The question “Do human belong within or apart from nature?” has been asked over several centuries. However, the answer for this question is not easy to address because it has been differing over time and place. To make it more sense when approaching this question, we should be familiar with two traditions of viewing nature which were proposed by Worster in his book “Nature’s Economy”. According to Worster, Arcadian view promotes a benign attitude towards nature and advocates a simple, humble life for man with the aim of restoring him to a peaceful coexistence with other organisms. In the other hand, Worster uses imperial ecology as a counterpoint to Arcadian ecology. This anti-Arcadian suggests that humans should attempt to manage nature, because
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He was Swedish and worked for the Royal Society and government. His duty was finding natural resources to benefit the government (Lecture, 9/10/15). With his study and the work from his students over the world, he developed a very usable system to classify species and came up with a very important idea which was “Policing of Nature”. According to Linnaeus, there is a system of policing in which populations of living things are regulated by populations of other living things. For example, birds preserve the portion of insects, insects and castle control the destruction of plants (Linnaeus, 130). For him, the policing is necessary to “the preserving the order of things in that perfection in which it was created; and which subsists alone by maintaining the number of species, and the relative proportion of the individuals of each unaltered” (Linnaeus, 166). His idea generally depicted the connection between species which ensure the balance of nature. In my opinion, his idea seemed to favor the connection between human and nature, even though his work seemed like controlling …show more content…
Humboldt is a German and he was really enthusiastic in discovering the patterns of the world; therefore, he had been traveling a lot. Similar to Linnaeus, he studied natural resources to benefit the government (Lecture, 9/15/15). In his very important reading “Physiognomy of Plants”, he was applying the idea of how a person’s face reflects his/her own mind on plants. One of his observations was: “the carpet of flowers and of verdure spread over the naked crust of our planet is unequally woven; it is thicker where the sun rises high in the ever cloudless heavens, and thinner towards the poles in the less happy climes where returning frosts often destroy the opening buds of spring, or the ripening fruits of autumn” (Humboldt, 230). The other important observation in his reading was about the destruction of nature which resulted in problems: “Once the region has lost the covering of plants with which it was invested, if the sands are loose and mobile, and are destitute of springs, and if the heated atmosphere, forming constantly ascending currents, prevents precipitation taking from clouds, thousands of years may elapse ere organic life can pass from the verdant shore to the interior of the sandy sea, and repossess itself of the domain from which it had been banished” (Humboldt, 233). The root cause of theses problem, needless to day, is humans. As Humboldt mentioned, “the ancient civilization
He was Swedish and worked for the Royal Society and government. His duty was finding natural resources to benefit the government (Lecture, 9/10/15). With his study and the work from his students over the world, he developed a very usable system to classify species and came up with a very important idea which was “Policing of Nature”. According to Linnaeus, there is a system of policing in which populations of living things are regulated by populations of other living things. For example, birds preserve the portion of insects, insects and castle control the destruction of plants (Linnaeus, 130). For him, the policing is necessary to “the preserving the order of things in that perfection in which it was created; and which subsists alone by maintaining the number of species, and the relative proportion of the individuals of each unaltered” (Linnaeus, 166). His idea generally depicted the connection between species which ensure the balance of nature. In my opinion, his idea seemed to favor the connection between human and nature, even though his work seemed like controlling …show more content…
Humboldt is a German and he was really enthusiastic in discovering the patterns of the world; therefore, he had been traveling a lot. Similar to Linnaeus, he studied natural resources to benefit the government (Lecture, 9/15/15). In his very important reading “Physiognomy of Plants”, he was applying the idea of how a person’s face reflects his/her own mind on plants. One of his observations was: “the carpet of flowers and of verdure spread over the naked crust of our planet is unequally woven; it is thicker where the sun rises high in the ever cloudless heavens, and thinner towards the poles in the less happy climes where returning frosts often destroy the opening buds of spring, or the ripening fruits of autumn” (Humboldt, 230). The other important observation in his reading was about the destruction of nature which resulted in problems: “Once the region has lost the covering of plants with which it was invested, if the sands are loose and mobile, and are destitute of springs, and if the heated atmosphere, forming constantly ascending currents, prevents precipitation taking from clouds, thousands of years may elapse ere organic life can pass from the verdant shore to the interior of the sandy sea, and repossess itself of the domain from which it had been banished” (Humboldt, 233). The root cause of theses problem, needless to day, is humans. As Humboldt mentioned, “the ancient civilization