Date of Award

1971

Degree Type

Thesis

Abstract

Centuries of technological advancements have contributed to a propensity for Western man to judge the quality of his life on a quantitative scale: bigger or faster or more has been interpreted to mean better. The inhabitants of the Western world are usually so caught up in the struggle for material goods, they have neither the time nor the inclination to see beyond that immediate concern. There have often, if not always, been poets and philosophers to point out the weaknesses in such a system but they have had little visible impact. A Gary Snyder writing in the middle of the twentieth century sounds the same alarm that Henry David Thoreau did in the nineteenth. The struggle has not changed; it may have intensified.

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