Texts, Treks, and Bears Oh My!

            So here we are, my very last nature journal entry. Looking back, I think I’ve discovered quite a bit about myself and have takeaways from the class that I will attempt to apply to my everyday life a great while after the class ends.             For instance, having never entered a canoe, I am more willing to go on these excursions and will try to go on some that the campus recreation center offers. I have also become more aware of the nature around me and how I can affect the world with the smallest of actions.             Prior to this class, I had no idea that the nature center even existed, much less what was actually there. Even though half of the excursions we were supposed to go on were rained out this semester, I still enjoyed this experience and will be willing to go back to the nat...

            Another set of authors I wanted to discuss is Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan. They both bring up the connections of life and death, and humans and nature. We can agree that Dillard has a bleaker outlook of nature, as she states that “evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.” This contrasts with the belief that nature is nurturing and we should then protect it. According to Dillard, there is virtually no difference between human beings and barnacles as far as nature is concerned. To a certain extent I can agree with this—as a species humans are entirely self-centered and often view nature and its creatures as an “us versus them” kind of thing. However, human beings are also more complex in how we are built compared to barnacles. We often have a view of morality that nature does not account for.             Hogan, on the other hand, does ...

In my opinion, I believe that Wendell Berry is one of the most influential writers from the readings in this class, because with the paper and presentation I have pulled some of his thoughts and compared them to society today. The themes he address carry over to modern day society and are worth noting: we should appreciate the world we live in, and we should not fall victim to societal expectations. Berry also raises the question about what we as Americans view “wildness” in nature and if our definition is accurate or not. One point Berry makes that I thought was interesting was the point of humans thinking that we can solve problems of nature dwindling away by making wilderness preserves. As he states in the text, “…to me, this means simply that we are not safe in assuming that we can preserve wilderness by making wilderness preserves. Those of us who see that wildness and wilderness need to be preserved are going to have to understand the dependence of these thin...

Looking back on past readings in the class, I realized that there have been multiple authors who have influenced my view about nature and the conservation of it. A few weeks ago we looked at N. Scott Momaday’s thoughts with passages from A First American Views His Land. This text looks at how Native Americans view and feel about the land around them, which provides a start contrast to how the modern American views nature. For instance, Native Americans view nature as they are able to live in harmony with it, as a Native American “lives on the land; he takes his living from it; but he does not destroy it” (573). They view nature as being able to provide for them but they do not take more than what they need. From prior knowledge, Native Americans will hunt a deer and use every part of it, leaving none of it to go to waste. Modern Americans, however, do not view nature in this way. Large companies and the like will view nature as a source to be exploited, not taking...

            I find that the hardest part about writing is finding what exactly to write about. This was my initial dilemma when thinking about what to write for the final paper. There were a few ideas floating around in my head: there were the excursions in class, past trips I’ve taken in the past year with going up to Colorado and hiking around in Boulder, and smaller trips like going on the trails by the Trinity River. When thinking of the overall class, however, I decided to focus on the canoe trip. It happened back in September when hardly anyone knew about the class and all the readings, but when I look back on my experience there are things that strike me.             For one, although we constantly hear about the Trinity River not being nice (no one goes to the Trinity River to swim in it or anything like that), it was appalling trying to canoe and ha...