The Earth’s Relevance Today

Edgar Beltran                                                                                        #1

Mr. Ho

Pre-AP English 10; Period 4

14 January 2015

The Earth’s Relevance Today  

        The earth has given the people the ability to live and feed off of its products, some people founded their wealth and idleness off of it.  In the novel, The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, the author entertains us with a pre-revolutionary novel that emphasizes on the earth and its importance.   Wang Lung, a poor farmer who has decided to marry a slave girl from the House of Hwang, lives his and his family’s life struggling through challenges, and hard decisions to survive and prosper.  One day in the South they came upon a blessing of receiving money and taking jewels that brought wealth to him and the direction of his life changes, as he returns to his own land .  The earth has been viewed by multiple perspectives such as of the book and people nowadays such as people do not treasure earth, it has maintain a prosperity in families in both times, and far most, the type of actions/feeling that the earth brings.

        To begin with, compared to how Wang Lung treasures the earth and its relevance to people nowadays, people do not seem to treasure it as one should.  For example, Wang states how unjust the people from wealthy families see the land and compared to him he sees as a different way, “‘to those at the house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!’”(55).   The tone shows how Wang Lung feels towards the fact that people do not treasure the earth as it’s supposed to be done and that no one can live without the harvest of the earth.  In contrast to modern day behavior, people do not seem to appreciate the land unless they are running out of resource they quickly try to preserve it.  For instance, Wang Lung also showed that he treasured his land by including his land/ earth into any decision that Wang Lung did in the South.  This gives the readers a suggestion that Wang Lung holds high regard toward the earth for he is not selfish but for the land that provides him with wealth and surpluses.  As people in these times, people do not really focus their attention on the earth for they do not have to cultivate or produce anything from it.  Any one person can go to the store and purchase food for a low price.  Ultimately, the way Wang treasured the earth and how people think of the earth today has been shifted to a degree.

        On a different note, Wang and people today hold high regard and relevance to the earth for the prosperity and the wealth that it has given them and their family.  Wang after an external conflict with the famine that made him heads to the south had given him a chance to reflect on how the importance of the earth was to him.   For many generations that pasted and future to come, they are going to need the natural resources that the earth provides.  For Wang, the earth had provided him with the wealth that he soon established after coming back from the south, he invested his findings into more land, knowing that he was to receive more of the land. In modern times, families depend on the resources that the earth provides, many of which they use for the everyday life. This shows that the relevance of the earth has always been there and will continue to be there until humans choses to abandon it.  Just as the earth had provided Wang with prosperity, people now have also prospered from it, for instance the enough resources to maintain a family, also entertainment usages of the earth and the industrialization of the daily life, making it possible for a tomorrow.  More and over, both Wang Lung and the modern-day person have prospered by the earth and from the earth.