Pithy Quote Two

Knowing Our Place

            “What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them and name them…after whatever it was that got killed there.” Knowing Our Place  (39)

            The writer of Knowing Our Place makes a very interesting and a very good point. Every year more and more of the wilderness is destroyed and replaced with houses or shopping malls. Pretty soon there isn’t going to be anywhere else to go. Not only do the trees in the wilderness provide us with the air we breathe, but it also is a place of beauty and a home to animals.

            I agree with the writer about people succumbing too easily to having wilderness paved over. Most people don’t even give the thought of the wilderness being paved over another glance. We get so much from the nature around us. If it weren’t for the trees than we wouldn’t be able to breathe. We owe nature so much for how much we get from it. But we take it for granted and just think that what does it matter if we just destroy a little bit of nature? If everyone thinks like that though then we’ll be left with nothing.

            I like shopping and seeing all the beautiful buildings like a lot of people, but not if that means destroying nature in place of the shopping malls and new houses. And I think it’s funny that it is true that most places, after destroying the forest, names whatever they built after it. Almost like that makes destroying it okay, and that as long as they keep the same name then it will be a way to remember what was there.

            I think more people need to fight this and not succumb so easily, and we need to do it before there is nothing left. We need the wilderness and nature more than we think, so we should appreciate it and cherish it, not destroy it.