Finding a Balance Between Nature and Man
"There is no match for the beauty found within America!" I thought with excitement when I first laid my eyes upon our American landscape. The fascinating forests and wondrous lakes have outdone the stories I heard while growing up. However, it puzzles me when I see sights that hamper my sense of admiration. Though there are forests that are untouched, "No Littering" signs seemed to be everywhere. One could be easily puzzled as to why so much effort was put into preserving a land already pristine. Some only know of the awesomeness American landscape offers and feel that it is only natural for people to preserve it.
Over time, I learned the ongoing struggle to preserve the environment. On one side, concerned people strive for environmental rules on industries to produce a cleaner environment their kids can enjoy. Their foes, on the other hand, the economists, argue that these rules limit the nation's productivity, thus halting the general prosperity. Seeing the effects of overpopulation and pollution in China, I agree with the need to protect the environment. Yet these rules protect our landscape is flawed. Though many people push for rules on industries while they do not truly understand what they protect. It seems that many people today misunderstand nature for a pure, untainted ground that we has not corrupted. What’s worse is people go through incredible lengths to intervene and bring it back to life when they lack an deeper understanding of nature.
Though nature is not the pure and concentrated essence that many believe, it is beyond any doubt valuable to humans. Two concepts we use referring to nature frequently arise. The "refined" view from the well-to-do city dwellers pictures natu...
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... technology, nature provides crucial assets we cannot synthesize. Nature is still a mystery that continues to surprise us with wild and brilliant combinations of things, and we, as humans, have only recently come to appreciate some of its creations. The mystery and beauty of nature lies in its unpredictability.
Nature holds many lessons for us to learn from, and it is crucial that we preserve it. Therefore, we need to find a balance between the nature's preservation and human expansion. We should only intervene with nature a little for we don’t fully understand or know everything, but we should also not hesitate to act when it would benefit our prosperity. Today, with the advancement in technology, people are ignorant of what will and will not ruin the environment. It is important to increase the public awareness of facts so a delicate balance can be established.
Human beings have made much of purity and are repelled by blood, pollution, putrefaction (Snyder, 119). Nature is sacred. We are enjoying it and destroying it simultaneously. Sometimes it is easier to see charming things than the decomposition hidden in the “shade”.We only notice the beautiful side of nature, which are benefits that nature brings us: food, fresh air, water, landscapes. But we forget the other side, the rottenness of human destruction. That is how human beings create “the other side of the sacred”. We cut trees for papers, but we fail to recognize that the lack of trees is the lack of fresh air. Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge “the other side of the
Look at the civilized, beautiful capital cities in every developed country all around the world which is the central of high fashioned and convenience facility. To live in the city, it seems like the nature surrounding is not important to us anymore. In “The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature” David Suzuki presents the connection between human and the nature and how we depend on the surrounding environment. However, within the past century, most of our modern technologies have been developed in order to provide people needs of goods and products (63). Many of the products we made are causing much more harm to the environment than the value that products provide. Technological development has damaged our environment to the point
... of nature is to get the theme of the intermixing of technology with man and nature across; “I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; /around our group I could hear the wilderness listen” (15-16) in these lines we get more of a feeling than an image of the intermixing of technology and nature.
Man has destroyed nature, and for years now, man has not been living in nature. Instead, only little portions of nature are left in the world
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.
In earlier years, observing nature brought happiness. One look around at the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee or at Lindsey’s Rainbow Farm in Arkansas showed everything the world offered—tall grassy fields, magnificent black bears, chilly fall nights, clear streams, slimy trout, and the warmth of the sun on my face at sunset. Breathtaking sights awaited us around every corner. Nature seemed endless. Today, places such as these appear to be found less and less. With the expansion of not only civilization but also its economy, Americans slowly destroy the once symbiotic relationship between nature and community. Americans face such a difficult situation due to the way we live our lives—specifically, the way we obtain our food.
This healing quality derives from a connection to nature that dates back thousands of years; “foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face” (1). Humans now must continue to build on this attachment. The serious length of this relationship adds to the credibility of the restorative qualities of nature. Emerson describes experiencing “perfect exhilaration” in nature (9). Therefore, the reader becomes attracted to nature and the capabilities it holds.
In today’s society, much of the resistance for finding ecological solutions comes from those who would be required to drastically change their policies and business models. “In general, an environmental problem proves politically less difficult to resolve if a marketable solution exists,” says Janicke. “In contrast,” he says, “if a solution to an environmental problem requires an intervention in the established patterns of production, consumption, or transport, it is likely to meet resistance.” Furthermore, Ecological Modernization states that ecological innovations must meet the following three qualifications to succeed: First, the solution they propose needs to be to a problem that affects the global level. Second, it needs to promote global industrial growth, which will heighten the demand for further environmental innovations. Third, the solution needs political and/or societal support, and preferably both. When a solution meets these three criteria, it can be successfully marketed.Land art constructed an experience; works of land art had to be traversed to be truly appreciated. For example, the piece Broken Circle Spiral Hill [see Figure 2.4] by Robert Smithson was built to follow a certain path connecting the Hill to the Circle. From the top of the Hill one could take the path in which to view the Circle and vice versa, exploring the picturesque quality of the time of the viewer. The piece appears completely different depending on the season in which it is viewed. Finally, looking at the erosion of the Spiral Hill, one is aware of the entropic geologic time. As Smithson said, “The gardens of history are being replaced by the sites of time.”
