Wilderness and Sustainability

In my opinion, I believe that Wendell Berry is one of the most influential writers from the readings in this class, because with the paper and presentation I have pulled some of his thoughts and compared them to society today. The themes he address carry over to modern day society and are worth noting: we should appreciate the world we live in, and we should not fall victim to societal expectations. Berry also raises the question about what we as Americans view “wildness” in nature and if our definition is accurate or not.

One point Berry makes that I thought was interesting was the point of humans thinking that we can solve problems of nature dwindling away by making wilderness preserves. As he states in the text, “…to me, this means simply that we are not safe in assuming that we can preserve wilderness by making wilderness preserves. Those of us who see that wildness and wilderness need to be preserved are going to have to understand the dependence of these things upon our domestic economy and our domestic behavior.” I used to think, among many others, that wilderness preserves did a lot of good. And they do, but people think once we section off a portion of the wild to preserve it, our work is done. This makes us have the belief that some nature is for our exploitation while others are to be remained untouched, which is flawed thinking and we as a society should be thinking about preserving all types of nature.

As a society sustainability efforts should be kept in mind. Our current economic structure makes this difficult, because in my opinion capitalism is not friendly to sustaining the environment because it often relies on the exploit of it. I feel that in modern day, however, people are becoming aware of the consequences of this and will look for products and companies that are more environmentally friendly. Also knowing what are in certain products help in the long run, such as what palm oil is and how the cultivation of it is contributing to deforestation of rain forests. I am more optimistic than pessimistic when I think about our society making advances to the sustainability of nature, even though I know we have a while to go before we reach that point.