Essay, Research Paper: Pillaging Nature

Pillaging Nature

I read Edward Hoaglands essay The Courage of Turtles.
I like turtles so I decided to right my essay on the
related to ecological issue in Hoaglands essay.

Another essay that I read for English is Malcolm X’s A
Homemade Education. I think that Malcolm has some
ideas in his essay that is related to Hoaglands essay,
so I will include a quote from Malcolm’s essay.

Turtles are interesting creatures, or as Hoagland puts
it "personable beast." These beasts are part of an
ecological system around a pond or lake. Ecological
systems are sensitive to change. Take away a piece of
the ecological system, such as turtles, the system
will disintegrate rapidly. This happened in a small
lake not to far away from where I grew up in
Washington State. The city decided that there were too
many ducks in this lake and had then all removed. The
lake quickly became choked up with waterweeds. The
ducks had been keeping a fast growing type of
waterweed in check by eating them.

What if a main piece of the ecological system was
taken away, like the lake as in Hoaglands essay. The
system would be devastated. Look at rainforest in
South America and Madagascar. The destruction has
gotten so bad that satellite photo show the erosion of
the land into the sea. That can not be good. What of
the turtles that live in places like these? The turtle
in Hoaglands essay hopefully in up in "boxes in boys
closets." Some turtle from Hoagland essay followed
their instink and "dug themselves into the into drying
mud for another siege in the hot weather...the drying
mud baked over them and entombed them." The turtles
from the rainforest also have it hard. If the turtle
are not killed by machines and fires used to destroy
rainforest, the turtles can go deeper into the forest,
stay and live with the people who now live in their
old home, or end up in the pet trade. The first option
would create overpopulation with the turtles already
living in the deeper forest. If the turtles stay and
live with people they will be considered pest and most
likely killed. In the pet trade the turtles could end
up like the turtles in front of the pet store in
Hoaglands essay, "dry as a heap of old bones in the
sun...creeping over one another gimpily, doing their
best to escape." Kind of sad.

The people who decided to bulldoze in a lake and cut
down forest must know what they are destroying little
critter’s home. In Hoaglands essay it is the local
Water Company. In South America it is different
governments, depending on what country the rainforest
is in. Some people say animals do not have feeling.
They look like they do to me. Hoagland describes the
turtles as almost human like; "they rock rhythmically
in place as we often do, although they are hatched
from an eggs, not from the womb. (A common explanation
psychologist give for our pleasure in rocking quietly
is that it recapitulates our mother’s heartbeat)" That
just goes to show that man automatically assumes that
he is superior to animals. Supposedly the smarter the
mammal the more lobes the brain havens. Humans have
five lobes and dogs have three lobes. Scientist have
found that dolphins have seven lobes. That should mean
that they are smarter than humans are.

Personally I think man is hell-bent on destroying
things around him. Since man creation I do not think
that has not been a war some where in the world. We
have been killing of animal since prehistoric era. The
wooly mammoth in North America, the lion in Eroupe and
the dodo in South Pacific Islands have all become
instink before modern times. In Malcolm X’s essay A
Homemade Education talks about white man destroying
other culture, "the whole world’s white men acted like
devils, pillaging and raping and bleeding and draining
the whole world non-white people." Why would nature be
different?

Hoaglands essay is written in the first person. The
essay is very descriptive. I instantly got a mental
picture of the lakes back home where I catch turtles.
I also got kind of a depressive feeling from the
essay. Man at his lowest distorting nature around him
and destroying part of himself.





Word Count: 721