He Has Not Learned to Think Like a Mountain

This week’s readings have affected me more so than Walden did. I’ve always love trees; the way they look, their smell, climbing them and relaxing in them. But John Muir took this love to a whole new level and opened my eyes even more to the trees (as did Dr. Gallegos. After the walk we went on, I looked up more about some of the trees he spoke about and learned that the Chinese Chestnut tree bears edible nuts). John Muir uses personification, simile, and metaphor to describe his experience among the trees in a wind storm in “A Wind-Storm in the Forests”, making for a beautifully detailed experience. “…the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds”  (Muir 91). It appears he is saying only Nature truly knows and understands Nature, but his trip up into the trees speaks to how we should all try to reconnect with and understand Nature ourselves instead of just observing it and having nothing to do with the beauty of it.

Aldo Leopold also uses personification (of atoms, of prairies, of mountains) to draw us closer into the land. He speaks of the land like an organism close to ourselves, even going so far as to ascribe to the land a bloodstream. He talks of how eliminating predators will eventually eliminate everything down to the flora as the fauna will run rampant and eat it all before starving out. 

He speaks of all this before going into land ethics. But then he digs deep into land ethics and exposes how little people are willing to do for the environment and how much is relegated to the government. He shows how people are more interested in profit than conservation (as was a prevalent theme in Walden). He makes it clear that uneconomic/useless species are still necessary in order to retain Nature as she is. “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty” (Leopold 267). As he states here, many will not appreciate something so necessary and important unless it has something that will please them, be it beauty or money. As both Emerson and Leopold say, we still view land as “slave-girls”-property-and treat the land just as badly as we once treated slaves. He advocates, in a very convincing way, that ethics be applied to the land and that the land needs to become just another part of the community. “For every atom lost to the sea, the prairie pulls another out of the decaying rocks” (Leopold 273). It appears that he also advocates not only for preservation but for activism based in replenishing what we have taken from the Nature.

We need to be more aware of our surroundings and what sort of an impact we’re having on it. As Anohni sings, “Why did you separate me from the Earth?” Why are we so separated from the Earth when our ancestors worshipped and understood it? What caused us to become so apathetic towards the world we live on when the only reason we can live is because of it? Is it really that we are so selfish and power-hungry that only money drives us? Does not the possibility of using up everything the Earth has given us scare us? It appears that it will not happen so drastically in our lifetime (even though it has been drastically changed from our grandparents time to ours), but have we no hope for the future?