“Thinking like a Mountain” by Aldo Leopold

Introduction

The environmental ethics literature and the environmental motion in general have long congratulated Aldo Leopold's term article, “Thinking like a Mountain,” as canonical.* Leopold pleads for empathy with the geological, with the world itself. If we rehearse the physical exercise of recollecting like a mountain, we might reach our empathies (and our significance and political support) to entities that look like to defy or even contradict the human step and lifespan. But “thinking” has more modes and consideration is burdened with capability power issues.

 

Thesis Statement

We stare at the mountain, hoping its approval, acknowledging with its power and aspiring to associate with it. These capability confusions (or even pathologies) reside near Leopold's laudable empathy.

 

Analytical Discussion

Leopold's renowned term article commences with a tender reconstruction of the divergent means “every residing thing” discovers the howl of a wolf in a distant canyon. The deer, coyote, hunter, and cowman draw divergent classes from the sound of the wolf. “Yet behind these apparent and instantaneous trusts and worries there lays a deeper implication, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has inhabited long adequate to perceive objectively to the howl of a wolf” (Leopold, 129, with accent on added). This mountain (and, probably, any mountain) doesn't progress at a human step, but it is nonetheless, in one way or another reenacting human consciousness: the mountain listens, dwells, and knows. Indeed, the mountain is super-human. It listens “objectively,” and, set in resistance to the surprisingly short, if in addition densely historicized human horizon, it “lives” a long time.

The essay's conceit (“Thinking like a mountain”) is no not hard well-written ploy, and the brevity of the term article only amplifies the drama. The term article is a plea to systematically and compellingly personify the mountain. The mountain - wholly - recognizes “a deeper meaning.” It “has lived,” and its life ought to be evaluated in resistance to the dwells of the other (animal and human) listeners; it “has inhabited long enough.” It not only recognizes more profoundly, it discovers better, too. Only the mountain can “listen objectively” to the wolf's howl. The mountain is super-human, considering its bodily dimensions: it is expanded and this augments to its advanced constancy and wisdom, as well as to its better scenery of the landscape. Accordingly, all of its human attributes are in one way or another taken to a (literally) higher level. Size matters. And the greater and more inert “you” are, the longer you inhabit and the more advanced you are.

Leopold (129) ups the stakes in virtually every paragraph: “Only the uneducable tyro can bungle to sense the existence or nonexistence of wolves, or the item that mountains have a surprise view about them.” This is a thorough claim. Mountains configuration and have opinions, surprise to us humans, but still, “the fact” of those views is apparent to all but the feeblest humans.

Implied in the interpretive pursuit called ahead by the surprise is the expect that we could, ...