Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Reflection about environmental ethics
A thesis on environmental ethics
Introduction to environmental ethics
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Reflection about environmental ethics
A thesis on environmental ethics
Introduction to environmental ethics
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
In the 2013 online article, “The Chris McCandless Obsession Problem”, author Diana Saverin describes the Alaskan wilderness travel phenomenon along with attempting to uncover the ‘McCandless Pilgrims’ “root of motivation. Sparked by the release of both Jon Krakauer’s and Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”, numerous individuals pack their backpacks and eagerly step into their (sometimes newly-bought) hiking shoes and tramp into the Alaskan Wild to pay homage to their hero Chris McCandless. Filled with personal anecdotes and interviews, Severin’s Outside article takes a new approach Into the Wild commentary by directing attention to the lives McCandless’s story affected indirectly rather than critiquing on McCandless himself. In response to what appears to be a huge amount of troubled McCandless-inspired tramping stories, Saverin provides an unbiased rationale as a attempt to explain why so many are “willing to risk injury, and even death, to..visit the last home of Alaska’s most famous adventure casualty”. Saverin begins her article with anecdote- telling the unfortunate experience of young lovers and adept adventure seekers, Ackerman and Gros.
Into the Wild Essay Most people go into the wilderness to go camping for a week or less than a week, then leave. Some stay for more than a week. Chris McCandless was in the wild for at least one hundred days. “ I’ve decided to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and the beauty of it is too good to pass up.”(pg.92)
In the beginning of the story, the author views nature and civilization as separate things that should continue to be separate as Owens states on page 244 and 245 “It was part of a Forest Service plan to remove all human-made objects from the wilderness area, a plan of which I heartily approved.” This quote shows that the author thinks that human-made objects, or civilization, should be separate from the wilderness area which is nature. The author also shows the viewpoint that civilization and nature are separate on page 245 where he states “At the end of those five days, not a trace of the shelter remained, and I felt good, very smug in fact, about returning the White Pass
Chris McCandless was an American adventurer who traveled to the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992. He look little food and equipment with him, before embarking on his journey McCandless abandoned his car and burned his money. He wanted to live simply in solitude away from the materialistic world. Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist, also ventured to Alaska to study grizzly bears. Both Chris and Timothy set out to explore what the wilderness had to offer and they didn’t let anyone stop them from doing what they desired.
McCandles Parallel Essay Every person in this world has dreams and reasons to live. They live with a goal that they want to achieve sometime in their lives. It may be as simple as wanting to rest at the end of the day or beating the world’s record and becoming popular. There are a few people that are similar to Chris McCandles and Everett Ruess that is willing to give up everything they have in exchange for their dream. McCandles and Ruess both represent freedom, adventure and romanticism for they lived their lives pursuing their dreams with a strong mindset that encouraged them to be one with the nature and away from everyone else.
1. Recently, the death of Cecil the Lion has made international headlines. Do a search for news coverage of the story and respond to the following questions: The murder of Cecil the Lion generated a lot of popularity, I saw this name everywhere, it was on the news channel, on my timeline on twitter. It even showed up on my snapchat where the people I followed used the 15 second video app to express their disgust with the events. It was interesting to see the uproar, because this is not the first time a lion has been hunted and killed, animals have been treated brutally by humans for centuries.
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.” (Abbey) These words, written by Edward Abbey in 1982, resonate the ideas proposed by John Muir nearly a century prior. While both Muir and Abbey both appreciate the natural beauty found in the American Southwest, only Abbey recognized the threat of human intervention on the preservation of the natural beauty of these wilderness areas. In Explorations in the Great Tuolumne Cañon, Muir describes the area that would later become Yosemite National Park in great loving detail.
seclusion, so called simplicity, the beautiful landscapes, its hard no to believe that alaska could cure all of our issues. the dreamers and the misfits that jon krakauer meantions in the quote from page four in Into the Wild expect alaska to patch up the unsatisfactory holes in their lives. a person being interviewed from Into the Wild, Jim Gallien, explains that people, such as Chris McCandless, have certain expectations for alaska; these expectations include easily living off of the land and claiming "a piece of the good life". all of these people that expect "the frontier" to save us believe that since they will live an imagined simplier life, most of their problems will be cured. the holes they search for something to fill could be caused
“We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because it is unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature” -Henry David Thoreau, Walden. In Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, a biographical account of Chris McCandless’s life, after graduating from college, 22-year-old McCandless decides to cut all ties from his family and hitchhike across America and live as simply as possible.
I had the opportunity to go to Mexico and visit the Yucatan rainforest and this lead me to be able to explore nature and feel the peaceful impact it can have on someone 's life. Chris McCandless was determined to create a new life for himself and be the one to control his own destiny. “Chris changed his name, gave the entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet…. His family had no idea where he was or what had become of him until his remains turned up in Alaska”. This quote is from Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and shows how McCandless left everything from his old life in order to create a new life for himself.
People could see themselves as having this provoking aspect of the wilderness and how they would feel if they would drop everything and escape. Thinking about how others could find themselves feeling secure and safe outside of their regular comfort zone would feel unnatural to experience. Lewis & Clark Northwestern School of Law added “The cultural clashes surrounding wilderness have much to reveal about how we comprehend the world and our place in it. They reflect how we think about ourselves as distinct beings, our understanding of normative values and their origins and legitimacy, and how we
In his 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon declares that “the time has come to rethink wilderness” (69). From the practice of agriculture to masculine frontier fantasies, Cronon argues that Americans have historically defined wilderness as an “island,” separate from their polluted urban industrial homes (69). He traces the idea of wilderness throughout American history, asserting that the idea of untouched, pristine wilderness is a harmful fantasy. By idealizing wilderness from a distance, he argues that people justify the destruction of less sublime landscapes and aggravate environmental conflict.
The perception of wilderness can be problematic. One of the most prominent points that Cronon made in his evaluation is the ideology that wilderness is an illusion to escape reality. This perception can be ambiguous because it segregates humanity from nature, by establishing the idea that wilderness is separate from everyday life. Also, Cronon calls attention to the issue of dividing the land and calling it wilderness. The issue of this isolation is that it disintegrates humans and nature, rather than bringing them more in unity.
The Alaskan Bush is one of the hardest places to survive without any assistance, supplies, skills, and little food. Jon Krakauer explains in his biography, Into The Wild, how Christopher McCandless ventured into the Alaskan Bush and ultimately perished due to lack of preparation and hubris. McCandless was an intelligent young man who made a few mistakes but overall Krakauer believed that McCandless was not an ignorant adrenalin junkie who had no respect for the land. Krakauer chose to write this biography because he too had the strong desire to discover and explore as he also ventured into the Alaskan Bush when he was a young man, but he survived unlike McCandless. Krakauer’s argument was convincing because he gives credible evidence that McCandless was not foolish like many critics say he was.
Since 2005, the year Birmingham was claimed to be the ‘murder capital’ of the United States, over 889 homicides have occurred (DeSilver). Birmingham this year alone, is estimated for 47.5 homicides per 100,000 residents, more homicides than what granted them the ‘murder capital’ of the United States in 2005 (BHAM Wiki). Most, if not all, of these homicides are whitewashed as rapes, drugs, guns, robberies, and domestic violence, as the cause, but the question is what lead up for these homicides to happen? What happened that caused Birmingham to go from a record with low amount of homicides in 2014 to a 26% increase, placing it in the FBI’s most homicidal cities in 2015 & 2016? Birmingham is embedded with strain and tension built up over years of history, which derives from economic inequality and fractured race