Deliverer of Gloom and Doom

Dale Jamieson, a professor at NYU, visited Miami University
as part of the Anthropocene Lecture Series.

"Climate change is the most difficult problem that humanity has ever faced,” Dale Jamieson solemnly informed the audience at his Anthropocene lecture “Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed and What it Means for Our Future” hosted at Miami University.

Indeed, most of Jamieson’s lecture was solemn; it was laundry list of past human failures in regards to our changing planet. I felt a furious humiliation as I read the 1970s headlines that Jamieson displayed: “Scientists Fear Climate Change” or “’Wait & See’ May Be Too Late.” There was a sick understanding in the audience that these past examples mirror the headlines of today—almost forty years later.

Never an “It” but Rather a “He”

Only fifty pages into A Sand County Almanac, and I am persuaded that all issues of conservation could be solved if life mandated that every soul read the revelations of Aldo Leopold.

The talented writing in A Sand County allows the reader to progress smoothly, but even more effectual is Leopold’s fondness to personify nature. 

Leopold turns nature into a neighbor—one with motives and cognition—to which people can relate to on a human level.

Never is an animal an “it” but rather a “he” (I’ve yet to witness a “she” but given the decades in which Leopold lived, I’m willing to let this one slide).
The choice of a human pronoun, paired occasionally with a human occupation or behavior, goes a long way to invest the reader into the affairs of Leopold’s “tenants.”