Thinking Like a Mountain

"We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer deer strives with it's supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time." In the article, Thinking Like a Mountain, the author describes a time when he comes to realize that not everything is revolved around human development. In the text, he tells a story of when he and some other people were out having lunch near a river and saw what looked to be a deer struggling with the current of the river, only when they moved closer did they realize that it was not a deer but a wolf. Now as hunters, if you had the chance to kill an animal that was hunting down your game, you would obviously do it, and that is what they did. But the author saw something within the eyes of the dying wolf, something he had never seen before. He saw that what they had done was the complete opposite of what was good. He saw how the wolf, and all wild animals for that matter, were integrated within the mountain. He saw that everything was in perfect balance with everything else and that human development was disrupting the sustainability of the mountain. To sum everything up, Thinking Like a Mountain by: Aldo Leopold, is a text that tells the story of just one person realizing that the way the mountain and everything that lives in it thinks is the correct way to think when building an empire. Adopting the thought process of the mountain could lead to more environmentally sound developments and can lead to a much healthier global and local ecosystem.