“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.

“As more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated. The wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat” (75).

I thought this was an interesting passage because many of our classmates have visited the grand national parks of the west, and I believe they would disagree with Cronon’s assertion that it was tame or no longer held that special power that it once did. In this instance, I cannot agree with our author that it is domesticated, but rather that it is easier and more popular to seek out perhaps.

“To do so is merely to take to a logical extreme the paradox that was built into wilderness from the beginning: if nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves. The absurdity of this proposition flows from the underlying dualism it expresses” (83).

This passage stuck out to me because in my response paper regarding “What is Nature?”, I basically played this dualism game myself, regarding nature as being as least touched by man as possible. While I don’t know if I fully agree with the sentiment expressed in the quote, it is an unusual perspective that I had not thought of before, but one that certainly is expressed in most apocalyptic movies, when the human race is killed off, and nature and wilderness reclaims what was once lost. An interesting notion here from Cronon.

A funny thing happened last week; I was sampling on the Bushkill for some research, wearing my clumsy waders and toting my cumbersome field equipment along the bank, when I stumbled upon a gaggle of geese. Who knew geese could give you such a brutal stare down. As I emerged from behind some trees I could feel their merciless, death stares as they saw the culprit of the disruption of their peaceful dip. I hesitantly approached my sampling spot fearing these birds would rather greet me with a painful snap of the bill than with a friendly hello. In class we have discussed a couple of times whether or not we think humans have a place in nature or not and if we can find our place in nature. Cronon addresses this as well in our most recent reading. I believe that we can, but for a brief moment during this interaction with the geese I felt very very unwelcome in nature and like I was too “human” to belong in a place like this. I wonder if anyone else in class has had an experience in nature when they felt very unwelcome too?

“If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live. How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and bring them closer to home?” (87)

I like this passage from Cronon because it contradicts my definition of wilderness. It is thought provoking in the sense that it calls attention to climate change and societies’ impact on the environment. How can we hold wilderness as the gold standard if we can’t live in it?

“In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we a completely lost, or turned round, – for a man need only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, – do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.” (186)

I think this quote is mirrors what Cronon was saying. In Thourea’s time, he was living with the Wilderness. However, he believed that the common man could get lost in the wilderness, easily straying off the path and becoming confused by different surroundings.

Tonight, the first supermoon eclipse since 1982 is set to occur. It is pretty cloudy out today, but keep your fingers crossed and look at your window at 8:11pm.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/watch-sundays-supermoon-total-lunar-eclipse-or-wait-until-2033-n433866

http://www.pc-tablet.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Lunar-Eclipse-moon-22921626-1024-768-1024×576.jpg