Sand County Almanac

From Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold I decided to present two quotations. The first one is present on page 6 and mentions the following:

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace."

I like this piece because I find it humorous. We all know that eggs come from chickens, bacon form pigs, etc... but we don't take these things into consideration when we go to the grocery store. Besides the foods that we eat have so many chemicals and preservatives added that they have become products of science. In my personal experiences, the organic eggs that I have eaten have a different taste to those I have bought at the store. In addition, I like this excerpt because although it is funny it is a statement that one day might become true. People no longer grow their own crops like they used to do before. In the time of my grandparents and great-grandparents, they usually grew everything they ate. All of the trees that my grandfather grew at his backyard produced. In his backyard my grandfather had lemons, guavas, avocados, bananas, peaches, tomatoes, watermelons, figs, grapes, tangerines, oranges, grapefruits, pecans, etc... Now, four years after his death, my uncles have not kept up with his garden and only half of those goods are still producing. Now with our fast lives going a thousand miles per hour we don't have time to be growing our own goods. If we want an apple we go buy it at the store. There is no need to wait months to see fruits from our efforts. We live in a society where we only want fast results. It also mentions that we are going to believe that the heat comes from the furnace. I thought this to be funny as well, but it got me thinking. We no longer spend time in the outdoors that we no longer appreciate the heat given off by the sun.

The second quote that I liked was found on pg 264 and it states the following:

"Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization."

I like this quote because it carries a great truth. Before men had the idea of exploration and getting to know the unknown much of the land was wild. Not only was the land wild but the people that lived in the wilderness were also considered "wild" and "uncivilized." Our history is filled with stories of invasion and how the white race came to these wild lands to the rescue of these "uncivilized" people and lead them to civilization. We came to these lands and took the life out of the wilderness. The wilderness was too much for us to handle that we had to "perfect" it as if we were carving a chair from a piece of log. We scraped off the rough edges and cut out the unneeded pieces in order to meet our needs. The problem is that we are soon going to run out of this raw material through which we are creating our civilization.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

From the book Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner I liked a passage that best describes the relationship between man, land and the economy. There used to be a time where the relationship between men and land was sacred. The people would treat the land as a brother because they understood that it was thanks to the land that they were able to feed their families. It was a mutual love. They treated the land kindly and the land therefore produced sweet tasting vegetables and fruits. Unfortunately this relationship deteriorated when the monetary gain became the main focus. The relationship between men and land became numbed when the men were bombarded with the mortgage notices. The banks didn’t care for the small farmers. If they didn’t have the money to pay for the mortgages they would take the farm away and sell it to the best bidder. At the end the lands ended up being in the hands of the rich investors who did not care about the land but of the monetary gains that they were able to obtain from them. Therefore we are now confronted with the problem dealing with the exploitation of the land. The passage that I selected is found on pg. 221 which main focus is this problem. It mentions the following:

“It took a man to break and hold a homestead of 160 acres even in the subhumid zone. It took a superman to do it on the arid plains. It could hardly, in fact, be done, though some heroes tried it…Quiet as often as not it was the immigrants who stuck it out and eventually made it. Having gambled their savings and their entire lives for the chance, they were not often driven out by anything short of annihilation. Those who were defeated, and up to 1990 two thirds of those who tried it were, were by the normal course of events in peonage to the banks. A mortgage was more common on a western farm than a good team…The land of the failures went to the banks, and thus onto the market, and often in to the accumulating domains of speculators or large ranch companies. In the end, the Homestead Act stimulated the monopolizing of land that its advocates had intended to prevent.”

I also like this passage because surprisingly it also deals with our present problem in Arizona. At this moment with the Proposition at hand immigrants are not being welcomed in those lands. In this passage selected it clearly mentions that it was usually the immigrant that made the arid lands produce goods. Since they have already gambled all of their savings and lives by coming to the new world (in this case the United States) they worked hard and were last to give up on the land.

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

From The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell I selected a piece found on page 212. At this point in the book John Powel and the other explorers are from the junction of the grand and green to the mouth of the Little Colorado. It is on July 19 and they have been climbing the rocks and going through some of the fissures of a gulch that they have selected:

“…So we pass each other alternately until we emerge from the fissure, out on the summit of the rock. And what a world of grandeur is spread before us! Below is the canyon through which the Colorado runs. We can trace its course for miles, and at points catch glimpses of the river. From the northwest comes the Green in a narrow winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock- not such ledges as the reader may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains that, rolled out on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as the reader may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit….On the summit of the opposite wall of the canyon are rock forms that we do not understand. Away to the east a group of eruptive mountains are seen- the Sierra La Sal… so the mountains are in uniform…wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks, - deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles, and ten thousand strangely cared forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds.”

