Emerson's Argument Essay

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, a famous American poet whose life spanned most of the 1800s, is known today primarily for his creative writing abilities; surprisingly, however, he also used his aptitude for constructing vivid word pictures to devise an interesting theory of environmental ethics. In his famous essay Nature, he proclaimed his love for the environment and explained his reasoning on why people should value the natural world. While several aspects of his argument do align with a Christian worldview, Emerson’s ideology, when taken as a whole, neither articulates the complete, God-given value of nature, nor does it provide sufficient motivation for people to protect the environment. Emerson believed that the beauty and wonder of nature should …show more content…

Worster even says that “‘[Emerson] tended to devalue the material world except insofar as it could be put to higher spiritual uses by the human mind’” (qtd. in Meehan, “Ecology and Imagination”). Because his argument is so narrowly founded on the spiritual aspect of nature, his theory provides no motivation for certain groups of people. Non-spiritual people, people who do not spiritually relate to nature, and people who do not enjoy going outside have no reason to seek to protect the environment, based on Emerson’s theory alone. Moreover, not everyone who enjoys the outdoors is capable of going outside to have spiritual experiences; even Emerson himself once stated that “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature” (Popejay, “The Beginnings of American Naturalism”). A last blow to his argument is that since he limits the value of nature to the value that individual people give it, he also precludes the formation of a unified approach to environmental ethics by failing to create a system by which we can evaluate how the environment should be preserved. Consequently, Emerson’s argument, at its foundation, provides only limited motivation for the protection of the natural world and it fails to provide criterion that we might use to guide our approach to environmental

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