Why I have chosen to dismiss Thoreau and replace him with Sagan.

In the illuminating and witty 3rd-edition "An Incomplete Education: From Plato's Cave to Planck's Constant...Einstein to Gertrude Stein...Twelfth Night to Twelve-Tone Theory..." is a succinctly descriptive blurb about Henry David Thoreau (1816-1862). Such details listed include "how he earned a living." His occupations ranged from being a schoolteacher, pencil maker, and handy-man to fulfilling the role of a naturalist. Thoreau's famous novel/memoir "Walden" (1854) was a written documentation of his two years "spent communing with himself and Nature in a log cabin on Walden Pond" (14). The concise summary of Thoreau's renowned position amongst the American literary parvenues is that he "was one of the great American eccentrics and the farthest out of the Transcendentalists, and that he believed you should spend your life breaking bread with the birds and the woodchucks instead of going for a killing in the future's market like your old man" (14). This humorous paragraph was very candid and further emphasized his prestigious, yet outmoded status in the literary realm; thus, because he is such a patent, passe naturalist, I have decided to choose a more unusual figure, a man who is consistently heralded as the individual who brought the "Cosmos" into mainstream society: Dr. Carl Sagan. The late astrophysicist and astronomer was one of the first people to call attention to the detrimental climatic effects of nuclear annihilation and global warming. During the 1980s, he championed an avant-garde environmental movement that formed a seemingly incongruous, yet strong bond between science and religion in the task of protecting the weakening environment. The preeminent atheist's speech titled "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God" was given at the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland in 1985; I will use this lecture, formatted into a lovely book and edited by Ann Druyan, as my main resource in discussing the philosophy of Sagan and his theories on Earthly organisms and scientific forces working within our grand universe, temporal and speculative beings that are so important to the diversity of life. Sagan's zealous enthusiasm for garnering knowledge, questioning theories, and appreciating the world we live in, consequently demarcates Sagan as being one of the legendary naturalists of the 20th-century.