More

  • Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter

    1198 Words  | 3 Pages

    He believes that the wilderness has helped form us and that if we allow industrialization to push through the people of our nation will have lost part of themselves; they will have lost the part of themselves that was formed by the wilderness “idea.” Once the forests are destroyed they will have nothing to look back at or to remind them of where they came from or what was, and he argues everyone need to preserve all of what we have now.

    Read More

  • Summary Of David Suzuki And Edward Abbey

    478 Words  | 1 Pages

    David Suzuki, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey, what do these three men have in common? They all are environmentalists. Each man would passionately discuss and criticize the way humans have impacted the earth and its land. These three men throughout their life have spoken and written about the conservation of our land. David Suzuki, an environmentalist, lecturer, biology professor, author, and TV host, created the piece Declaration of Interdependence. Aldo Leopold, a forester, conservationist, and the founder of the Wilderness Society, produced the writing Thinking Like a Mountain. Lastly, Edward Abbey, an essayist, agrarian anarchist, park ranger, and radical environmentalist created the writing Serpents of Paradise. Although each man was an environmentalist, their opinions about nature and man’s responsibility to the environment differ from one another. In this essay, a comparison between each man will develop and their true positions on nature will be illuminated.

    Read More

  • Analyzing Leopold's 'Think Like A Mountain'

    372 Words  | 1 Pages

    From all this reading, it’s just the author explaining the viewers how we can contribute to the environment. He’s just telling his stories about previous incidents and the interactions with nature. To “think like a mountain” defines how we can connect and appreciate all the living and non-living things in the ecosystem. Leopold experience of his adventure of a wolf den. He thought who can pass up killing a wolf. The more we eliminate wolves, the more deers we have and greater hunting expedition. But, he saw something that changes his mind. “We reach the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in

    Read More

  • Summary Of The Wheels Of Freedom: Bicycles In China

    871 Words  | 2 Pages

    Many years ago, people saw the wilderness as a savage wasteland, but today, it is viewed as “the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth.” (Cronon) He discusses this changed point of view by stating the difficulties that society will have rectifying environmental ailments if it stops viewing wilderness as “a dualistic picture in which the human is completely outside the nature.” (Cronon) This is understandable because humans rely on others to create opinions, and they do not know how to form their own thoughts and solutions to issues such as environmental ones. Therefore, it is with great importance that humans begin to learn how to formulate their own thoughts and share those personal thoughts with others, such as sharing solutions about environmental

    Read More

  • Essay On Muir

    1148 Words  | 3 Pages

    Since the rise of the American environmental romanticism the idea of preservation and conservation have been seen as competing ideologies. Literary scholars such as Thoreau and Muir have all spoke to the defense of our natural lands in a pristine, untouched form. These pro-preservation thinkers believed in the protecting of American lands to not only ensure that future generations will get to experiences these lands, but to protect the heavily rooted early American nationalism in our natural expanses. Muir was one of the most outspoken supports of the preservation ideology, yet his stylistic writing style and rhetoric resulted in conservation being an adopted practice in the early 20th century Muir is often seen as one of the most pro-preservation

    Read More

  • Dillard and Thoreau Comparison

    1452 Words  | 3 Pages

    From the lone hiker on the Appalachian Trail to the environmental lobby groups in Washington D.C., nature evokes strong feelings in each and every one of us. We often struggle with and are ultimately shaped by our relationship with nature. The relationship we forge with nature reflects our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. The works of timeless authors, including Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, are centered around their relationship to nature.

    Read More

  • Aldo Leopold on The Ecological Conscience

    349 Words  | 1 Pages

    Leopold’s view is a glorified dream at best. While most people do acknowledge the need for some type of ecological consciousness, the one illustrated by Leopold is far from probable. Today’s society is overrun with the desire for speed and convenience, and driven by competition. Asking the busy world to stop, step backward, and work the concerns for such things as soil, rocks, or oak trees into its contracts and agreements is a foolish notion. It has come to be that to most individuals, the sight of a city skyline that is bustling with business and life is just as pristine as the sight of a natural forest.

    Read More

More about Land Conservation: For Humanity or for the Sake of the Wilderness

Open Document