Hey gang, it's Mr. Hefner again. Who else would you expect in one of these videos? After all, it's my class and my responsibility. But today we're going to get started reading the first of two essays that we're going to tackle in this nonfiction unit.
Today's essay is a relatively short essay but an incredibly famous and very powerful essay. It's called Thinking Like a Mountain. and it was written by Aldo Leopold, one of America's earliest environmental activists.
So let's get started. Now, Thinking Like a Mountain is published today in a collection of essays by Aldo Leopold, and that collection is called A Sand County Almanac. If you have taken an agriculture class at Conrad Weiser, or if you've ever been in the ag library in the ag department at Conrad Weiser, You could probably find at least one copy of this on the shelves, and I'm sure there's more than one copy on the shelves down there. Although Leopold was a scientist, but he was a political activist, and he was an outdoorsman.
And his essays are not written for other scientists. His essays were targeted at a general reading audience. And so he uses very effective techniques to make complicated issues of the ecology. accessible to just about anybody. Now, some people have compared a Sand County almanac to Henry David Thoreau's book Walden.
You're going to read part of Walden when you get to 11th grade American Lit, but Henry David Thoreau was a 19th century environmentalist who spent two years living in a cabin by a pond. We would probably call it a lake here in Pennsylvania, but New England, it was called a pond. Just kind of... getting to understand life and nature and his role in it.
And in a way, a Sand County Almanac asks some of the questions that Thoreau asked and comes up with, in most cases, the same answers, but maybe slightly more scientific answers. Now, Aldo Leopold himself was also born in the 19th century, but he lived until after World War II. He graduated from forestry school.
which is kind of interesting. Most times we're reading authors and they graduated from Yale and Harvard. He graduated from forestry school and he became a supervisor of the Carson National Forest, which is in New Mexico.
He was a teacher for a while. You don't need to remember where, just remember that he did teach at one point. And a Sand County Almanac was not published until a year after his death.
It was something he worked on for many years. but it was after he died that we finally got the entire collection of his works. Now, as we read today, we're going to take a look at two important literary terms. The first one is anecdote.
Now, whenever you write nonfiction, don't be afraid to still use narrative techniques. You see, human beings have this thing called privileged memory, which means that when we're told stories, They stick in our minds and we connect with them. We all like hearing stories. Anecdotes are stories that are told to make a point. Often they're very personal.
And in this particular essay, Aldo Leopold is going to start the essay with a personal story, an anecdote of something that happened to him when he was younger, so that he can tell us the lesson that he learned through that experience. And that becomes the introduction to the rest of the essay. Personification is the other literary term, and this is one that I know you have known since you were in elementary school.
Personification is when a writer gives human characteristics to things that are not human. The very title of this piece, Thinking Like a Mountain, is in fact personification. We might argue that mountains don't think, but what if they did?
And that becomes the driving tool for this essay. Now as you read the essay, What I want you to do is I want you to look for those two things. I want you to look for examples of personification and how this scientist writer is using personification.
And I also want you to pay attention to the anecdote at the beginning of the story and ask yourself questions about how it works to introduce the rest of the essay. All right, now this is the point in the video where you pause the video, you go read the essay, It's under two pages long. And then you come back here to the video, and we'll go over the check for understanding questions. All right, you go read.
I'll wait right here. Okay, you're back. All right, let's take a look at these check for understanding questions. What event gave Leopold his conviction about wolves? Shooting into a pack of wolves?
Watching a wolf die? Seeing the damage the deer did? Or writing the essay thinking like a mountain?
And the correct answer is watching a wolf die. This is the climax of the anecdote. which he uses to lead the entire essay.
In his younger days, Leopold would what to kill a wolf? Never pass up a chance to kill a wolf? Give anything to kill a wolf? Always be prepared to kill a wolf?
Or tell his companions not to kill a wolf? In his own words, he tells us that, in his younger days, he would never pass up a chance to kill a wolf. Why did Leopold originally want the wolf population to go down? He thought wolves served no purpose? He was afraid of wolves?
He thought it would make for better deer hunting? Or because everyone else wanted it to? Yes, he thought it would make for better deer hunting.
And in fact, it probably would. But in the process of making for better deer hunting, it was also going to destroy the mountain. What happens on the mountain when the wolf population goes down?
The deer population goes up? People feel more comfortable? Vegetation the wolves eat grows uncontrollably?
Or the deer population also goes down? Now some of those you might make an argument for, but they all come back to A, the deer population goes up. When the deer population goes up, the deer begin eating things they normally wouldn't. They reduce the vegetation, reduced vegetation leads to erosion, leads to the decimation of the deer population eventually, and disaster on the southern slopes of the mountains. What other consequence does Leopold attribute to the absence of wolves?
Forest fires, dust bowls, deer migration, or animal disease? Yes, dust bowls. During the great dust bowl era of American history, we had not properly managed the land.
We got to a point where plants would no longer grow in the soil, and windstorms just swept up this dust, this soil, and carried it for miles. His point here is if we kill the wolves, the deer population will reduce the vegetation almost to nothing. And finally, if we were in class, we would discuss this question together. But I want you to think about how the anecdote that leads off this essay works to do things like grab your attention, connect with you as a person. Leopold isn't some scientist telling you not to make mistakes.
He's saying, I made these mistakes myself, and I've learned from them, and I hope that you can learn from my mistakes. Ask yourself, what's his purpose in telling the anecdote? What lesson did the narrator learn from this? This is going to be a question you're going to see again later.
Alright, and that's it for today. Be sure after you're finished with this video that you check Schoology for any additional assignments, requirements, or expectations. And I'll see you back here soon. Thanks for staying with me through the entire presentation.