Walden Readings 2/13

Walden states that true richness is in living things alone. This is one of the more true statements I've read or heard in a while. Most people in our society today find beauty in buildings or cars, but we need to appreciate the beauty of nature. The Earth isn't our canvas to paint what we want with it.






Most people travel afar to escape from things. In "Where I lived and what I lived for"  he states that he escape closer to "home" than most. When you go out into nature and you succumb to it you forget all of the things you had found important. You realize those things truly don't matter. They only matter because our society puts such an emphasis on them. When it comes to the big picture of nature nothing society puts emphasis on truly matters. No one needs to have a large house or an extremely expensive car, but society forces people to want these. The celebrities have them. I want to have them. Much like what was stated we confuse the appearance of things with reality. Reality is nature was meant to be conserved not conquered. We need to realize, much like what McKibben said in Eaarth we need to change our ways. We can't continue to live as though we are living on Earth. We're on a new planet. We need to adapt and change out ways to try and keep what we have left.

We need to also learn that we don't need some of the things that we have. We can be perfectly fine living in the middle of the foods without a "house". We always want bigger and better than the next guy, but we forget that there's always someone with less than we have. We can no longer take anything we have for granted. This includes our planet. We are losing touch with nature and so we are conquering it. Constantly expanding when we can't even feed our entire population.