John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt: Taking a Stand for National Parks “Ordinarily, the man who loves the woods and mountains, the trees, the flowers, and the wild things, has in him some indefinable quality of charm, which appeals even to those sons of civilization who care for little outside of paved streets and brick walls. John Muir was a fine illustration of this rule.” (John Muir: An appreciation by Theodore Roosevelt.) John Muir was influential in the fight to preserve nature for future generations because of his ability to convince others about its importance. The first way John Muir convinced others of the importance of nature was by working with President Theodore Roosevelt. As President, Roosevelt had the power to preserve nature for future generations through setting aside lands that would later become the National Parks.
Another example of transcendental thoughts is the movie, Pocahontas. According to Emerson's essay Nature, “In the woods, we return to reason and faith”(citation). Pocahontas has a love for nature and often goes to nature to get away from reality and think. ().The song “The Colors of the Wind”, from Pocahontas, suggest Emerson’s thought that nature is precious. The lyrics from “Colors of the Wind” suggest how Pocahontas values nature: “You think you own whatever land you land on, the Earth is just a dead thing you can claim, but I know every rock and tree and creature, has a life, has a spirit, has a name”.
George Wright Melendez has a significant historical importance in American National Parks. He had the ideology of “realization coming that perhaps our greatest national heritage is nature itself, with all its complexity and its abundance of life.” His ideology was that everything in nature is important especially the life that lives in the parks. The animals in the park were important to him since he was a zoologist. He was naturalist at Yosemite National Park. Melendez thought that the national parks did half of their job.
Ziolkowski has chosen to carve Crazy Horse’s likeness into the side of a mountain in the Black Hills, similar in the manner that white settlers carved the faces of old presidents into the face of Mount Rushmore. The monument, though, well meaning, misses the point by defacing an ancient formation that the Chief would have seen as sacred. Ziolkowski is right to honor Crazy Horse, but the way he intends to honors him, by carving up a sacred mountain formation, is an affront to Crazy Horse 's memory. It 's a well meaning gesture, but it 's so off-base, it comes off as a bad
For Leopold, skill is an integral part of developing a land ethic. He believes having a skill-based relationship with the land leads to the formation of “an ethic, ecologically” because relating to the land in such a way produces a “limitation on freedom of action” (Leopold, 121, 202). Leopold also interprets buffers that prevent humanity from having a direct and skill-based relationship to the environment as “spiritual dangers” because they prevent people from fostering direct connections to their ecological realities (Leopold, 6). Materialist ecofeminism also ascribes to the view that an understanding of ethics only arrives from an understanding of the materials in which people exist. For materialist ecofeminists, ethics arise from materialist relationships through which the development of a spiritual connection with the natural world is possible because of the skills, knowledge, and agency utilized when interacting with nature.
We follow the same natural life cycle just like everything else; birth, grow, age, die. We are no more separate from the system than that ant you see in your garden. For us to think we are in complete control, above the normal system all living things on earth are part of, is to think we don 't depend on the earth and everything that the earth provides. We depend on the system like the system depends on us, just another piece of the large puzzle, hardly more significant than any other
During the Transcendentalist movement, Henry David Thoreau was a leading transcendentalist whose work focused mainly on nature and adventure. Walden, or Life in the Woods is an exceptional example of a story based on adventure. In Thoreau’s account of his life at Walden pond, he first states, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Through this quote Thoreau explains that he was tired of the complexity of normal life and desired to go on an adventure to live simply. Additionally, Thoreau states, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…,” which again reveals his motivation for new life by adventure and simplicity. Finally, as Thoreau concludes his account he states, “I left the woods
I consider myself to be a transcendentalist, after reading the stories. I try to see the positive in every situation, and I don’t try to conform to society, and have respect for nature. A anti- transcendentalist is very negative and often needs proof in order for things to be true. In the story Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson he talks about the beauty of nature, he says that “nature never wears a mean appearance,” implying that nature is good and you will have to rely on it. An example of an anti- transcendentalist is someone who doesn 't see the positive and that is shown in The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential truths of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach me. And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived at all. Living is so dear.” Henry David Thoreau can be credited as one of the first western philosophers to point out the real values in life. Just as Plato made the famous Cave Allegory speaking of what it means to go through enlightenment and truly understand what is real in this world and what is not, Thoreau is able to push our minds to the point where we begin to question who we are and what embodies our lives. Throughout our entire lives, we are asked who we are.
Jay Erskine Leutze came to speak to us today about his book, Stand Up That Mountain and his experiences growing and living in the mountains of North Carolina where he was able to call Belview Mountain his very own backyard. He is basically a conservationist who made a huge effort to save and preserve what we know as much of the Appalachian wilderness that happens to be one of the most beautiful sights on the east coast. I feel as though his book showed several different messages but I believe that one of the biggest points that he added onto at the convocation was the fact that realizing who you are and realizing the importance of the world and environment and creatures around you is the only way to truly understand everything around you. There are many small battles that have to be one before you can win a war and Mr. Leutze demonstrated this