Bounded People, Boundless Lands

Throughout the book Eric Freyfogle uses examples of poems, fictional stories, and true stories to strengthen his view of the land, and land ethics. One such example is that of the poem by Robert Frost called “Mending Wall” where the phrase “Good fences make good neighbors” came from. Freyfogle uses this poem as a precedence throughout the book, making reference to it, and the contradiction of the meaning of the poem, and that people took that phrase literally, and it has become and anthem for the American culture and how they view the land.

From the poem on, Freyfogle gives examples of how America has shaped its land, and how boundaries have been set up in American culture. He states, “Boundaries and the bounding process have been central elements of American culture since the first days of settlement. The westward expansion of the country, in fact, was a matter not only of taming the land but also of dividing and bounding it. Through a messy process continuing for generations, an interconnected whole became a collection of parcels and pieces. As they divided nature, the settlers severed, mentally and sometimes physically, many of the

The book definitely made me reconsider how I want to live my life, and how I want to treat the land. Who knows, maybe just me and a few of my classmates that are reading the book as well can pass along the knowledge that we learned and become motivated to change things in our own community. To stand up and say that we want regulations changed, that we don’t want to pollute our rivers anymore, and the laws need to change.

Freyfogle then talks about the snail darter and land health and land ethics. He discusses Aldo Leopold and what Leopold said about land health; that the land’s basic needs were conserving soil, maintaining water flows and water quality, and mitigating significant human-caused changes in species populations. Freyfogle also talks about individualism and how in America the individual is the one that counts, not the community. He gives the example of Boneyard Creek where once there was a winding, slow-moving stream lined with maples and cottonwoods and sycamores, now it is a tethered ditch, angular and rough, and is polluted all along it’s banks. Freyfogle then discusses how Boneyard Creek fits in the individualistic view of the world.

There are many examples that Freyfogle gives throughout the book about the land health and how we need to fix things in order to make it better. He gives examples of people that made mistakes and didn’t have the land’s health in mind. He also gives examples of people that did have the land’s health in mind and how they are the people that we need to look at in order to change the way that the land is being taken care of. He give examples of scenes that “illustrate the complexities of the ongoing debate about how people ought to live on the planet- about what precisely it means to own land, about the ecological and spiritual values of wild places, and about how people should assess environmental risks and legislate pollution limits when their knowledge is incomplete. ….Many land-use practices simply make no financial sense, even when long-term harms are discounted to present value” (pgs. 30-31). Freyfogle then give some solutions and thoughts on what he thinks should be done in order to change the way that the land is bounded, and treated. “Contemporary culture, in short, needs new bearings in the natural order. It needs a broader understanding of moral

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