Wallace Stegner Summary

One main idea of landscape architecture is to persuade people to interact with nature and to enjoy and help it, not to destroy or harm it. Nature is as much as part of this world as humans are; without nature or the wilderness there would be no society. Leopold states, “Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization” (264). Human grew out of nature. In the essay “Wilderness” Aldo Leopold talks about nature as if it is a masterpiece painted by the earth or as if it is an ancient artifact in a famous museum.

With human advancement, technology has taken on a life of its own. The current American society’s reliance on digital support has caused it to forget the importance of its humanity. The novelist, Wallace Stegner, wrote in a letter to argue for the preservation of the wilderness in order to help restore the spirituality and historical values of America, which he sent to David E. Pesonen, a research assistant for the Wildland Research Center at the University of California. His claim relays that the remaining wilderness needs to be preserved as much as possible because American society needs to remember and appreciate its ancestral roots. While he used primarily pathos as his method of persuasion, his argument lacks factual information and mentions minimal credibility.

American wilderness stories depict wild-nature as separate from human and as only pure and grand when it meets the criterion of being free from human intervention--emptiness. The components of these stories is really a recipe for constructing and embedding settler-colonial logics in the the minds of the citizenry. John Muir’s, My First Summer in the Sierra Nevada, does an effective job at achieving this. Just like Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s, Into the Wild, he fetishizes land that is free from human intervention, referring to the mountains, groves, and waterfalls as “glorious mountain sublimities” by which man’s “worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in” (Muir 11, 25). Quintessential dualism, he is segregating the human world from the non-human world; polarizing the relationship while acquiring the land for his own pleasure and therapy (Jacobs 28; Glenn 6).

Christopher McCandless, a 29-year-old dreamer, went on the journey of a lifetime to involve himself with nature and being truly independent. He had lived a life of privilege, made amazing grades in school, and even went to school at Emory College, getting degrees in both history and anthropology. Even though he seemed to have everything good going for him, it’s not the life he wanted. McCandless decides after law school to go deep into the “wild”, with no map, no resources. All he kept was a small journal and camera in which he captured and recorded all of his experiences in, allowing people for the rest of time to read and learn about his journey in his book titled Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer.

However there are dangerous things about nature even if humans need nature. The inclusion of nature in the good mind’s creation suggests that humans want a simplistic life in unity with nature, but without the chaos of nature in its purest

In his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon declares that “the time has come to rethink wilderness” (69). From the practice of agriculture to masculine frontier fantasies, Cronon argues that Americans have historically defined wilderness as an “island,” separate from their polluted urban industrial homes (69). He traces the idea of wilderness throughout American history, asserting that the idea of untouched, pristine wilderness is a harmful fantasy. By idealizing wilderness from a distance, he argues that people justify the destruction of less sublime landscapes and aggravate environmental conflict.

But we know it is nature, We have watched and worked with it “. The significance of nature’s power is shown in the

I had the opportunity to go to Mexico and visit the Yucatan rainforest and this lead me to be able to explore nature and feel the peaceful impact it can have on someone 's life. Chris McCandless was determined to create a new life for himself and be the one to control his own destiny. “Chris changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet…. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska”. This quote is from Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and shows how McCandless left everything from his old life in order to create a new life for himself.

President Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was known for his love of nature. This was conveyed most strongly in his speeches, such as “Conservation as a National Duty”, in which he advocated for the preservation of natural resources in the interests of the nation and its people. In this speech as well as others he gave during his term as President, he stressed that conservation did not just pertain to preserving natural resources or deferring their exhaustion; rather, it was closely intertwined with the patriotic duty of ensuring that the nation would be able to provide for future generations, and was second only to the “great fundamental questions of morality”. One such example of how Roosevelt connected conservation with morality is found in his “The New Nationalism” speech, given in Osawatomie, Kansas in 1910. Here, he compares the way he believes the nation must behave in terms of conservation to the manner in which a farmer acts in reference to his children and the land that provides for them.

The struggle of man versus nature long has dwelt on the consciousness of humanity. Is man an equal to his environment? Can the elements be conquered, or only endured? We constantly find ourselves facing these questions along with a myriad of others that cause us to think, where do we fit? These questions, crying for a response, are debated, studied, and portrayed in both Jack London’s “

Theodore Roosevelt: “Conservation As A National Duty” introduces the problem of the lack of natural resources, and how are we going to fix the problem for future generations? Roosevelt makes connection between conservation and progress,patriotism,and morality of the American people by putting different people since or point of view of other people and himself to not waste our natural resources. He uses other people 's point of view by asking and using other people 's feeling about the crisis that they are in the middle of right now. (Stated in paragraph 3) “so vital is this question,that for the first time in our history the chief executive officers of the states separately,and of the states together forming the nations,have have met to consider.

Unlike humans trying to reconnect back to nature, we rather seem to want to create an artificial nature in our cage of industrious lives. Regrettably, this author 's call to save the environment has not been fully applied, as of today humans are still releasing toxins into the environment at the highest rate in history, occupying forests with building in the name of owning something, in places such as Antarctica, the polar bears are starving, even worst humans had it illegal to feed them while they are exploding and destroying their homes, the seas-fishes are iced up, just to name a few reasons why connecting back to nature is critical. Although green activists such as Ecosia have been working on restoring the environment, however, more needs to be done. We must see to it that nature bounces back to its full

President Roosevelt said “The time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone.” is one of the examples how President Roosevelt ’s and John Muir’s camping trip in Yosemite supported their goal to preserve nature. Some of the reasons how they supported their goal to preserve nature are they admired the place. Also, they fought for nature. Finally, they spent time in nature.

In order for here to deliver her message to the best of her ability, her dominant organizational pattern problem- solution because she gives the problem, which is that nature's definition is too strict. The secondary organizational pattern advantages- disadvantages because she states the old claim presented by Bill McKibben, which was that nature is no longer because it has been altered by humans. She also uses many rhetorical devices. The speaker uses irony, express something which is contrary to the intended meaning, when she describes how it takes a lot of maintenance to make national parks look untouched. Use of rhetorical question when asking the audience what counts as nature, so the audience can really think about her concept.

Many people who go into nature always see it as something beautiful and aesthetic, but they never see the other side to nature. Humankind’s connection with nature isn’t a real one. They always look at the bright side of nature but are blind to the true dark side of nature. JB MacKinnon’s article “False Idyll” (2012), reveals that nature is not just flowers in a field but can also be the survival of the fittest. He backs up his claim by talking about nature through anecdotes and expert’s research.