The Story with Humanity

Fantasy writer Philip Pullman says, “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Stories have been central to how human history has been shaped and remembered. On a grand scale, stories have been a way to pass down culture and remember history. On a smaller scales, they have been used to spend an entertaining evening or- often in many cultures, put a child to bed. While the power of a stories is one that has gone generally unnoticed, William Cronon urgently calls us to pay attention to stories. As Cronon argues in “A Place for Stories”, the manner in which a story is told influences what futures generations will both learn and recall on their own.
William Cronon tells the “story” of postmodern environmental history and postmodern historian's various methods of narrative discourse: “As often happens in history, they [conflicting accounts] make us wonder how two competent authors looking at identical materials drawn from the same past can reach such divergent conclusions” (2). What Cronon is saying is simple; history can be told from different viewpoints. Furthermore, in his example of the case of the history of the Dust Bowl, Cronin argues that the narrative form breathes life into otherwise seemingly meaningless accounts by pitting humanity against what we call “Mother Nature”. It seems to me that, without the human element of the story, we, as humans, are not all that interested in the natural elements. For example, storms like Hurricane Katrina and Sandy come and go. Yet, without people in the story, the stories hold no significance to humans. The thought a thousand lives lost resonates in the memory more than the loss of a thousand acres of uninhabited land. It is how the chr...

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..., a loss that everyone can either sympathize or empathize. However, instead of focusing on the pain and heartbreak of not having a mother, the narrator instead takes strength in the fact that her mother is connected to nature. Although her mother is not physically in her life, her body has, instead, been buried in the ground like a seed. This brings the narrator solace because at least her mother’s essence will always be present as long as there are trees, grass, and animals.

Works Cited

Bass, Rick. The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Print.
Cronon, William. "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative." The Journal of American History 78.4 (1992): 1347. Print.
Spirn, Anne Whiston. "Restoring Mill Creek: Landscape Literacy, Environmental Justice and City Planning and Design." Landscape Research 30.3 (2005): 395-413. Print.