Emerson and Thoreau as Prophets of Eco-wisdom :: Biography Biographies Essays

Emerson and Thoreau as Prophets of Eco-wisdom The major premise of obscure eco-wisdom is that connection with nature is essential for a persons intellectual, aesthetic, and moral health and growth. whiz must see and experience nature intimately, whether defined as the not-me or as landscape, to participate in the unity of Spirit beneathlying its plain processes. This connectedness is the basis of the self-reliance which deter taps how a person lives with integrity in nature and society. Granted, the concept of self-reliance apparently devalues social concerns, including the global shipment and cooperation needed to bring about the kinds of changes that would reverse the climatic greenhouse effect, for example. Indeed, Emersons ideas deplete been unfairly appropriated to justify the capitalistic exploitative excesses and insensitivity to social problems and long consequences that lie at the root of many of our environmental problems. However, we cannot fault Emerson and Thorea u for not imagining our current dependence on technology, the complexity of a largely urban economy or the ties of a global community. Yet even the sentiment of a self-contained Concord or Walden Pond, which might seem uninstructed and outdated, is reflected in current ideas about eco- regionalism. By accounting for what they could not develop known of our present condition, we can still find fruitful shipway of understanding where humans, singly and as a species, should fit into nature. Emersons greatest exhibit was lessons in seeing in and through nature and extracting symbolic meaning, til now his own intimate encounters with the nature around him were relatively rare and indirect, with a couple of(prenominal) concrete traces in his writings except as occasional metaphors. He wanted his revelations from nature to be abstract and come by surprise, as did the famed mystical encounter at the beginning of his book record Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special hefty fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am blessed to the brink of fear. In such an experience, even the self is absorbed by a greater power I become a miasmal eye-ball I am nothing I see all the currents of the habitual Being circulate through me. The metaphor may be unfortunate, except not his faith that a single person could perceive afflictive meanings through experiencing nature, even if only indirectly. Such possibilities impelled Thoreau and countless others since to mine the details and processes of nature that Emerson had generalized, looking for embedded revelations and sharing in natures ecstasy.