Kenneth Maly uses his text to highlight and discuss Aldo Leopold’s writing A Sand County Almanac. Maly seems to have negative feelings towards Aldo’s view and thinks that his tendency to speak in an anthropogenic tone is inferior to an ecogenic tone. Though Maly says that he doesn’t want his essay to be a question of whether Leopold was “guilty” of anthromorphism, I would like to address the issue. While I agree that an ecogenic view is better on the whole, I might argue that the anthropogenic tone is the more common and natural progression of a writer or any human. I might compare this change from anthropogenic to ecogenic as very similar to the change from a geocentric solar system to a heliocentric one. For many years, scientists naturally assumed that the geocentric solar system was correct because from our point of view, that seemed like the right answer. Through the naked eye, all the evidence supported that the moon and the sun rotated around earth. Only after many years, mathematical proof, and much speculation did the scientific community accept that the earth was not the center of our solar system. Is it not the nature of the humans to put ourselves before others? Don’t humans have an inborn selfish behavior? Is it not our instinct to put ourselves before other species in order to survive? In fact, this inborn selfishness is not only innate in humans, but in other animals and species as well. Is that not the dominant reason why Treadwell died? The bear valued his own life over the life of Treadwell.
Therefore I think it is natural for humans, like Leopold to be anthropogenic in our language as well. Maly admits that Leopold had a large idea of an ecogenic community in his writings, but that the way he wrote often showed him to be anthropogenic. Maly questions whether Leopold’s final thinking is anthropogenic or ecogenic and I have to lean towards ecogenic not only because his writings leaned towards it, but also because he might not have realized that his writings were come across as anthropogenic some of time, with the reason being that it is a human’s natural tendency to have an anthropogenic point of view. Leopold does believe that the earth limits humans and that conservation is an important view.
My question to the class then is about the nature of humans or all beings. Do we not all have an inner selfishness? Is it not our nature to value ourselves over others?
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I think we do all have an inner selfishness, and it is our nature to value ourselves over others. The greatest example of this is infants. Do they seem and or act as if they care what other people want or think? No, they go about crying and carrying on about what they want. I am aware that they must do this in order to survive, but that just supports my point even more. We are born with the need to be selfish, to put our needs above all others.As we grow older, we learn to put our needs second, to become less selfish. We learn to share. We learn to help our parents. We learn to give back to our communities through volunteering. We learn to put our own infants' needs above all of our own.
ReplyDeleteHumans definitely have inner selfishness. It is clear everyday. We build roads (screw the wildlife that need these trees) and kill plants, animals and insects in huge quantities every day for food, because they're annoying, its fun, or whatever the reason may be. I think it is cultural. You learn early on you have to defend yourself. While Morgan also brought up children, I thought about it a little differently but it goes along with what she’s saying. Most mothers will say they would protect their children more so than themselves. I wonder where that fits in to this model. Mother's put their child’s needs above their own. And the child learns that whatever they want they can get...and later they learn that’s not how the world works for long (or at least I hope). I think we do have a natural tendency to put ourselves above others. It is easy to do so. We have such a feeling of superiority. We have houses that protect us from other predator animals. We have changed the natural to work for us. We push animals away to have more room. We value ourselves and think we are the greatest. Every once in a while however, nature puts us back in our rightful place. Whether it is a hurricane or tornadoes or storms of any sort, these natural evens show us we are not immortal to nature. We can perish just as easily when force is pushed on us.
ReplyDeleteI think that humans do have an inner selfishness which we have used greatly in terms of our own survival. With our intellectual ability greater than any other mammals we have made them work for us so that we could get ahead. Plowing fields, providing us with food and also giving us a means of living our lives. Whenever we kill anything that we are going to eat it is because we have our own selfish motives, in this case to eat. By allowing the inner selfishness to take over and make our decisions I think that we are further driving the wedge between ourselves and nature because instead of working with her we are now exploiting what resources she has given us and at one point she will have no more to give. Once nature runs out of things to give us that is really when to inner selfishness will kick in strongly since at that point our very survival is questioned.
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