“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” This essay is about one who cannot. Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold exposes a profound and fundamental detachment between contemporary people and the land. This detachment based on mechanization, individualization, consumerism, materialism, and capitalism is leading mankind down an un-returnable path that seeks to destroy the land that we love. Nevertheless, Aldo Leopold writes about the delicate intricacies that intertwine to form an infinite system linked together by relationships that still escape understanding.
As Leopold’s story progresses he reveals an unparalleled wisdom flowing from his interaction and experience living as a piece of the ecological community—not as a separate machine, but as a cog within a greater and more infinitely complex system. Numerous examples flow from his simple yet fundamentally different perspective. Leopold writes, “The autobiography of an old board is a kind of literature not yet taught on campuses, but any riverbank farm is a library where he who
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Our system today is inherently opposed to developing a relationship with the land because it depends on evidence in terms of monetary worth. “One basic weakness in a conservationist system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value” (246). How much is a wildflower or a songbird worth? Therefore, this infinitely complex ecological system, which depends upon an unforeseeable amount of community-shaping mechanisms, tends to become increasingly diseased. “It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial values, but that are (as we know) essential to its healthy functioning” (252).
“Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators”
As similar as “Civil Disobedience” and The Monkey Wrench Gang are in terms of themes and activism, Thoreau’s influence on Abbey is most pronounced in the comparison of Thoreau’s greatest work, Walden, and Abbey’s personal desert meditation, Desert Solitaire. The publication of Desert Solitaire first drew critics’ eyes to Abbey’s connection with Thoreau, and it caused Abbey to be labeled “a road company Thoreau” by Clifton Fadiman (Cahalan 163). From that point in his career, Abbey was often equated with Thoreau, and though it took many years, Abbey “encouraged the use of ‘the Thoreau of the American West’ as a blurb on the hardback jacket of Beyond the Wall” (Cahalan 163). Abbey would quickly change his mind about this comparison to Thoreau, but it has followed him, for good reason, throughout his career. Beyond the texts’ similarities in construction and subject matter, they are grouped together as “Solitude and Backcountry Living” in Thomas Lyon’s “Taxonomy of Nature Writing” (278), and they both reveal the authors’ personas and great truths about modern society and natural living.
The purpose of this paper is to inform you about John Muir and his effect on America's national forests. He was a Scottish American and was born in Dunbar, UK on April 21, 1838. He arrived in the U.S in 1868 when he was 30 years of age. John Muir was one of the most influential naturalists in the world. If it wasn't for John Muir we probably would not have the national park known as Yosemite. Some of his goals in the U.S. were the preservations of the national forests. He was an environmental philosopher and did well for the U.S. national parks. John Muir founded the Sierra Club, an American organization and the 211-mile trail called the Sierra Nevada was named in his honor.(John Muir, wikipedia)
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
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
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
In his journal, Thoreau muses upon twenty years of changes in New England’s land and beasts. He lists the differences in plants and animals, comparing them to past accounts and descriptions. He questions if the growing human presence has resulted in “a maimed and imperfect nature.” Cronon believes that this is an important question to consider. He points out that although changes do happen in nature, it is not so easy to determine how they changed. He is also not sure if Thoreau’s description of “a maimed and imperfect nature” is the correct way to refer to ecology, since it is by its essence, a fluid system of changes and reactions. Cronon does not deny the impact of
John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Aldo Leopold all have moderately different views and ideas about the environment in terms of its worth, purpose, use and protection. At one extensively non-anthropocentric extreme, Muir’s views and ideas placed emphasis on protecting environmental areas as a moral obligation. That is to say, Muir believed that wilderness environments should be used for divine transcendence, spiritual contemplation, as a place for repenting sins and obtaining devotional healing, rather than being used for exploitative materialistic greed and destructive consumption, such as industrialism, mining, and lumbering. At the other extreme, anthropocentric, Pinchot views nature simply as natural resources. In other words, nature is explicitly
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.
At first glance, Henry Thoreau’s, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, and E.B. White’s, Once More to the Lake, have nothing in common. After several readings; however, one can interpret that both authors have the same message. Even though Thoreau and White use extremely different styles, they both portray nature as the simplest way of life. Thoreau writes an argumentative essay in the 1800’s trying to persuade society to “simplify” by going back to relying on nature instead of technology (50 Essays pg. 417). White writes a 1900’s narrative about his visit to his childhood lake where he shockingly discovers how nature reveals the essence of life. While Once More to the Lake by E.B. White is a subtle portrayal that compares nature to simplicity, Where I Lived and What I Lived For by Henry Thoreau is a clear-cut approach in comparing nature to simplicity.
Knight, R.L. 1996. Aldo Leopold, the land ethic, and ecosystem management. The Journal of Wildlife Management. :471-474.
In Thinking Like a Mountain, the author, Aldo Leopold, writes of the importance of wildlife preservation through examples of the symbiotic relationship of animals and plant-life with a mountain. He asks the reader to perceive the processes of a mountainous environment in an unusual way. Aldo Leopold wants the reader to "think" like a mountain instead of thinking of only the immediate, or as the hunter did. Taking away one feature of an ecosystem may eventually destroy everything else that that environment is composed of. Nature and wildness is essential for the well being of life on this earth.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of the men whose opinion was changed by Muir, ultimately leading to the change of Yosemite to a state park. Though John Muir was a selfish man, he always put nature first. Some believe that having the right intentions and morals means taking care of others before yourself or anything else. Others believe right intentions are putting your care and effort in something you believe. But no matter your stance on John Muir, I believe his intentions were always in the right place despite your definition of “good morals”. John Muir never hurt anyone, nor anything. Whatever his action or decision, it was always to move one step closer to becoming one with nature and preserving it from any
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 defends his position the advent of a new ethical development, one that deals with humans’ relations to the land and its necessity. This relationship is defined as the land ethic, this concept holds to a central component referred to as the ecological consciousness. The ecological consciousness is not a vague ideal, but one that is not recognized in modern society. It reflects a certainty of individual responsibility for the health and preservation of the land upon which we live, and all of its components. If the health of the land is upheld, its capacity of self-renewal and regeneration is maintained as well. To date, conservation has been our sole effort to understand and preserve this capacity. Leopold holds that if the mainstream embraces his ideals of a land ethic and an ecological consciousness, the beauty, stability and integrity of our world will be preserved.
After twelve years of things change and that holds true to school today. New ideas are being developed often and are being introduced to school system more and more. One example is the change in how the school handles the honors students. Now after so long the school has decided to raise the weight of an honors course from 1 to 1.5. With this change, students will look better to colleges and have a more competitive GPA. A second example is in the elementary school and middle school students are taught subjects such as math in a vastly different way than just five ten years