Environmental Injustice In Leopold's Prairie Birthday

Writing Assignment 1 – Leopold 1 It was not until recently that I have become passionate about my future as a community planner. One of the issues I intend to address as a planner is environmental injustice, the disproportionate placement of minority groups in highly-polluted and environmentally degraded areas. Another issue of utmost importance to me is how to protect native species from habitat loss – and ultimately extinction – as humanity advances. These issues are seemingly disparate; how can I protect plants and animals while providing equitable living conditions for all human beings and planning cities? The truth of the matter is that these subjects are interconnected. Leopold recognizes this in his essay, “Prairie Birthday.” One line that spoke the most to me was, “…we are confronted by the two alternatives already mentioned: either insure the continued blindness of the populace, or examine the question whether we cannot have both progress and plants” (Leopold, 1966). I believe that yes, we can have
As portrayed numerous times by the essays in “A Sand County Almanac” and “The Quality of Landscape,” Leopold does not hesitate to denounce humanity’s tremendous impact on nature. In “Prairie Birthday,” he goes on to confess that, if he were to meet a railway president to provide him “physical evidence of his soft-heartedness” – in other words, his destruction of the Silphium prairie (1966). His criticism extends to not just humanity’s actions but to their perceptions and beliefs. In an in-depth annunciation of nature’s deep-rooted elegance in “Marshland Elegy,” he chastises our perception of art, particularly nature, with the superficial “pretty” (Leopold, 1966). It appears that the only reason we spare any beings of destruction if it is physically alluring to us. Furthermore, he frequently questions who wrote the rules for progress and why we abide by