The Journey Home Analysis

The writer of the book The Journey Home, zestful environmentalist Edward Abbey is angry at and loathes the idea of incessant update of technology and machinery. To him, it’s completely unnecessary; even more so is it a hindrance to human being’s natural development. Disrespectful towards nature and harmful to each individual’s supposed natural way of living, the modern world in Abbey’s eyes is what needs to be “updated” to fit as real human being’s natural habitat.

The updates in technology, in Abbey’s eyes, is the modern world’s way of it’s distasteful declaration of war towards nature. He claimed, “What should Yosemite Valley be? It should be what it once was: the kind of place where a person would know himself lucky to make one pilgrimage there in his lifetime. A

He condemns it to be harmful to each individual’s supposed natural way of living. He passionately stated that “They deny the world because the only world they know has denied them... The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons”(225). Although these sentences seem to have a lot of personal feelings injected in, the general idea is, actually, quite factual in terms of defining the society people live in today. Because they are too busy upgrading the efficiency of the world as well as the burden to the earth, the place modern people known as their home is no longer for them, but for robots; for machineries; for breathless steels. The modern world no longer recognize the natural wonders to be necessary for their personal developments. They see themselves as living machines, paying little attention to their spiritual development and their connection with the wilderness, breathing for the sake of being able to wake up and work. They denied the world in such a way that their ignorance for their need of the green is what is the most fearful and pitiful to