Research Paper On Momaday

“Could it be that we are supposed to be talking to the plants and animals, interacting with them, accepting the gifts they offer, and using them in ways that further their growth?”(Starhawk, 162). I feel this quote from “Our Place in Nature” is a great way to start the topic of how artists uses plant life in their work. It shows how artists might try to interact with the environment for ideas on the works that they come up. I feel also that they are trying to be one with the environment. I feel if you spend enough time in nature, you will build a strong connection with everything around you. This comment is justified when Starhawk said, “I can walk into any forest where the trees are strange and understand something about the relationships

According to Deborah McGregor, the term “environment” encompasses many different aspects of nature. From a contemporary perspective, the environment means the components of the earth such as: land, all layers of the atmosphere, all organic and inorganic material, and interacting natural systems. However, for indigenous populations, “environment” is more than the surrounding physical attributes of nature. The term “world view” emerges from the intense bond between indigenous populations and the environment. As a result environment also encompasses how one views and experiences the world (McGregor, 2015). Unfortunately, McGregor (2004) finds that traditional ecological knowledge surrounding environmental

Gordon Orains states that, “Throughout human history, people have pondered their relationship to the living and nonliving components of the environments in which they have lived” (2). Both Henry Thoreau and Chris McCandless, took a deep dive into the way they both prosper throughout the nature they choose to live in. Disconnecting from the modern world and reuniting

I have grown up with a mindset common to most of humanity, that the world is our property to rule and therefore we must conquer and control it by any means. With this mindset I and most of humanity view the earth as a tool for our satisfaction and a stepping stone to our self-defined greatness. Having read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, I have begun to challenge this belief as he explains this mindset through the concept of Mother Culture. Quinn describes a world of Takers and Leavers. Takers are people who mold the world around them for their own benefit, and Leavers are those who live in harmony with the environment, as part of the ecosystem. For the Takers, Mother Culture maintains a lifestyle that is proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.

Chris McCandless probably wasn’t the first to think, “When you want something in life, you just gotta reach out and grab it.” In the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and the short story “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, they both have the belief that by living off of nature and preserving it, the closer one will come to understanding the nature of nature.

Coming from an uncultivated society, such as the one that brought farming and ranching to the settlement of North America, humans have retained some sensitivity to environmental issues as they derived their livelihood directly from the land. But with the advance to an urban or metropolitan society, there has been a major disconnect between humanity and nature. Today’s urban society is provided with mowed parks, paved playgrounds, plush automobiles to move the public around on asphalt roads, housing with automatically regulated heat and cooling, and supermarkets with shopping carts and baskets, in which people can gather their food supplies from orderly shelves and freezers. Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” term suggests that humans stop treating the land as a mere object or a resource, like how the world does today. For Leopold, land is not merely soil, like the public would think of today; land is a fountain of energy, flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.

The environment can be described as all those elements, both the living and the non-living that surrounds us. The environment can also refer to the condition within which individuals, animals and plants lives. Mankind has a role to play in the environment, which mainly concerns taking care of the environment as well as improving it. Since, we as human beings are different from animals as we have a gift consciousness, we have an obligation of being improvers of the environment through ensuring that we observe environmental consciousness and that we avoid all those practices that negatively affects the environment and cause ecological crisis and problems. This essay will use the article “Towards a Buddhist Environmental Ethics” by Rita M Gross to help in the answering of the question “What is our appropriate role in relation the environment?” The essay will additionally look into the concept of ‘deep ecology’ by Bill Devall and George Sessions to get a deeper understanding of the ecology and our relationship with it, a concept that will help us to be in a better position to answer our appropriate role concerning the environment.

The interconnection between the human race and nature is complex, and can be interpreted an infinite amount of ways. Mark Jenkins’ ‘King of the Dirtbags’ and Wendell Berry’s ‘An Entrance to the Woods’ are both very similar in the ways they represent philosophical ideas regarding the relationship between the modern man and nature. Both literary pieces discuss the benefits of simplicity, and explain how mankind has a tendency to overcomplicate much of what they develop. The two authors also share the idea in their writings that the ability to adapt to different environments is a crucial trait in evolution and progression as a society. Another major concept that is prevalent in both of the author’s pieces is that man must be able to reach beyond his comfort zone to understand nature’s consistency throughout time.

