Thoreau and McCandless Comparison

Thoreau and McCandless (as presented in the movie), share a lot of their fundamental motivations to escape and rebel society. The idea of the individual opposed to the community, and the discovery of the true self. But even though, in essence the motivations are the same they approach them from different ways. McCandless shows stronger feelings towards his fusion with the wilderness, and his critique to society is much more political, while Thoreau demonstrates a higher priority to the creation of a self space” in which one is the creator, and then the fusion with nature.

Spring Break

During Spring Break I visited Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. It was an interesting experience in several ways; but it mainly reinforced the interest for the American environmentalist thematic. From the architecture, I could tell that the city was built mostly in the 80’s and 90’s; it is an enormous touristic urban area, with great concrete structures. Because of the season the whole place was unoccupied, there were almost none in the gigantic hotels; and there was this sense of emptiness and absurdity in the environment. The city was imposed to the nature and landscape, and the great structures were only unanimated witnesses of the silence. The experience made me identify myself with a common theme of the American environmentalist, for one moment I felt the need of strongly reject the society, and isolate myself in nature.

Casey Property Experience

The Casey property experience was interesting in a lot of different ways, but for my perspective as a foreigner, the landscape was particularly impressive . Since I’ve been in Iowa, that was the first time that I had the opportunity to visit a non urban area. And it changed my perspective of Iowa and the US.

Wendell Berry Response

I think that this poem was great in a lot of ways, but the part of it that moved me the most the call of rebellion against the dominant system. It is a new notion of rebellion for me, and a very original way to deliver it. The type of rebellion that Wendell Berry talks about is not the rebellion by the means of violence or some type of activism to restructure the dominant system; it is a call to do the unexpected, to come back to being humans. Stop being effective to produce for a system that takes advantage of you to become effective to enjoy nature and simple things.

Jhon Miur

John Miur's a Thounsand Mile Walk to the Gulf is mainly focused to criticize the judeo-christian perspective of nature. Because of this characteristic it is aimed to a broad spectrum of audieces, even though one can infer that it is essentially aimed to American Christians. His authority is built around his own negative experience with an alligator, that puts him in a reasonable position to speak of alligators and nature. This negative experience overlaps with pathos, because the audience can identify the sense of losing something precious and loved as a dog and creates anger towards the alligators. From this two points the author builds his logic describing the antipathies and explaining the root of this antipathies on the "wrong" assumptions that the judeo -christian faith has.

Class activity

Because of the reflective nature of the text and its rhetoric, the intended audience is western hemisphere people and developed countries population.

The purpose is to reflect on the abuses of the human kind to nature.

He uses the contrast between American Indians and western abuses.

Snap Shot

I had the oportunity to assist to two of the events on the symposium, from them the one that had the bigest impact on me was the reading of the short stories performed by Rick Bass. He red two short stories, both had as a subject food, and more clearly the abuse of it, and the relation of this abuse with the enviroment. Out of this two stories the one that I think is more effective was the second one; he really made a very interesting fusion of several complex topics. His childhood and inocence oposed to the ambition and greed of the "Titans" (very rich people), and the relationship of the greed and glutony with the extintion.