The above photo was on top of our guide for the camping trip this weekend. The second cartoon reminded me a lot of my experience climbing half dome. I spent four hours during the middle of the night climbing half dome by headlamp. When I finally reached the top the sun was beginning to rise, and the first thing I did was take out my phone. Because half dome is so high in elevation, it surprisingly gets perfect cell signal. I had known this before my hike, so had messaged the rest of my family who were in Cambodia telling them I would have service and the approximate time I would be up at the top. I immediately facetimed my family from around the world and talked to them and showed them the view and the sunrise. In some ways I think this ability is absolutely amazing. My family can be on a trip thousands of miles away and still experience what I experience and see what I see. I think it is an incredible use of technology. Yet on the other hand I felt slightly impure or off that my first move upon achieving an incredible accomplishment was to pull out my phone and document it. In such a pristine “wild” place it felt weird using technology.

This weekend, I participated in a 5k walk to fight blindness. It was located at the Bethlehem Steel Stacks which is where Bethlehem Steel used to be located before it went out of business. It has been since renovated into a very nice facility, but the old structures are still all around and very cool to see (fun fact part of the first transformers film was filmed there).

Most of the old buildings are all falling apart and very rusted, but there are some that still stand proudly, striking impressive figures against the sky. Something else that accents this interesting look is the green that is slowly working its way back against the sea of red rust. While walking, I witnessed many plants, even trees sometimes, jutting out from the buildings many feet up in the air.

It was amazing to see these trees seemingly growing from nothing and flourishing. It speaks for how hardy nature is and how everything gets reclaimed by it sooner or later. A steel mill definitely was not the most environmentally friendly structure, and yet now, not that many years after it went out of business, the environment is slowly but surely reclaiming its land. And not only is it reclaiming it, it is adapting to it. The plants have access to higher up structures which give them better access to sunlight. There is more area (in the form of verticality) for plants to grow. It is fascinating to see this transition back to nature from a once industrialized area.

The split between nature and industry also strikes a cool dichotomy. As mentioned before, the color scheme between red and green is appealing in itself. But it also always surprising to see a patch of green perched haphazardly off the edge of a two story crumbling building or wrapping its way up a rusty old stairway. In time, the green will eventually take over and the red will succumb, but until then, the picture they paint is unforgettable.

“We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away- a lesson that applies as much to people as it does  to (other) natural things” (Cronon 89).

“The removal of Indians to create an “uninhabited wilderness”- uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place- remind us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is” (Cronon 79).

“The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends” (Thoreau 188).

“Those who have celebrated the frontier have almost always looked backward as they did so, mourning an older, simpler, truer world that is about to disappear forever. That world and all of its attractions, Turner said, depended on free land– on wilderness. Thus, in the myth of the vanishing frontier lay the seeds of wilderness preservation in the United States, for if wild land had been so crucial in the making of the nation, then surely one must save its last remnants as monuments to the American past–and as an insurance policy to protect its future” (Cronon 76).

“But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but i preferred that society should run “amok” against me, it being the desperate party” (Thoreau 187).

“God was on the mountaintop, in the chasm, in the waterfall, in the thundercloud, in the rainbow, in the sunset. One has only to think of the sites that Americans chose for their first national parks–Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Ranier, Zion–to realize virtually all of them fit into one or more of these categories”

I had never examined how national parks were chosen and I found it very true and very interesting that those that were the most aesthetically pleasing were the best protected. Other ecosystems such as wetland may actually have more valuable ecosystem services and biodiversity to protect, but they were not as well protected because they did not have the feeling of God.

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that musty old cheese that we are”

In some ways this passage speaks to me. Like Thoreau, I hate small talk and find it an annoying part of society. Yet I believe the more time you spend with a person the more interesting and relevant the conversation becomes. It does not have to be new things that have occurred in the recent hours since you last saw each other but instead conversation could be about the past and about learning each other’s true personalities.

“husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but only as a robber”. (180)

This quote from Walden talks about Thoreau’s frustration about the lost art of husbandry and his disappoint in farmers and those who practice husbandry for the purpose of cultivating what they grow for themselves or profit without appreciation for the act of growing it.

“There he passes his days, there he does his work. There, when he meets death, he faces it as he has faced many other evils, with quiet uncomplaining fortitude (77).

This quote is actually by Theodore Roosevelt but is mentioned by Cronin when he begins to define Wilderness in terms of the frontier. I liked this quote because, like Cronin suggests, the frontier is a last, shrinking unclaimed wilderness and freer than any modern civilization. He admires those who went out to frontier to live that admirable life. But I think at the same time those are the same people who began to make it civilized..

“The special power of the tree in the wilderness is to remind us of this fact. It can teach us to recognize the wildness we did not see in the tree we planted in our own backyard. By seeing the otherness in that which is most unfamiliar, we can learn to see it too in that which at first seemed merely ordinary. If wilderness can do this–if it can help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural–then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.” (88)

This passage hits home because it tells us that our home can be the wilderness.  Someone can seek out such places as the Grand Canyon, Muir Woods, or a hike 50 miles away but their own backyard doesn’t deserve the same attention and love as those others? Is that why we can’t protect our entire planet, because we only value the protected or famous wilderness areas?

“The curious result was that frontier nostalgia became an important vehicle for expressing a peculiarly bourgeois form of antimodernism.” (78)

The modernizing world had become too overbearing for the wealthy who had created it, so they sought out the untouched land. Their idea of wilderness mirrored those who came before them and transformed this frontier.