Bounded People, Boundless Lands: Envisioning a New Land Ethic

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 examples he gave were inspiring and taught me a lot about what goes on in the rest of the country that I had no idea about, and about the past and what has gone on with laws and regulations about the land.

connections that joined nature’s pieces into and organic whole. They had reasons for doing so, of course. But in time, their boundaries and senses of boundedness would take a heavy toll on the land’s health” (pgs. 6-7). After this statement Freyfogle goes on to give examples of how this happened, and people and places that it happened at. Such as in California when settlers divided !

Ø Finally, there is and indispensable need for good stories, stories about how people and land come together, about present generations joining hands with past and future ones, about people regaining intimacy and friendship with other species, about nature’s inherent mystique and the limits of human knowledge, about the joys of communal life, and about the resettlement of the American land” (pgs. 174-176).

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