The Journey Home Analysis

The writer of the book The Journey Home, zestful environmentalist Edward Abbey is angry at and loathes the idea of incessant update of technology and machinery. To him, it’s completely unnecessary; even more so is it a hindrance to human being’s natural development. Disrespectful towards nature and harmful to each individual’s supposed natural way of living, the modern world in Abbey’s eyes is what needs to be “updated” to fit as real human being’s natural habitat.

The updates in technology, in Abbey’s eyes, is the modern world’s way of it’s distasteful declaration of war towards nature. He claimed, “What should Yosemite Valley be? It should be what it once was: the kind of place where a person would know himself lucky to make one pilgrimage there in his lifetime. A

holy place. Keep it like it was”(145). Abbey sees the nature to be full of spectacle and miracle that it is what makes the earth a sacred and precious place to live in. Taking the Yosemite Valley as an example, it’s heft and it’s dignity as a natural wonder needs to be carefully treated and admired. However, the modern world is carelessly, violently stripping away it’s sanctity. The way the modern world is incessantly updating materially makes it loathsomely necessary for natural wonders to compromise their, in Abbey’s eyes, uncompromisable holiness, to the society’s earthly desires. The man-planned, man-made change on nature is considered as criminal and profane to Abbey, for it is consciously making the haven’t-yet-stripped, left-over holy lands on earth as mundane as the cold, metal technology and machinery. He woes and cries, from the moment the thought of changing the nature existed, it is inevitable for human beings to develop into their current mundane self.
Abbey sees the modern world as an indifferent, passionless and meaningless ground of the living deads.

He condemns it to be harmful to each individual’s supposed natural way of living. He passionately stated that “They deny the world because the only world they know has denied them... The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons”(225). Although these sentences seem to have a lot of personal feelings injected in, the general idea is, actually, quite factual in terms of defining the society people live in today. Because they are too busy upgrading the efficiency of the world as well as the burden to the earth, the place modern people known as their home is no longer for them, but for robots; for machineries; for breathless steels. The modern world no longer recognize the natural wonders to be necessary for their personal developments. They see themselves as living machines, paying little attention to their spiritual development and their connection with the wilderness, breathing for the sake of being able to wake up and work. They denied the world in such a way that their ignorance for their need of the green is what is the most fearful and pitiful to

Abbey.
Unbearably sarcastic, cynical and sometimes unmannerly, Abbey’s expressive words sent his anger, his depression and his worries across well enough to raise awareness of protecting the environment as well as protecting the spiritual health within oneself in the modern world. He remarked that the modern technology is impeding people’s artless way of living as a member of the nature society. Quite a common sense; yet surprisingly, the countries that are most involved with machinery development has the unhappiest citizens, while the less technologically developed countries have the most good-hearted subjects. And that is what Abbey was angrily trying to prove. We are all solely subjects of the earth.