Text on 3rd Chapter: Taking Thoreau's lead, can you imagine ways in which our technologically affected lives can be wedded with a sensual acuity for nature?

Technology, nature, and humans

My iPhone rings. I turn around: six-thirty in the morning; time to get up. I take a shower, brush my teeth, get dressed. I take the milk out of the refrigerator and turn on the coffee machine. I listen to the radio on my iPhone. I check the weather for the day—on my iPhone. Getting out of the house, I listen to music—from my iPhone. For me it is only three stations by train and two by bus to get to University. The elevator takes me into the 12^th story. In class we switch the lights on—it is the end of the year; thus still dark outside. I take notes on my laptop. In University I stay until six o'clock in the evening. Whenever I go home, it is already dark again. I take the train back home. How much time have I spent outside? Maybe 20 minutes maximum. My feet have not even touched any grass. My skin has not seen any sun. Am I close to nature? No.

“Sometimes […] I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house [...]” (Thoreau 69). When I sit at my desk at home, I hear the cars on the road, people talking, our neighbors fighting, and the train passing by. In his hut on Walden Pond, Thoreau lived without the days of the week, and the hours of the day (69). To us every hour, every minute, every second is a structured component of our days. Let out the day of the week; the expected weekend. Thoreau had time to listen to the sounds of the forest and the lake. Nowadays we do not even have the time to listen to our fellow men; even less to our environment. As a matter of fact, we do not listen to any surroundings anymore, but we stopper our ears with a technological advice.

Of course there are many technological advices that let us understand nature better, for example measuring instruments for the weather, oxygen cylinders to breathe under water, or satellites allowing us to look into space. However, this does not mean that we are close to nature. Talking for the western world, I would even claim we are not close to nature at all—if we would be, we would not treat nature the way we do.

Who looks for a relationship between man and nature, soon discovers the predominant mistreatment. Because Thoreau talks about the different sounds owls and other birds produce around him, here is a short introduction to the way we treat “our” birds:

“If you aren't a farmer, what I've just written probably confuses you. You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But for the past half century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens — broilers and layers — each with distinct genetics. We call them both chickens, but they have starkly different bodies and metabolisms, engineered for different "functions." Layers make eggs. (Their egg output has more than doubled since the 1930s.) Broilers make flesh. (In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time. Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.)

This raises all kinds of bizarre questions — questions that before I learned about our two types of chickens, I'd never had reason to ask — like, What happens to all of the male offspring of layers? If man hasn't designed them for meat, and nature clearly hasn't designed them to lay eggs, what function do they serve?

They serve no function. Which is why all male layers — half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year — are destroyed.

Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about.

Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Other layer chicks are destroyed in other ways, and it's impossible to call those animals more or less fortunate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks)” (48-9).

This excerpt gives a small impression about livestock farming. Considering all the animals we eat and treat, nobody who participates in this system and at the same time says he likes the forrest, can claim to be close to nature. Technological advices might have brought us closer to the analyzes of nature, but at the same time furthest away from its essence than we ever have been. “[...] a new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our common dwelling” (77) Thoreau talks about has long been forgotten in the world of today. 

1) Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. USA: Reada.Classic, 2010. Print.

2) Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009. Print.