I liked this excerpt because of its great use of detail. John Wesley Powell does a great job in describing his surroundings. He describes what he is able to perceive at every direction. Once being the top of the rock he is surprised and awestruck at the view. He mentions how a “world of grandeur” was spread before him. The river runs for miles, there are gorges in one direction, bottomless canyons in another direction, and cliffs at still another direction. The grandeur of all of these environmental characteristics reminds me of our insignificance in comparison to Nature. It reminds me about the video titled “The Power of 10” that we saw in class. He is standing on this rock that is hundreds of miles above the sea level, but it is still hundreds of miles from reaching the sky. In addition, we can tell that he is impressed with the view. We can tell this because Powell tells his readers that it is a view that none of us have seen since he himself was impressed even though he has been an explorer for many years. The description of the grandeur of Nature is also made to indicate that it is impossible for us to really appreciate all of its beauty. He mentions that there were forms of rock that he didn’t understand nor had previous knowledge about. Therefore even though we would like to learn all of the secrets of nature, Nature is so big that we would never be able to discover all of its wonders. That is just how magical Nature and the wilderness really are!

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

From the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey I decided to select the following excerpt:

The lights of drill-rig towers glimmered in the distance, far off across the unhabited immensities of the Escalante beachlands. They passed, from time to time, familiar names on little metal signs at turn-offs along the road: Conoco, Arco, Texaco, Gulf, Exxon, Cities Service.

"The bastards are everywhere," Hayduke grumbled. "Let's go get those rigs."

"There's men out there a-workin'. Out there in the cold at four in the morning slaving away to provide us with oil and gas for this here truck so we can help sabotage the world planetary maggot- machine. Show a little gratitude."

The light of dawn found them rolling southeast under the facade of the Fifty Mile Cliffs. Hole-in-the-Rock was a dead end (for motor vehicles) but their route lay another way, up a connecting jeep trail over the plateau.

Hayduke spotted geophones along the road. "Stop!"

Smith stopped. Hayduke jumped out and tore the nearest geophone out of the dirt, along with the cable that connected it to a series. Geophones mean seismic exploration, the search for mineral deposits by means of analysis of vibration patterns- seismographs- in the subsurface rock, the vibrations created by explosive charge set off in the bottom of drill holes. Hayduke wrapped a loop of the cable around the rear bumper of the truck and got back in the cab.

"Okay." He opened a beer. "Christ, I'm hungry."

Smith drove forward. Behind them, as the cable tightened, the geophones began popping form the ground and scuttling along behind the truck, dancing in the dust. Dozens of them, expensive little instruments, ripped untimely from the earth. As they proceeded the truck yanked still more out of the ground, the whole lot.

"Soon as the sun comes up," Smith promised, "we'll fix some breakfast. Soon as we get out of the open and up in the woods."
pg. 150/151

I like this excerpt from the novel because we can clearly see the disagreement between Hayduke and the process of industry. Hayduke dislikes industry because of the effects that it has on the environment. The area that was once unhabited is now filled with the lights of industry. This invasion causes anger in Hayduke which leads him into the destruction of the geophones. He does not care that these devices are expensive because in his eyes they are just endangering the environment. I also choose this excerpt because it gives introduction to an important concept- that although we are in disagreement with the destruction of Nature caused by industry we use the sources produced by industrialization which causes a greater depletion of our natural resources. At the end, industrialization ends up being nothing more than a supply and demand company. In this example, Hayduke is mad at the effects of industrialization on the environment but Smith remind him that it is thanks to industrialization and the production of gasoline that they are able to travel in their truck. There are many activist fighting for the rights of our Nature, but unfortunately we have become too dependent on the products produced by industrialization that it is difficult to brings industrialization to a complete stop. If we want to see a change and a stop the depletion of our natural resources we need to start with our own actions.

My First Summer in Sierra by John Muir

From Muir's book, My First Summer in Sierra, I really enjoyed the excerpt he wrote on September 7 when he was describing the Cathedral and gave mention of religion.

"No feature, however, of all the noble landscape as seen from here seems more wonderful than the Cathedral itself, a temple displaying Nature's best masonry and sermons in stones. How often I have gazed at it from the tops of hills and ridges, and through openings int he forests on my many short excursions, devoutly wondering, admiring, longing! This I may say is the first time I have been at church in California, led here at last, every door graciously opened for the poor lonely worshiper. In our best time everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars. And lo, here at last in front of the Cathedral is blessed cassiope, ringing her thousands of sweet-toned bells, the sweetest church music I ever enjoyed. Listening, admiring, until late in the afternoon..."
- pg. 82/83

