Summary Of Last Child In The Woods By Richard Louv

560 Words2 Pages

It is not a lie to say that we currently live surrounded by technologies in every aspect of our lives. In excerpt from Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv laments about the modern world – where separation between humans and nature had widen to a great degree. In nostalgia to the memories where he “saw birds on the wires and combines in the field,” Louv leverages refutation, anecdote, and recollection to warn the broadening gap.
The excerpt opens with Matt Richtel’s new advertisement method on nature, based upon the research of State University of New York. Louv introduce this as a “brave new advertising medium.” Description of “brave new” encompasses a sarcastic tone as well as allusion to a novel Brave New World, making indirect depiction …show more content…

In this example, a car salesman is stunned when a customer “didn’t want a backseat television monitor for [her] daughter.” That salesman had not foreseen this decision, as “multimedia entertainment products, as they are called,” are becoming the “hottest add-on since rearview mirror fuzzy dice.” By mentioning the dice, not only it evokes sentimentality, readers can contrast the old views outside the car to current day concentration on the multimedia entertainment products. Louv then asks a rhetorical question: “Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less TV, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it?” By questioning this, people who are pertinent as these “Americans” get a chance to rethink of their actions invoking regret and self-reproach. He questions again the reason why “so many people no longer consider the physical world not worth watching.” Though he acknowledges “highway’s edges may not be postcard perfect,” he states that this view from backseat is necessary to learn “how cities and nature fit together.” Not only the view from backseat, Louv lists other landscape of what “we watched as children” arousing

Open Document