Land Ethic and White Noise Essay

In Don DeLilo's White Noise, the relationship between humanity and the environment in discussed in light of the television news coverage of catastrophes, and this discussion demonstrates the kind of hyper-conservation emergent as a result of the modern media environment. In particular, White Noise enacts a prediction made by Aldo Leopold in his essay "The Land Ethic," by showing how the dominance of the television has created a divide between humanity and the land, to the point that the environment as represented onscreen has little mental connection to the environment of the viewer. As a result of this, even natural disasters have become commodified, so that "conservation" takes the form of film recording, because according to the novel, disasters only have value when they can be seen and broadcast across the world.In effect, White Noise demonstrates how the specific lack of a land ethic in modern American culture has redefined humanity's relationship with its environment, and not towards the responsible citizenship Leopold had hoped for. The novel reveals the extent to which Leopold's ideas have permeated any discussion of land and the environment in America, even if those ideas have not bee carried out to their end.

Works Cited

DeLilo, Don. White Noise. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press,….....