Island Civilization

Island Civilization creates a mental picture of an idea that will intuitively provide a better atmosphere for generations to come.  Roderick Nash emphasizes the importance of the wilderness from the beginning, and as human nature, both physically and mentally has changed, so have our motives toward progressing as a whole union.  The wilderness was not proven to be effective and important to the lives of humans until change had been made.  Once gone, the realization kicked in and there were very few options available as to how it could be fixed at the time.  Roderick Nash makes sure we all understand that the environment is not only significant in general, but that it’s significant to us.  Without that understanding, change cannot be made large enough to have an effect on the entire world population.  Nash explains that people are now starting to realize the environment is a huge part of our daily lives, and that what we do is not always the most important.  Writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Albert Schweitzer stressed the importance of preservation.  They wrote about ways to conserve and respect the environment, and by doing so their findings and personal views began to appear in modern culture and spread all through the human race.  Nature preservations, national parks, and environmental acts giving species rights of their own opened the eye of the public to a certain degree.  Although the new research brought out was encouraging in hopes of a brighter future, Nash indicated that there is still damage done/being done to the environment and problems still reside amongst our existence with nature.  If this negativity persists, in a century wilderness could disappear and the scattered remnants left behind would be all that was left.  From this point on, fixing this problem is up to us.  Nash explains that we have an impact on only a small portion of the world, but in order to do even that, we must become “self-willed.”  We haven’t done the rest of the world any favor by creating the world we live in today; our technological advances and creations have put a damper on the environment, so it is now our time to use these advances to create something worthwhile.  It is what we do with technology that will better our future.

Nash’s article inspired me in a way that really caught my attention.  Approaching the environmental impact in the way he did sparked my curiosity as to how our far future may be.  I think the ideas posed in the article regarding a future plan of improvement for the environment all seem slightly distant from today’s society.  The thought of concentrating humans in various areas around the world is so different than what we are all used to that it could not be implemented anytime soon.  I feel that as of now, Island Civilization is far too advanced for the world we live in, but quite possibly in the Fourth Millennium a change so drastic could be an option.  I was inspired by Nash’s response to using the technological advances in society to create a way to make our environment a better place.  We need these thoughts captured by the public eye in order to make a change, and by publishing and making a confident, valid statement there is hope that such an idea will be promised.  I do agree with quite a few of Nash’s statements, although there is much time needed and a dramatic increase in human motivation to complete such a task.