How does this happen? Someone thinks of a good idea, writes it out, and someone else reads it and thinks "Wow, what an asshole." Well, Leopold sort of did sound like a white guy in control of his land when I read his account of seasonal change in Sand County. Yet his land ethic feels much more authentic to me because he abandons his notion of "his" land and extends it to a consciousness for all elements of the land. John Muir wandered the wilderness in order to study the process of plant diversity across differing ecosystems but wrote for social change to preserve these lands. Thus, people thought John Muir was being elitist for taking plant samples in land he wanted to keep everyone out of. I write in this with a certain idealism in order to reflect and continually grow upon my goals and sound as if I am preaching or bragging. How does one then communicate without the danger of misinterpretation?
I don't think there is much of a solution to this. As Lacan would say, the object is a failure and one can never fully communicate through language. In order to be interpreted, an object must be delivered by one person and interpreted by the other, and each person's own experience with the object is taken into account. This is understood by a childish game of telephone or asking a group of people to draw a leaf; everyone has their own interpretation of what a leaf looks like, but there are different manifestations of what the object leaf can mean.
I do think there is a certain delicacy to argument a writer must consider. Alas, once something is written it takes on its own life beyond the one who wrote it. It is constantly recreated through each who encounters it.
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