“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Art & Design Perspectives III, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan
For 10/6 (I'm an idiot and have been posting on section 3's blogspot. I deleted them all and copy/pasted them to the section 2's blogspot! Sorry!)
ReplyDeleteThis week, the Sand County Almanac reading was mostly about the food cycle. Aldo Leopold starts talking about mountains and how they are different today than when he used to visit them. He then goes into when he first realized how important wolves are to the health of a mountain. When he first kills a wolf, he thinks that it will make hunters happy now that there are more deer to kill. However, too much deer can kill a mountain. He says, “since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves… I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails… I have seen every edible bush and seedling browed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death.” He takes this realization and then compares it to cows: “The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.” I like that he learns this from his own mistake/experience of killing a wolf for hobby instead of just lecturing about something he hasn’t experience first hand.
He also compares the food cycle to science and how different it is. He says, “in terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre… yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost.” However, if you ask an ecologist, he will tell you that there has been an “ecological death” which cannot be expressed in terms of contemporary science.
Leopold goes further into science later on, talking about how science believes in more people and inventions and doubts everything except facts. However, he believes that scientists are ignorant towards the facts of their environmental issues: “he has no doubts about his own design for living. He assumes that for him the Gavilan will sing forever.”
The introduction/prologue of the book Collapse was very interesting, but also very scary. I like how Jared Diamond talks about how the past can offer us a rich database from which we can learn from to stay successful. However, it scared me when he pointed out that past societies, which have been successful, collapsed because of the same environmental and economical issues that our society faces today. He also poses the question, “will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York’s skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?” This question hit me directly partially because it is something that is completely possible that I have never thought of (or was too scared too think of) and partially because I live in New York.
- Connie In