Robinson Jeffers - An Environmental Pioneer

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In his poem The Answer, Robinson Jeffers writes, ."..know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful...the greatest beauty is organic wholeness...Love that, not man apart from that." Throughout his life, Robinson Jeffers tries to prove his environmental theories and his beliefs in "inhumanism" and "ecocentricism" and urges everyone to start living a life closer to Nature, the origin of all things on Earth. He has done so by setting himself as the best example - living a life near the sea without even the most essential house appliances like electricity and enjoy most of his time just being close to Nature, where his inspirations for poetry writings come from. All of poems he writes are filled with his attitude towards the dominant world view of Nature and his theory of how we should interact with our environment.

First of all, Jeffers stresses the importance of realizing the beauty of our physical world as a whole; human beings are just a tiny part of it, along with animals and plants. All the complications of our lives can be spared if we can acknowledge how bad we are harming Nature. According to Jeffers, human beings are self-centered and too involved with each other to have any time left to appreciate what Nature has sacrificed for our luxurious lives. Jeffers wrote in Carmel Point that "We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; we must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident as the rock and ocean that we were made from." We find similar message from Sign-Post where Jeffers implies that humans should "Turn outward, love things, not men...now you are free, even to become human, but born of the rock and the air, not of a woman." Through his poems we can also get a sense of feeling that Jeffers believes we can be better, happier person with more successes if our interaction with Nature can be altered from the dominant view where human beings are always the priority in every circumstance.

Even though Jeffers believes all the complications in our lives are pulling us away from Nature, he doesn't deny the fact that understanding science will help us understand the natural world better. However, Jeffers points out that science have its limitation; no matter how advanced it is or will be in the future, it will never be able to explain fully how exactly Nature works unless you experience it on your own.

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