Richard Louv Last Child In The Woods Analysis

Technology is overcoming our lives. It is tearing us from nature, and it is allowing us freedom to do as we please. Richard Louv does an acceptable job of explaining this in a passage from "Last Child in the Woods." He creates a cocktail of ideas and rhetoric alike to form a well thought out analysis of evolution of technology, mainly one of a car in his, versus the nature that surrounds us and a simpler time at that.

Richard Louv begins his passage with a detailed version of advertisement. He explains the evolution in this current time of the adverts and their creators towards the natural world. He uses examples of a butterfly 's wing to to express the adverts use as trying to be displayed in the nature around us to properly synthesize a …show more content…
This allows for a colloquil tone with the reader to speaker, and is used to emphasize his following diction, which continues on to a story-telling type element. In this, he tells the story of a friend, who in celebration of her fiftieth birthday, buys a car. This itself is a use of story-telling to ensure pathos. He uses an everyday story of a woman turning a sacred age and buying a car as such. It appeals to others; "yeah, good for her!" they could think as they read, as it we can sympathize with her need to beat her age. He goes on to explain the features of the car, which will in turn allow him to emphasize the idea of technology in then case escaping from nature. He talks of the dealer trying to sell his friend a television for her kids in the back, which she declines. Technology is becoming cheaper and easier to sell in themselves, allowing for more opportunities to sell it. It all goes back to money, which he says is the reason behind advertising in his first paragraph, but now is the point of the dealer. A premium cost for a television in the back? Money. It is becoming easier to get as development gets cheaper, able to lower prices to sell more and make a greater profit at the same rate. Advancements are being made constantly, going over the heads of those willing to pay for …show more content…
In his previous paragraph, he referred to experiencing the natural landscape today in this century as "often occuring within an automobile looking out." This is elaborated on more in the following, speaking of how their visual of the world was found in that car. But parents, wanting them to learn MORE about nature, could and would promote less by getting additions to the car in whic they learned. He visualizes that world in which everyone misses with technology, the imperfections that made our world perfect. He referred it to as his time 's drive-by movie, a metaphor of the world compared to the relaxation of a movie and a reference to the car in general, the convience of viewing of the outside world. He then tells of a potential situation in which an anecdote to his granchildren to be that of surprise towards the technology and viewing of the world only years before. He visualizes in such everything the common person, as a child would do. Everything one saw in their boredom, something that would fascinate them so much, that no matter how much they looked, they would still be bored. The uncanny mind of the human is not easily entertained, but we still found it lovely. And, as he says, in a reflection of what was and what will be in our life of glass which will soon end to the life of screens and pixels: "We considered the past and dreamed of the future, and watched it all go by in the blink