Aldo Leopold is on the forefather of modern environmentalism. His book, A Sand County Almanac, is based on the notion of viewing land as a community and as a commodity. In the chapter “The Land Ethic”, Leopold invokes a rethinking of our relationships to our world and is based on the principle that ethics are “a process in ecological evolution” (238). Leopold describes the stages of ethic evolving and explains that the rules for socializing were originally defined for human beings. These rules are expanded upon in the next stage of “Ethical Sequence” (237-238), describing how humans interact toward their community. The third stage is the ethics between humans and the land. Upon analyzing “The Land Ethic” I have come to the conclusion that in order to have respect and ethic for land, or anything, one must make a personal connection.

Lopez added that people worry about unknown land and want to take it once new land is discovered. He criticizes that humans don’t realize untouched land could save society. Furthermore, Lopez addresses the relationships humans have with their environments. People want to feel an intimacy towards a place that will turn into an attachment, an attachment they can cherish and remember for the rest of their lives. In closing, Lopez suggests that everything around humans has a meaning, and that the stories we tell one another keep us alive. Ultimately, what Lopez is trying to convey through his essay is that nature has a prominent influence on humans.

Since the beginning of time, man and nature have coexisted with one another. Before civilizations began and industrialization spread, all that was in the world was nature and man. Both Edward Abbey and Ralph Waldo Emerson, viewed nature as something which made us complete as a person. Abbey claims nature both “bore us and sustains us”. They believe we owe everything to nature. Nature has provided us opportunities to grow and prosper as an individual, yet what Abbey and Emerson failed to recognize is the importance of community. Both men believed one could truly understand himself by escaping society and pursuing the serenity of nature. This theory has its faults, for while moments of isolation may be beneficial in renewing one’s self, other

Hypothesis: “We propose that affiliating with nature affords us the opportunity to be fully flourishing human beings.”

Nearly everything that a human does is in response to the environment. Our lives are defined by what is around us and what we find in front of us, whether this means accepting, dealing with or changing it. This has been the pattern since primates first stood up and became Homo erectus, and has continued until we considered ourselves doubly wise. The shape of the land affected where humans moved. Weather was something with which to contend. Fire affected humans until they conquered it – and herein lies the core of the relationship. The earth affects humans, and humans affect it back, viewing characteristics and patterns as problems and challenges, and finding a solution.

“The Earth does not belong to us: We belong to the Earth”-Marlee Matlin. In Aldo Leopold’s essay, “The Land Ethic”, there are several overwhelming examples that illustrate why we as humans would believe we own the Earth when we really don’t. Paradoxically, looking at Virginia Woolf’s work, “The Death of a Moth”, one would come to believe that none of that matters because all living beings will suffer the fate of death. However, both works show that there can be a reconciliation between a certain kind of symbiosis: man vs man, land vs land, or man vs land. “The Death of a Moth” may show that all life form end eventually,but “The Land Ethic” convinces readers that there can be ways to maintain balance in the land that can prevent death or ameliorate life for all before death. In both works, we can observe the considerable similarities and differences, the balance between what is ethical and logical in how humans use the land, and the management of life and assurance of death for all life forms.

A photograph of Earth reveals a great deal, but it does not convey the complexity of our environment. Our environment (a term that comes from the French environner, “to surround”) is more than water, land, and air; it is the sum total of our surroundings. It includes all of the biotic factors, or living things, with which we interact. It also includes the abiotic factors, or nonliving things, with which we interact. Our environment includes the continents, oceans, clouds, and ice caps you can see in the photo of Earth from space, as well as the animals, plants, forests, and farms that comprise the landscapes around us. In a more inclusive sense, it also encompasses our built