Into The Wild Chapter 4-6 Summary

[Yolette Langevin]

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There isn't a correct answer to your question. It depends on who youask. I know how Chris McCandless would have answered. Chris wouldhave said it's better to eschew norms and pursue your own interests. Inchapter 6, Chris writes the longest letter he will write on his two year"adventure" to a man named Ronald Franz. The letter is the closest thingto an admission of why Chris does what he does, and why he thinks that others(like Ron) should do the same. Here is a small section of that letter.

Chris was all about going his own way. "F*** the government" is aquote from him in the very first chapter. That's not just how Chris felteither. It's how he lived. He didn't do his taxes, and when he did,Chris would falsify his name and birth date and everything else. He sawno reason to take anybody's advice, unless Chris asked for it. He burnedhis money, and he turned away many potential friendships. Even whensomeone like Wayne Westerberg begged Chris to stay and help out because he wasshorthanded, Chris said that he couldn't because it would get in the way of hisgreat Alaska time table.

Chris McCandless is nothing new, and Krakauer points that out by comparingChris to many other equally doomed Alaskan adventurers. Beyond thatthough, Chris reminds me of a men like Emerson and Thoreau. Both of themencouraged going your own way, eschewing norms, and pursuing your own dreamsand interests. That mentality is what a lot of "Civil Disobedience" and"Walden Pond" are about. Even Ayn Rand's character Howard Roark remindsme of Chris. Roark wants it done his way, or it's not worthdoing.

All of those men would say that it is better to pursue your own interests. But I don't think it is better. It seems to me that Chrisand the other men that I listed made their lives more miserable and moredifficult by being as estranged as they were. They would each disagreevehemently with me. They would claim that they are really living and"sucking the marrow out of life." Fine, but Chris still died fromstarvation because he couldn't find enough marrow to suck on inAlaska.

My main argument toward conforming to societal norms and expectations isthat by doing so a person is able to live in community with other people. I don't mean in an actual neighborhood. I mean community in thesense that the people around you are more like family. They have your back ingood times and bad. Chris had some of that, but for every person thatChris let get sort of close, he pushed another dozen away (especially his ownfamily). Conformity secures a person more help. Following societal rulesallows for more opportunities as well.

Beutlich, Jonathan. "In Into the Wild, is it better to conform to society or pursue personal interests?" edited by eNotes Editorial, 7 Sep. 2015, -wild/questions/into-wild-better-conform-societal-expectations-499007.

The IPBES Assessment Report on the Sustainable Use of Wild Species is the result of four years of work by 85 leading experts from the natural and social sciences, and holders of Indigenous and local knowledge, as well as 200 contributing authors, drawing on more than 6,200 sources. It was specifically requested by, among others, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). It also has immediate relevance to the work of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The Assessment considers various approaches to the enhancement of the sustainability of the use of wild species and to strengthen related practices, measures, capacities and tools for their conservation through such use, taking into account the multiple worldviews and knowledge systems that operate within different social-ecological systems. The Assessment highlights drivers of sustainability and compares, among others, the effectiveness of policy options to better govern the sustainable use of wild species.

The IPBES Assessment Report on the Sustainable Use of Wild Species is composed of 1) a summary for policymakers (SPM), approved by the IPBES Plenary at its 9th session in July 2022 in Bonn, Germany (IPBES-9); and 2) a set of six chapters, accepted by the IPBES Plenary, as well as a glossary.

"Keep not standing fix'd and rooted,

Briskly venture, briskly roam;

Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,

And stout heart are still at home.

In each land the sun does visit

We are gay, whate'er betide:

To give room for wandering is it

That the world was made so wide."

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease. Briskly venturing androaming, some are washing off sins and cobweb cares of the devil's spinning in all-day storms on mountains; sauntering in rosiny pinewoods or in gentian meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting sweet, flowery sprays; tracing rivers to their sources, getting in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth; jumping from rock to rock, feeling the life of them, learning the songs of them, panting in whole-souled exercise, and rejoicing in deep, long-drawn breaths of pure wildness. This is fine and natural and full of promise. So also is the growing interest in the care and preservation of forests and wild places in general, and in the half wild parks and gardens of towns. Even the scenery habit in its most artificial forms, mixed with spectacles, silliness, and kodaks; its devotees arrayed more gorgeously than scarlet tanagers, frightening the wild game with red umbrellas,--even this is encouraging, and may well be regarded as a hopeful sign of the times.

All the Western mountains are still rich in wildness, and by means of good roads are being brought nearer civilization every year. To the sane and free it will hardly seem necessary to cross the continent in search of wild beauty, however easy the way, for they find it in abundance wherever they chance to be. Like Thoreau they see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush, and oceans in ponds anddrops of dew. Few in these hot, dim, strenuous times are quite sane or free; choked with care like clocks full of dust, laboriously doing so much good and making so much money,--or so little,--they are no longer good for themselves.

When, like a merchant taking a list of his goods, we take stock of our wildness, we are glad to see how much of even the most destructible kind is still unspoiled. Looking at our continent as scenery when it was all wild, lying between beautiful seas, the starry sky above it, the starry rocks beneath it, to compare its sides, the East and the West, would be like comparing the sides of a rainbow. But it is no longer equally beautiful. The rainbows of to-day are, I suppose, as bright as those that first spanned the sky; and some of our landscapes are growing more beautiful from year to year, notwithstanding the clearing, trampling work of civilization. New plants and animals are enriching woods and gardens, and many landscapes wholly new, with divine sculpture and architecture, are just now coming to the light of day as the mantling folds of creative glaciers are being withdrawn, and life in a thousand cheerful, beautiful forms is pushing into them, and new-born rivers are beginning to sing and shine in them. The old rivers, too, are growing longer, like healthy trees, gaining new branches and lakes as the residual glaciers at their highest sources on themountains recede, while the rootlike branches in the flat deltas are at same time spreading farther and wider into the seas and making new lands.

Under the control of the vast mysterious forces of the interior of the earth all the continents and islands are slowly rising or sinking. Most of the mountains are diminishing in size under the wearing action of the weather, though a few are increasing in height and girth, especially the volcanic ones, as fresh floods of molten rocks are piled on their summits and spread in successive layers, like the wood-rings of trees, on their sides. New mountains, also, are being created from time to time as islands in lakes and seas, or as subordinate cones on the slopes of old ones, thus in some measure balancing the waste of old beauty with new. Man, too, is making many far-reaching changes. This most influential half animal, half angel is rapidly multiplying and spreading, covering the seas and lakes with ships, the land with huts, hotels, cathedrals, and clustered city shops and homes, so that soon, it would seem, we may have to go farther than Nansen to find a good sound solitude. None of Nature's landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild; and much, we can say comfortingly, must always be in great part wild, particularly the sea and the sky, the floods of light from the stars, and the warm, unspoilable heart of the earth,infinitely beautiful, though only dimly visible to the eye of imagination. The geysers, too, spouting from the hot underworld; the steady, long-lasting glaciers on the mountains, obedient only to the sun; Yosemite domes and the tremendous grandeur of rocky caons and mountains in general,--these must always be wild, for man can change them and mar them hardly more than can the butterflies that hover above them. But the continent's outer beauty is fast passing away, especially the plant part of it, the most destructible and most universally charming of all.

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