Annie Dillard- Fecundity
The chapter on fecundity addresses the bizarre ways that nature has evolved to ensure the continuity of a species. As the title suggests, fecundity deals with the fertility of species where Annie Dillard explores the inefficiency of fertility and the brutality of nature’s evolution. In the end, Dillard concludes that death is a part of life.
• Fecundity begins with Dillard having a nightmare about mating moths which then lay eggs that hatch into a swarm of fish on her bed (160).
• Dillard then goes on to examine the intricacies of life. She describes the Ibervellea sonorae desert plant that sits on the desert like a dead plant but grows roots and shoots when it is rainy season (162).
• Humans have capitalized on
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You should also not swim in the desert pools or bury garbage in the desert (690).
• Despite all these warnings, people still visit the desert due to curiosity (692).
Question
Which is the most convincing reason on why one should not visit the desert?
Wendell Berry-An Entrance to the Woods
The book An Entrance to the Woods describes Wendell Berry’s camping trip where he goes to the woods to relax and enjoy some peace away from the city. He contrasts life in the wilderness where there are no people and no meaningless worries with the life in the city which is stressful. Being in the wild allows a person to clear their thoughts and be optimistic.
• Camping in the woods is easy, but one can get haunted by the sense of the predecessors such as the prehistoric Indians (765).
• It is not easy to change places as fast as one can be transported (766).
• Walking into the wilderness is similar to a man entering the world naked. For one should enter the wilderness while walking (768). He should also leave everything that he has been accustomed to behind.
• Man has destroyed nature, and for years now, man has not been living in nature. Instead, only little portions of nature are left in the world
Many individuals decide to live their life in solitary; though, only a few choose to live in the wild. The book, Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer vividly paints the adventurous trek Chris McCandless went on. From the friends he made, to the hardships he went through, McCandless is portrayed as a friendly, sociable person despite the fact that he was a vagabond. Other than McCandless, there are even more individuals that have taken the risks to live in the wilderness such as, Jon Krakauer and Everett Ruess. All three of them had both similarities and differences between their own qualities as a person and their journey.
Topic Sentence #3- Mountains and rivers are not sights on seeker’s journey; Chris is in the wilderness because he feels accomplished and has time to enjoy life when these obstacles are
Into the Wild, written by John Krakauer tells of a young man named Chris McCandless who 1deserted his college degree and all his worldly possessions in favor of a primitive transient life in the wilderness. Krakauer first told the story of Chris in an article in Outside Magazine, but went on to write a thorough book, which encompasses his life in the hopes to explain what caused him to venture off alone into the wild. McCandless’ story soon became a national phenomenon, and had many people questioning why a “young man from a well-to-do East Coast family [would] hitchhike to Alaska” (Krakauer i). Chris comes from an affluent household and has parents that strived to create a desirable life for him and his sister. As Chris grows up, he becomes more and more disturbed by society’s ideals and the control they have on everyday life. He made a point of spiting his parents and the lifestyle they lived. This sense of unhappiness continues to build until after Chris has graduated college and decided to leave everything behind for the Alaskan wilderness. Knowing very little about how to survive in the wild, Chris ventures off on his adventure in a state of naïveté. It is obvious that he possessed monumental potential that was wasted on romanticized ideals and a lack of wisdom. Christopher McCandless is a unique and talented young man, but his selfish and ultimately complacent attitude towards life and his successes led to his demise.
Taylor, Peter. “The Old Forest.” Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature. Ed. Jones, Suzanne W. New York: Penguin Group Inc., 2003. 247-314.
Abbeys first survival hint to the desert is, “stay out of there. Don’t go. Stay home and read a good book.”(p. 204) What fun is staying home if people have the chance to go and explore the desert? Getting a hands on experience and being able to explore the desert in real life is more educating than sitting at home reading a dull book on the desert. David Alloway (1999) once said, “the historical fact is however, that the human race was cradled in arid lands and people are well adapted to survive in deserts.”( 1) Alloway is a teacher at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and he teaches a desert survival class. His class philosophy is “not to fight the desert, but to become part of its ecosystem.”( 1) So the first hint or suggestion before you attempt to go into the desert is being prepared.
