Excerpt:
Roderick Nash’s Wilderness in the American Mind delves
into the role of wilderness in the development of American character and
its role in American life. Wilderness was the initial condition of this
continent and furnished the raw material from which civilization (in
both the material and psychological sense) was made. Wilderness, by
definition, is an area of land where the effects of man and his
civilization do not exist. It is, according to the transcendentalists, a
mirror of creation itself. It is the antithesis of civilization, where
man apparently strikes out on his own.
The common theme which seems to underlie the reasons
for wilderness is to provide a balance to offset the effects of
civilization. Civilization does not supply all the essentials for
maintaining health in people. Man, originally a creature out of the
wilderness- needs them to satisfy his basic instincts, without which
tension and despair usually result. Wild areas offer the spark of
creativity necessary for realizations of human potential. Without the
tonic of wilderness, life would revert to meaningless drudgery. Because
pressure will always be born by wilderness areas in an increasingly
resource deficient world, and considering the non-renewability of
wilderness areas, constant attention must be aimed at preserving its
integrity.
The ecology of mind, I seek is one of undoing and
eliminating basic conflicts that arise in everyday living. For myself,
rather than plunging into these issues, I prefer to go back to the
origins and look at basic precepts. Wendell Berry states one of the
goals of his book is "to show how the practical divorced from the
discipline of value tends to be defined by the immediate interests of
the practitioner and so becomes destructive of value, practical and
otherwise." Societal and cultural pressure that acts on every
person is to specialize. This never say very well with me, I prefer to
be a generalist. Specialization entails a simplification of awareness of
a world that I wish to know more about. I seek to understand the world
in its unity rather than in fragments. An ecology of mind like the
ecology of living organisms, requires diversity as a prerequisite of
stability. To simplify unnecessarily is to invite disaster.
The environmentalist and conservationist are
specialists. No where is conflict and division more evident than here.
The environmentalist, like all specialists, modifies and subverts his
values to the needs of his specialty. Only a specialist would deny
whaling rights and livelihood to the Eskimo people in the name of
conservation. What about conservation of human culture? The Sierra club
was found to own stock in major corporations including strip mining
firms, having pollution record among the worse...
