In Sterba’s chapter Teddies, we learn about how wild beasts once feared by the settlers and Native Americans took on an image as cuddly, friendly creatures. Sterba explains the phenomenon by discussing its occurrence in Europe, “Long before the modern era, however, bears had taken their unique place in European cultural mythology. Extirpated from most of Europe for centuries, they became the subjects of stories, folktales, and books, often portrayed as cute, even cuddly, and almost human. Later, in films and on television, they could be shown to behave like people. As real wild bears receded from memory, anthropomorphized bears took their place” (466-467). In this chapter Sterba mentions a number of examples of how this has occurred in our society. Here are some of the mentioned examples below:

<a href="http://sites.lafayette.edu/evst254-fa15/files/2015/10

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At the end of the chapter he brings this issue back up and connects it to our “denaturing”. “In our minds, we have always given animals human traits. We romanticize and sentimentalize them as members of the animal kingdom to which we belong. Children grow up surrounded by images of wild animals presented as furry or feathery little people like them. We learn from our pets how some animals live and then mistakenly project that knowledge onto wild creatures living a much different reality. In the past, however, people had enough direct experience in the natural world to to sort sentiment from reality. Not so today. Today’s denatured adults often continue to see bears and other wild animals the way they did as children without the corrective lens of direct experience” (185).

http://www.aark.org/WP/

The link above is a link to the AARK, a non-profit animal rescue center next to my house i mentioned last class. The site features descriptions of their mission, events and photos of the animals the rescue.

While the center has a noble mission, my family and I have questioned a few times whether they are using best practices to the aid these rescued animals. Like I mentioned in class, on multiple occasions, we’ve had specifically young deer wander up to our house or barn looking for food. The deer released from the center had clearly been domesticated to the point where they didn’t have a problem approaching people. While this was entertaining for us, its sad at the same time when these wild animals are released and have no idea how to survive in the wild for us.

Even though the intentions were good the impacts for some of these animals could still be negative.

“introducing the World’s First Smudge Stick! Check out the advertisement we created for it. We’re pretty sure the owners of the house we smudged are really happy to see their home smudged. And you can be happy too! Just Smudge those windows you’ve cleaned with Windex and keep them dirty and good looking”

I saw this commercial as I was watching TV this afternoon and found it comical and at the same time disturbing. What this commercial fails to advocate for this that most birds that run into glass windows do not survive. These birds are in a sense advocating for their lives by advertising these “smudge sticks.” I think if groups like The Audubon Society and The National Bird Conservancy saw this they would be utterly disturbed. Humans who are ignorant to the issues of birds constantly flying into windows would view this advertisement as funny, when there is a much bigger issue at hand.

The second video I found when I searched for this commercial on Youtube was even more disturbing. They mock the movement to protect birds who fly into these windows through an advertisement for glass cleaner. If I was the member of a bird conservation group I would be boycotting windex.

“While the total amount of lumber and fuel wood consumed continued to rise with population growth until the peak year of 1906, per capita lumber consumption had by then already begun to drop. Growing use of coal, oil, natural gas, and electricity reduced demand for wood as fuel. Also, aluminum, steel, and, later, plastics began to be substituted for wood in building construction” (Sterba 39). 

I would like to take this passage, as well as other statistics about this fuel transition, and shove it in the faces of those who doubt that our economy can transition away from fossil fuels. In the early 1900’s, people & the market realized that wood was becoming a scarce resource and that other, more sustainable technologies had the potential to direct us away from depleting a scarce resource. Sound familiar???

“The hares were very familiar. One had her form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure when I began to stir,- thump, thump, thump, striking her head against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out, and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternatively lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window. When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a squeak and a bounce” (Thoreau 304). 

Thoreau includes many encounters with animals present in the winter in this chapter, but I was particularly drawn to this one. Although it could be because of my affinity for rabbits/hares, I think how his description models the movements and mannerisms of the hares is remarkable. I love how he points out how deceptively they can blend into the ground and be difficult to notice until they move.

“The first task for settlers was tree removal– that is, unless he was lucky enough to find and pay a premium for a beaver created meadow good for growing hay and pasturing, or Indian-cleared field for planting crops. Trees were an impediment” (Sterba 25).

The history of the timber industry and deforestation is something that concerns me because it seems to not have stopped , or slowed down– and this is how it all began; it simply has moved elsewhere following that path of least resistance theory. How can we switch this mentality of tree conservation and stop forest degradation that now has stricken South America?

“Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep — not to be discovered till some late day — with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed” (Thoreau 168).

I think to me this passage is another reminder of this constant fight between humanity versus time and nature. It seems humans cannot win in that fight because eventually the land will result back to its original form because a life only last years and nature carries on almost infinitely. In this passage I am visualizing a ruin of an old cabin, buried almost entirely in the earth with an almost defeated personality being emitted.

“At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried in drifts, even without food” (Thoreau 171). 

This passage I can completely understand his critique about winter solitude. When it is cold I enjoy staying inside, reflecting on myself, and not really seeing anyone. It may have something to due with the winter weather, but to me is a good rotation between seasons. In the Spring/Summer/Autumn your social and in the winter a step is taken back and your always a bit more quiet and solitary. I do not know why this is, yet I noticed it happens.

“His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods”

In our reading from Walden, Thoreau talks about a man Hugh Quoil, who supposedly fought in the Battle of Waterloo. He references Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena. I thought Quoil got the better end of the deal since he wasn’t stranded on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.

But really he ends up meeting the same fate as Napoleon, but maybe a little less spectacularly, too. Quoil dies on the road and has his house at Walden torn down. Whereas when Napoleon died on St. Helena, the great Emperor’s funeral was attended by millions in Paris.

I thought this passage was trying to speak to the fleeting nature of our lives in these places. But he has another line that seems like he, as someone who is living in a place previously uninhabited, to be the oldest one in the village.

“A complicating extension of the idea of man the despoiler was a resurrected belief that the natural world was a benign place in which creatures lived in harmony with one another. The idea was in striking contrast to the amorality of a Darwinian nature that was indifferent and random, its creatures living in a world of predators and prey, struggling to war, reproduce and survive” (Sterba xvii).

“‘After seeing Bambi nobody wants to kill a deer'” (Sterba 110).

“They argued that people had invaded the habitat of the geese with their subdivisions, malls, and sprawl, so people had a special obligation to live in harmony, or at the very least coexist, with the birds” (Sterba 125).