Selection 4
The mountain is another name for Mother Nature. Mother Nature has a calling o all living creatures telling them what to do and when to do it. In the case of the wolf, nature told it to hunt the deer, to endure the deer didn’t ruin the mountain top vegetation. Kind of like a self supporting role, too many deer means less trees vegetation for other creatures. So the job of the wolf is to hunt the deer, to keep its population in order, not too much, not too little.
The hunter must take on the responsibility of the wolf, to hunt the deer to keeps its population intact, the right level. But humans cannot hear the call from nature, they either don’t hunt and let the deer destroy the mountain vegetation, or they over kill and end the population and regeneration of the deer species, as well as the wolf. Perhaps the message should be heard from `the mountain`, to save the world we must not kill the wolf in essence. We must let nature be nature or take on the role as a responsibility of killing the wolf, to maintain healthy populations of all species.
Wastefulness has dated back thousands of years, in the reading Leopold compares Odysseus`s return from Troy, where he did away with his property (in this case his disloyal households. We must evolve from this bad trait of wastefulness.
Over time ethics have evolved, from an outdated everyone for themselves into a working together system. Ethics has evolved into what is now democracy, the need of an individual is dealt with as a need for the whole, like a system working together. Yet there is still a missing link between those connections of the individual to the whole, to nature’s connection with the whole.
Leopold ponders why land, as valuable as it is property value and potential value, as well as the value it gives us in terms of feelings towards it, is treated so badly. Man has come a long way and with that evolution man may have out grown[1] land itself. Man today wants things faster, like food..; be it grown in a field or in a factory, he needs his food when he’s on his way to work, in a hurry.
This is the new idea of land, instead of bountiful beauty and resources; he sees a distance from one cultural hub to the other1. This is not good if we are to achieve some sort of ethic or rights for this land
Education is also needed if we are to achieve ethics for land. Leopold also states that before we achieve this we must not only look at land as a resource, we must also look at its other values, like the looks, how it decorates the landscape, as well as the life that depends on these resources1.
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