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Chet Raymo
“For wildness, hope lies in reality, not romanticism”
Boston Globe, March 1, 1999 , p C2
Outline
Criticisms of Thoreau’s “Walking.”
- Unrealistic ideal of living wild. Not authentic to his life
- Exaggerated rhetoric
- His notion of a Wild unsmudged by civilization doesn’t exist, and certainly won’t from now on
- He is presenting an image of the Wild where lion lies down with the lamb. This is false idealism.
His assumptions:
Nature
- selfish
- violent
- inherently disorder
- the only balance comes from mutually assured destruction
Human nature
- It too is wild … and selfish and disorderly.
- We need civilization to restrain it.
Native Americans
- Not even they really want the wild.
- Hunter-gatherer ideal will not save the wild.
Technology
- It will not go away.
- The domination of technology is the starting point for any discussion.
- With technology, we are free to create anything.
- There is and “evolving wisdom of technological civilization.”
- This, in fact, is the necessary foundation of an environmental ethic.
- All good that comes is by human design.
- We just need to develop technology with “compassion, self-restraint, and an eye for beauty.”
Dichotomies he uses:
- civilized generosity versus wild self-interest
- scientific ecology versus consumerist greed
- hope versus handwringing
>> all three are implicitly related, with the wild corresponding to consumerist greed
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