We See What They Had Seen

More than hundred years ago, by practicing one of the oldest of arts, Henry David Thoreau, while spending two years, two months and two days by the Walden Pond, wrote what he saw with his eyes nature things he saw and loved.

Hundred years later, through the medium of a new art, photography, Eliot Porter, guided by Thoreau's artistic instant, produced an illustrated edition to document Thoreau's selected passages in his book "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World". In another "Sierra Club" book, "Gentle Wilderness", Richard Kauffman, in the late 60's, came along with camera, recaptured the sense of discovery and vividness of what another naturalist, John Muir, called the Range of Light, the Sierra wildness he saw hundred years earlier. Every time we visited the Sierra, especially the Yosemite, we took nice pictures, simply trying to capture the spirit of John Muir.

We are lucky we saw the same beautiful scenes he saw more than hundred years ago. The only difference is that he was the discoverer, and we are the followers. We see what they saw, and hopefully our descendants will see the same hundreds or thousands of years later. We just need to preserve and protect the nature beauty as John Muir and many others had done. But it is not always what we would hope or expect.

In the year of 2003, we had the opportunity to visit our long dreamed mystery place, the Yangtze Three Gorges. On the cruise, we were told to be the lucky ones to view the last original scenery of the Three Gorges. We saw what Li-Bai saw thousand years ago. We tried to match the scenery with the description in the poems by Li-Bai and others. Nowadays, the visitors will see a quite different picture. Sad enough is that we were told the newly built big dam would be worth for only 100 years in term of producing the hydroelectric power, not to mention it's numerous potential bad consequences, which we have already started to witness.

We see what our ancestors had seen, and hopefully also what our descendants will see hundreds or thousands of years later.

Yeh Tze

(Originally posted in NTUMC68 class website, August 1 2008)