Penn exposes this in his film ‘Into the Wild’ portraying the conflicting ideas of feeling integrated with the natural environment by disassociated from our twisted contemporary society and belonging to family and friends and the people we will forever love. How would you like to escape the ways of this poisonous civilisation forever? To walk alone and find a place so simple and uncomplicated, a place of which you truly belong? This was Chris McCanless’s journey, for each and everyone of us. Sometimes we may be torn between where we belong and who we belong too. But no matter where you go or who you see, you will always take yourself with you. To be comfortable in yourself is the first step to being able to enrich your experience of belonging, contentment and acceptance with the ‘where’ and ‘who’ will
In Gerry Garibaldi’s “The Pregnancy Trap,” the logical fallacies of oversimplification and hasty generalization, in addition to his drought of views and statistics cause his work to severely fall in credibility. However, his first-hand experiences promote his writing because personal experience is reliable. His lack of facts reduces the trustworthiness of his piece. Simplifying and generalizing important information, also contracts from the reliability of his work. Due to the logical fallacies, absence of outside point of views, and deficiency of statistics, society may not accept his
overnight adventure through the isolated reign of nature was our goal. We chose a trail
In society there is a longing for a story to have a nice and neat happy ending. Broadway and the theater originally would give this to their audience, especially in America. Give the audience what the want! They want happy endings that mirror their own values and interpretations of how the world should be and at the end of it should be, “and they all lived happily ever after.” The fairy tale ending is something society hopes, dreams, and strives for since we could listen to our parents read us fairy tales with these sweet stories of finding true love and having to fight the odds to be the Prince or Princess you deserve to be. With Into the Woods, Lapine and Sondheim sought out to explore what could go wrong with “happily ever after.” Effectively leaving the audience with the adage, “be careful what you ask for…”
Human beings have made much of purity and are repelled by blood, pollution, putrefaction (Snyder, 119). Nature is sacred. We are enjoying it and destroying it simultaneously. Sometimes it is easier to see charming things than the decomposition hidden in the “shade”.We only notice the beautiful side of nature, which are benefits that nature brings us: food, fresh air, water, landscapes. But we forget the other side, the rottenness of human destruction. That is how human beings create “the other side of the sacred”. We cut trees for papers, but we fail to recognize that the lack of trees is the lack of fresh air. Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge “the other side of the
Gender stereotypes have existed since the beginning of modern man. We've all heard them before; male dominance and female weakness, a controlled male and a flustered female, aggression and passion, and many others that all basically boil down to the same thing. Emily Martin, in her essay entitled The Egg and the Sperm, takes this problem of gender stereotype to a new and much more serious level. As an anthropologist, Martin is concerned with the socio-cultural impacts on many different aspects of everyday life, including biology. In doing her research for this article, Martin was trying to uncover suspicions she had about socio-cultural gender stereotypes, and the affects they had on the diction used to describe egg and sperm interactions in numerous biology books and research reports.
Elizabeth L. Marshall was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She grew up in areas of southern California, and in parts of New York City. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is currently married and has two daughters. She attended and graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in English. She then graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Master of Fine Arts degree in fictional writing. She has worked form several scientific journals and magazines and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers. She has also written several well known books including Conquering Infertility: Medical Challenges and Moral Dilemmas, and High-Tech Harvest.
Humanity inevitably will return to the egg via “artificial wombs” and allow women the same gestating liberty as birds in the air. Critics of “ectogenesis” abound, but we see its advantages. Synthetic uteri will spawn exciting freedoms for both genders.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World is more than a warning against the dangers of technology; it is a prediction for the future that rings eerily true. Today we understand that many of the fantastical devices and practices imagined by Huxley are coming to life. Most notable is the practice of in vitro fertilization, something that was a mad scientist’s dream during Huxley’s time, is today a commonplace practice. According to the National Institute of Health, in vitro fertilization is “the joining of a woman’s egg and man’s sperm in a laboratory dish” (Storck). The procedure was first performed successfully in 1978 and since has become widely used today by couples that desire a child and are unable to conceive by “natural” means. The idea of in vitro fertilization originated in the works of British geneticist and Oxford professor JBS Haldane (Milner). Haldane imagined the practice of “ectogenesis”, or pregnancy hosted in an artificial womb, in his 1924 book Daedalus (Rosen). Haldane’s book was the inspir...
To understand the nature-society relationship means that humans must also understand the benefits as well as problems that arise within the formation of this relationship. Nature as an essence and natural limits are just two of the ways in which this relationship can be broken down in order to further get an understanding of the ways nature and society both shape one another. These concepts provide useful approaches in defining what nature is and how individuals perceive and treat