Moderation

For tonight's nature walk, I decided to take a stroll over on both Perham and Court St today. My mind abreast with the thoughts of Leopold and Thoreau, I decided to actually stop walking for a bit and invested some time into looking under rocks and trees. Maybe I could possibly make the same astute observations that the two nature writers did in hopes of make my own mind blowing philosophies.

Unfortunately, the only philosophies that I gathered about nature writing is that not everybody is capable of doing so. Why is that though?

Maybe it has something to do with maintaining a proper balance between that of pure nature and that of pure humanity at play. This new revelation is due large in part to the new readings of Wendell Berry's Home Economics.

Just in the very beginning of his book he talks in about how in reality (which I think speaks the most to our times) most people can't actually give up everything they're used to, to live in nature.

On page 7, he brilliantly lays out some main principles of his book by stating that, "People cannot live without nature; that is the first question of the conservationists. And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it. But this is true of all creatures; they depend upon nature, and the change it... the making of these differences is the making of the world." (Berry, 7).

Now Leopold illustrated this idea near the end of his book A Sand County Almanac, but not so clearly defined as the words of Wendell Berry. In getting back to my observations of trying to record nature, I believe I was unable to do so because I think too much on the pure side of humanity. But the even bigger problem is that when I try to think of nature, I think too much of it on the pure side of nature as well.

As Berry mentions, we are people who must change nature within nature to be able to adhere to human nature. This very idea by itself frightens me, because as he also points out in later parts of his essays that we humans have a tendency of destroying too much, or rather do things that are beneficial to us and us only; hence leading to an environmental imbalance within nature. However, my concern is that if it is in our nature to take and alter nature, then what can nature do to take and alter us? Regardless of all the readings that we accomplish, it seems that reaching that verdict is never fully achieved. The idea of an intrinsic act to obtain an intrinsic good rarely seems to be outlined.

As I continue to read on in Berry's book, I hope to stumble across a new way of acting intrinsically good towards nature and maybe even gain a better understanding as to why nature --after reading the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Leopold -- seems so puzzling to me.