When considering nature many people think of valleys filled with tulips and squirrels scurrying around. When a person thinks of wilderness he or she make think of overgrown forests filled with wolves prowling around and mountain cats ready to attack. Then, that person may discuss how he or she would react to his or her surroundings as if the person were a foreign object thrown into unfamiliar territory. That the wilderness and nature are two places filled with beauty and amazement that can strike most people speechless can be proved by climbing a mountain or just standing in the sun and feeling it’s warmth flood throughout the body, but there is apart of nature that is often times overlooked or just right out ignored. Human beings while may be disconnected from nature are not separate from it, but in actuality are a part of nature.
Such ploys seek to undermine any legitimate eco-consciousness in the audience, replacing it with rhetoric that is ultimately ambivalent toward the health of ecosystems, but definitively pro-business. These tactics assume a rigidly anthropocentric point of view, shutting out any consideration for the well-being of non-human existence; they seem to suggest that nature lies subordinate to our base desires. In addition to upholding the subordination of nature to business and leisure activities, this view establishes nature as something privately owned and partitioned (243), rather than something intrinsic to the world. Our relationship with nature becomes one of narcissism.
When I think of the perfect place, I imagine a cascading waterfall, a vast forest, a stunning mountainside, or a warm sunset on the beach. I look up around me, mesmerized by the vastness of the natural world and breathe in the fresh air. Over the course of my life, I have come to respect the environment and the earth’s natural surroundings in ways that most others do not in the industrialized and technological era of today. I can appreciate the beauty of the Earth and of all the different landscapes and organisms that surround me. The way in which I value and treasure the environment has evolved just as I have. I see the environment as something to be preserved and admired, not destroyed or exploited. My relationship with the environment is
To understand the nature-society relationship means that humans must also understand the benefits as well as problems that arise within the formation of this relationship. Nature as an essence and natural limits are just two of the ways in which this relationship can be broken down in order to further get an understanding of the ways nature and society both shape one another. These concepts provide useful approaches in defining what nature is and how individuals perceive and treat
Nature and God are the main themes in “Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, William Wordsworth’s poems, “The World is Too Much With Us”, and “It is a Beauteous Evening”. The poets portray the themes of Nature and God both explicitly and implicitly, exposing the reader to a variety of ways in which nature and God is synonymous.
I perceived, and continue to perceive, a severe problem with our culture. We see the space we inhabit as not wild, as not nature. Nature is in the parks, is in the mountains we drive over to sun ourselves on the beach, in unreachable and savage depths of countries like Brazil and continents like Africa. “That is nature,” we say, “not this, not our home, not our workplace.” A favorite author of mine calls this an “estranged worldview”, a term she borrowed herself from Friedrich Engels. She describes it thusly: “We are strangers to natur, to other human beings, to parts of ourselves. We see the world as made up of separate, isolated, nonliving parts that have no inherent value. “They are not even dead – because death implies life.)”[i] She goes on to say that “when nature is empty of spirit, forests and trees become merely timber, something to be measured in board feet, valued only for its profitability, not . . . even for its part in the larger ecosystem.”[ii] Starhawk, the author, finds the roots of an estranged worldview laid deep into our past, two millennia and more. In the Enlightenment, she tells us, the separation of the divine and the mundane (from the Latin word mundus, meaning “world”) promoted by Christianity became what she calls the “machine image”, a very telling metaphor.[iii] In such a worldview, when we are told by William McDonough that he wants to build a “building like a tree”, we find the statement odd ad perhaps even laughable. Trees are alive. Buldings aren’t. It seems so simple.
The power of nature is all around us and can be found almost anywhere. One is able to study nature through experiencing it firsthand, looking at a picture, watching a movie, or even reading a familiar children’s story. I believe that by learning more about nature we can grow closer to God. Emerson states, “Nature is so pervaded in human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular” (Emerson 508). Like Emerson, I believe that humanity and nature were created by God and we can learn more about the Spirit of God by studying nature. I also see that nature has the power to influence our emotions and actions. I see evidence of this through various landscapes such as the desert, the beach, the mountains and the jungle. I thought about the vastness of the desert during a recent trip to the desert with my class. I think about nature and my love for it when I am scanning through my photo album and see pictures that capture me enjoying the mountains of Utah. When I watched the movie The Beach I was struck out how nature, specifically the beautiful beaches of Thailand, influenced the actions of every character in the movie. Of course it is hard to read a legendary story such as “Jungle Book” and not see what a powerful effect nature and its’ animals can have over humans.