Through Muir's book we can strongly see this relationship between nature and religion. After doing some research on him I was able to find out that Muir's constant mentioning of religion can be attributed to his father. Being raised under his father's strict brand of Christian discipleships, it is not surprising that religion plays an important role in Muir's life which is reflected in his writings. Muir mentions that at the best of times everything is converted into religion. I had never thought of Nature as being religious, but I can now understands what Muir is trying to convey to its readers. Like religion, Nature at its most wilderness, is representative of the world that is farthest away from sin and destruction. In other words nature can be representative of heaven. Nature offers the human beings the peacefulness that is never reached in our hectic lifestyles we are so used to. The sounds produced by Nature (Yes- because Nature is a natural composer)represents the church bells indicating us that is time to ask for forgiveness for our sins and receive the father's blessing. Like God who is always forgiving, Nature is also forgiving. It is not a secret that we take advantage of our natural resources for personal benefits such as monetary gains and personal pleasures. We, as humans, tend to care about what is beneficial for ourselves and don't stop to think of the future or the consequences of our actions. Therefore we exploit nature with the hope that Nature, as always forgiving, will continue producing vegetation and pleasures for us. It is important to note that Muir found many similarities between Nature and religion. For Muir Nature is representative of the Church that thousands of people attend every Sunday to hear the sermon but retain none of its messages.

How Long She'll Last in This World- Maria Melendez

From Maria Melendez's book of poems called How Long She'll Last in This World, I personally liked the one on pg. 22 called "Auallido", which reads as follows:

In the Sierra Madre
they say, "El alma de
un lobo nunca desaparecia
de este mundo"-

a wolf's spirit never
disappears from the forest.
"Siempre su espiritu
estaba pendiente de vigilar

todo lo que habia
a su alrededor;
era el protector
de los bosques."

Can you picture a wolf's spirit?
It's not the gray, wispy thing
screen-printed as background
on countless tees.

It's solid as granite,
forged in fire, firm
as the basement rock
of the Rocky Mountains.

Can you picture a wolf's
spirit as sculptor
of the moose, the cottonwoods,
even the willows?

It is mammalian and familial:
there is a loba spirit flowing
in your breast milk and in the mik
of elk, moose, deer.

So come back here, loba,
recuerda estas montanas, mother mountains:

San Juan Range, Sierra del Huacha, Culebra Range, Spanish Peaks,
Front range, Snowy Range, Sierra de la Encantada, Sawatch Range,
Gore Range, White Mountains, Black Range, Mogollon Mountains,
Burro Mountains, Sierra del Nido, Sierra Madre

Living wolf, spirit in flesh,
breathe here,
walk here, recall these places
you never left.

Glance again in time's long mirror
and recognize yourself.

I can personally identify with this poem and not only because of my Spanish background. This poem indicates that the spirit of the loba never leaves the forest therefore even though they might be killed or extinct they will always be part of the forest even if it is only in spirit. It is interesting that Melendez makes clear that the spirit of this loba is everlasting and as hard as a granite rock. I believe that the reference of the loba (which is a female wolf) is representative of the mother figure, whether it is as Mother Nature or in the case of any nurturing mother. It is through the nurturing mother that this rebellious spirit common in the wilderness is passed from mother to offspring. Therefore, the offspring themselves possess the rebelliousness that has made the loba so distinctive. This is how all human beings have in them some rebelliousness and untamed wilderness. As the poem advices at the end- since we possess this wilderness we should go back to nature. We should go back to nature like our ancestors did before industrialization. We should go back as if we never left. We should go back because this is the only way when we are able to discover our true self and not what our rigid society has set upon us. Nature provides the total liberation and freedom that we all wish we had but most of the time never find.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

The passage I selected is found on page 338. It is the second paragraph on the diary entry on Oct.23:

• "Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one's head and shoulders. But I cannot excuse myself for using the stone. It is not innocent, it is not just, so to maltreat the tree that feeds us. I sympathize with the tree, yet I heaved a big stone against the trunks like a robber,- not too good to commit murder. I trust that I shall never do it again. It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us. Old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others. I was affected as if I had cast a rock at a sentient being,- which a duller sense than my own, it is true, but yet a distant relation"

From this exert we can say that Thoreau feels guilt for inflicting pain on the tree, which he personifies by giving it human characteristics such as feelings. We can also tell that for him Nature is like family when he mentions that "old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents." By this quote we can also conclude that Nature has been with us for centuries. Therefore, he feels like a criminal to inflict such pain on a living thing that feeds and shadows him. I also like the fact that he mentions that people would practice more humanity toward others if they knew the secrets of nature. Unlike humans, Nature does not hold back bad feelings or thoughts of revenge toward the human race- although the human race maltreats Nature. On the contrary, Nature still produces food to feed them and still shadows them from the sun.