“Ktaadn” Thoreau’s Culture Shock
For anyone who has read Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods” Ktaadn seems to be written by a different person. “Life in the Woods” is written by an author so full of himself he thinks of himself as being better than everyone else around him, he values nature over all things and is extremely philosophical in his musings and above all considers nature as a thing that must be protected from man. However in Ktaadn there is very little in the way of philosophy and Thoreau means quite literally what he says as there are few hidden layers and he begins to understand that nature is not weak rather it is the mistress of her domain and it is instead man that is weak.
One thing he does do is give a personality to nature, he paints it first as a mother correcting her children from going to where they were not meant to go and helping to lead them to where she believes they belong.
The Movie Baraka as Evidence of a Human Cultural Legacy
The movie Baraka shows us that humans are not extremely different, but rather that all humans are and must be thought of as interrelated. The movie explores the many ways that human societies adapt to their surroundings, and in doing so, it also shows us that all human societies adapt in similar ways. Although humans themselves are diverse, their diversity pales in comparison to the diversity of the earth itself. The Earth itself has achieved far more diversity than anything a human can imagine ” even aliens in science fiction are based on animals, insects and fish. The human cultural legacy is minute and our existence is naught but a blink in time. That being said, as we are a creation of the earth we do not owe it anything; because, as its creation, we cannot harm it. Of course humans are capable of destroying all life on the planet, but it would recover eventually, and in doing so continue to create new life.
