Конкурсная работа _Московский Международный форум ОДАРЕННЫЕ ДЕТИ-2013_ДОМАШНЕЕ ЗАДАНИЕ_МОНОЛОГ

Камыкина Александра

МОУ «Гимназия №12»

Саранск, РМ

Номинация «Клуб лингвистов»,

Домашнее задание, монолог по теме

«Руины одного нужны вечно живой природе для жизни другого»

(Готхольд Эфраим Лессинг)

Good day, my dear readers. Or, I’d better say, listeners, hadn’t I? Well, it doesn’t matter. Perhaps, you would like a more official “Ladies and gentlemen”, wouldn’t you? Ok, then. You may think, I sound a bit more cheerful than any other British or American writer you’ve ever heard of; as for me, I am born a Scots-Canadian and naturalized a U.S. citizen, and that was what  determined  my life and my stories. My name is Ernest Evan Thompson, born in England of Scottish parents, and my family migrated to Canada in 1866. Most of my  childhood was spent in Toronto. I cannot say I was happy with my parents then. I often left the house for  retreating to the woods to draw and study animals as a way of avoiding Father. I even changed my name to Ernest Thompson Seton. I believed that Seton had been an important name in my paternal line.

So, let me introduce myself again. Ernest Thompson Seton, at your service. An author, wildlife artist, founder of the Woodcraft Indians, and one of the founding fathers of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). I am afraid I am partly  responsible for the appropriation and incorporation of what I believed to be American Indian elements into the traditions of the BSA.

You don’t think you have ever heard of me, have you? No problem. Let’s get to know each other. I like writing about animals, I am a devoted nature lover, and you guess what? I studied animals for thirty years, and was even awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1928 for my work, Lives of Game Animals, Volume 4.  Today that would sound funny, but probably, in some fifty years from now a big encyclopaedia will say , “Ernest Thompson Seton wrote 74 works about animal and forest life, drew it vividly and Seton Legacy Project has been organized as a major exhibition on Seton opening at the New Mexico History Museum on May 23, 2010, the catalog published as Ernest Thompson Seton: The Life and Legacy of an Artist and Conservationist by David L. Witt”… Some day people would make a movie, a popular 2009 TV documentary entitled, "The Wolf that Changed America”. Some day, but not today. What I want you to think is, eternal nature needs the remnants of the past to build the future. For all I know, nothing disappears in vain, if you understand what I mean. I have often thought about wildlife, and its generosity and cruelty, and have come to the conclusion: it’s the ever-lasting circle of life. The grass eaten by the herbivores, becomes flesh and blood to be taken by predators; when they die, they turn into soil, which gives life to the grass. It matches perfectly the triad of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” associated with the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and largely extended and adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Engels gave an example of a barley corn to rot, decompose and disappear, but when it grows and ripens, there appears to be more corn. And more of them bring a lot more. You know about German ideas, don’t you? I didn’t. I just saw it alive.

I have always known about this evolution law. My heroes in the Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), Biography of A Silver Fox (1909), Life-Histories of Northern Animals (1909),  Wild Animals At Home (1913), The Slum Cat (1915), Legend of the White Reindeer (1915) knew that, too. A tiny little jackal Tito, and a couple of sparrows in Steetsingers, and Arneut the pigeon, and the grizzly bears in The Biography of A Grizzly (1900), and Jack the rabbit, and Snup the dog, and Jim and his Winnipeg Wolf, and many others. Smaller animal are hunted by bigger ones, the latter are hunted by people, all of them to go into the earth again and thrive as trees, plants and flowers in spring soon.

I have always been sure that life in the wild is a strict teacher for us, people. It shows us  living beings from their birth till the end of their existence. But life exists everywhere, and even remnants of old trees may house smaller birds and tiny mammals.

My whole life has been spent to depict the beauty of nature, however severe it might seem to her children. Nevertheless, people have no right to bring harm to it. Every single mammal, bird, plant, reptile or insect deserves careful attitude, because it serves the global aim: to provides facilities for life to anything on Earth. No link in the food chain can be destroyed, killed or taken from, unless it has been done by natural reasons. If humans interfere in in, thus, ruining the circle of life, life comes full circle, too, ruining humans. It’s logical, isn’t it?

So, my only hope for the future is, that my readers will be sensible enough to think about the past and the present, and learn more about themselves through nice stories out of my soul.Thank you.