Response to John Muir

John Muir is an environmentalist and like Abbey, he uses his writing to call his audience, anyone who is reading and could help, to action. He wants to remind people that the earth does not belong to man, although man may believe it to be so. I think this is a fair point that was also seen in the momaday writing. Most people do forget that the earth is not something to claim, since basically, all we have done is divide it up and claim bits and pieces for ourselves. Muir writes in a very interestingly jumpy style. To me it seemed that maybe he did so in a "wild" way to represent the wild. This may be a stretch, but i felt like the way that you didn't know what to expect next, and the lack of real transitions was interestingly wild. But it was also effective in holding the readers attention because as a reader I was thrown into story after story, there was no slow build, he just jumped right in. He used Ethos, pathos, and logos in his arguments to capture the readers attention and portray his message. Ethos was used towards the end of the passages where he would sum up his argument which maybe wasn't completely clear before but tied together in the end. He stated different facts, particularly in the first passage about how and why man shouldn't believe the earth is his. He uses pathos throughout his passages to grab the readers attention and play on their emotions. This was evident in the discussion about the alligator eating the dog in the first passage and the detailed admiration descriptions of yosemite national park in the second passage. And Logos is used throughout both passages while he backs up his arguments with fact and interesting points. The part that stood out the most as an example of logos to me was in the first passage when he said "man claimed the earth was made for him, and i was going to say that venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that the whole world was not made for him." That is a very strong logical point to sum up his arguments.