As time goes on, we’ve been spending increasingly less time in nature as a result of our increasingly busy lives. If we’re too busy to go to nature, how important is it to us really? Or, an even bigger question, why should we go to nature? Two writers, Henry David Thoreau and John Burroughs, offer an answer to this second question, saying that spending time in nature should be important to us, and that we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of experiencing everything that’s out there. While Thoreau takes a more erudite approach, saying that learning from nature is at least important as anything taught in college, Burroughs takes a more emotional approach, saying that people have to love nature in order to experience it fully. In my opinion, both of them are right, but in different ways that can be combined into an answer that explains and strengthens both of their arguments. In his writing, one of Thoreau’s main points is that humans should learn from nature to make themselves better, but as Burroughs …show more content…
Thoreau believed that learning from nature was at least as important as getting a college education. Meanwhile, Burroughs believed that people can’t truly understand something unless they first love it. While these may seem like contrasting claims, they combine into something perhaps more true than either of their original statements. Without some amount of knowledge, one can never love something; likewise, without that love, one can never truly know that same something. Love and learning are two sides of the same coin, and thus it’s impossible to have one without the other. Thus, Thoreau and Burroughs each only described half of why people need to go to nature. The whole reason is in their combined