Last Child In The Woods By Richard Louv
Richard Love appealed to both logos and pathos, with use Of anecdotes, hypothetical examples and imagery, in a sheer effort to illustrate the separation between people and nature, explaining that while nature is just at our fingertips, we fail to pay attention to it’s purifying effect on humanity. Love uses an anecdote to support his argument. He recounts a friends story of being pushed by a salesman to purchase an in-car television, and hyperboloids the actions in that ‘the salesman’s jaw dropped”, creating dramatic effect.
With this anecdote, Love has attempted to show that the salesman’s attitude towards dependence on technology reflects today’s society, and express the common opinion of a constant need for technology. To continue building off this anecdote, Love raises the hypothetical example to help him show his disdain towards the idea. He proposes that “we’ll someday tell our grandchildren” that there was a time when kids “looked out the car window’ instead of playing on phones or watching the backseat television. The key to the effectiveness of the hypothetical example is that it is rechristening realistic.
Even today, our grandparents tell us about a childhood without television or Internet. So certainly Luvs hypothesis is not far from fact. The shocking realism of this hypothesized example makes the reader realize the immediacy of the issue and the pace at which it is progressing. Lastly, Love uses the devices of abstract and concrete imagery to advance his claim of the separation of humanity and nature. Perhaps his most effective device, Luvs imagery paints a scene that is virtually unable to write off in hat it is deeply familiar, thus evoking an emotional connection to the issue.
His description of “fogged glass”, the “telephone poles ticking by” and “country cows and horses” evokes a nostalgic remembrance of a readers own childhood, rendering him or her unable to resist the desire to preserve these memories for future generations. He makes the reader realize that this experience may be lost on the children of future decades if the separation between people and nature is not bridged. This imagery creates a sense of wistful loss that brings the issue home on a personal level to anyone who has ever gazed out a car window as a child.
Luvs argument relies on anecdotal and hypothetical evidence as well as imagery, but more importantly, it relies on a sense of personal attachment to the issue at hand. Love subtly proves that the disparity between humanity and nature is an issue that affects us all. In order to preserve the golden days of our youth, we must close the gap. Love effectively proves that the separation is unnatural and needs remedy. Luckily, the remedy is not unattainable; rather, it begins with our own decisions.
