In Roderick Nash’s essay on society and its effect on our
world, he begins by outlining his purpose in this writing. He states that he
wishes to review the human-nature relationship in the past, how we treat the
relationship now, and how we should treat it in the future. He feels that what
we are doing now is not necessarily the best course of action if we want to
sustain life and make any progress in society, but he proposes his own unique
solution that will promote success for future generations of our planet.
He starts his argument by reviewing what the word,
“wilderness,” actually means. In old English, he informs the reader that for
something to be wild was to mean that is was self-willed. The, “- ness,” portion
of the word indicates a place, so in conclusion the whole word comes to mean
“self-willed land.” In the past we treated this type of land as an obstacle. We
tried to conquer it and make it our own, instead of trying to be one with the
land. The wilderness was the home to predators and the unknown, which
ultimately scared us as a community.
Now that we are beginning to progress as a society and
have made significant advancements that make clearing out the wilderness
feasible, we realize that we are destroying one of our own precious resources as
well as the homes of fellow species. The examples that are used to illustrate
this point are various pieces of legislature such as, “The Endangered Species
Act.” This is just one of the examples but what it allows is for other
residents of our world to be entitled to their own variation of life, liberty,
and pursuit of happiness.
After the reader realizes how our lives as humans have
impacted the world in the past, he covers a few possible outcomes theorized by
various individuals. These theories range from views of totally trashed and
poisoned world to those where we have overtaken the entire world and nature and
wilderness no longer even exists. But Nash proposes his own solution known as,
“Island Civilization.” This theory states that we need to limit the amount of
births in the world while also setting boundaries on our individual societies.
We would have to contain our population to these boundaries, but if we do so
then we will be able to successfully preserve what’s left of nature and hold on
to it for all of time.
My response to this is made up of rather mixed feelings.
First I will cover his theory on the birth control issue. I see this as a
totally reasonably wish for our world, but it causes a few moral dilemmas. One
of those problems being how do we choose who to limit and who not to? Do we select the pairs of people who are
allowed to breed based on intelligence, race, or some other defining factor?
Will we have to meet certain diversity quotas by allowing X amount of
African-Americans to breed, X amount of Caucasians, and so on? This limit
causes all sorts or issues that I honestly would not be entirely sure how to
deal with.
As for Nash’s idea on boundaries for our societies, I am
more agreeable. This thought on constraining the boundaries of a city to a
defined “island,” as he called it, seems pretty straight-forward. Nash even
said that we would always be allowed outside into the wild but we would have to
live as one with nature if we wished to do so. Again, this seems fairly just.
But I still have my problems with this idea. People are not always law-abiding,
model people that we would wish for sometimes. That being said, I still see
people going out and running amok in the wild, just as some do now. We would
still need some sort of moderating force such as police in the wild. But if
they are to moderate, they will need an advantage over perpetrators, and
without technology it will be a lot harder to do that.
In conclusion however, I seem to mostly agree with Nash’s
idea for a better future, provided that my questions are appropriately
answered. How they will be answered though will more than likely be a long and
arduous process. But there is an obvious and necessary need for some sort of
population control, and Nash’s is as good as any.
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