Final Blog

Throughout this entire class, I have found myself contemplating my true place in nature. The idea of a place in nature can be twisted into so many concepts, so many ideas. My favorite place to physically be in nature, a place where I feel safe, is a huge tree in my backyard woods. My favorite poet I was introduced to throughout the class was Wendell Berry. In the poem “The Sycamore” he describes my relationship with that tree perfectly: "In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing..." My place in nature however, as far as a relationship with it is concerned, is to protect it. I feel connected with nature when I sit in my tree, when I look at my dog, and when I walk on the beach in front of my grandmother’s house. All of these experiences and relationships are perfectly integrated with nature.
One of the novels we read in the class entitled “Looking for Hickories: The Forgotten Wildness of the Rural Midwest” was written by an author who lives in my hometown. His name is Tom Springer and he was the most inspiring author we read, for me, and by far the most entertaining guest speaker we had the privilege to meet. This book was my favorite, not only for the numerous references to things that I have personally experienced (streets, shops, and homes), but because if the intense relationships the author depicts between himself and nature. I can so easily relate to that.
Nature has forever been a huge part of my life, my childhood especially is engrained with images of tree-climbing, sand pits, swimming and playing in the rain. These memories are priceless to me and this class gave me an amazing awareness for how important they really are to me. I have so many memories of myself and all the other kids from my neighborhood playing baseball with a type of fruit known as an osage orange. When I came across a passage in Tom Springer’s novel describing osage oranges, my heart fluttered. “And the softball sized fruit of the Osage is a study in delightful weirdness.” It’s these earthly relationships that connect us all at the core of our being.
In Alison Swan’s book “Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes”, there is a specific quote that has stuck with me throughout the semester. “The wind blows so hard off Lake Ontario that at odd times my entire house shivers and groans like a big elderly dog stretching in a dream.” This passage was written by Leigh Allison Wilson. Of all the works we read this semester, something about this warmed my soul. Maybe it’s my love for my old dog. Maybe it’s my similar experiences in an old house by the lake in a storm. Whatever it is, this, and other passages like it, brings me back to the raw nature of us as humans. We long for a connection to the natural world, to this earth from which we came. This entire class, overall, opened my eyes to this fact and so many more details of the importance of knowing your place in nat

A Giving Tree...

Of all of the poems we have been provided thus far, I have been touched most deeply by “The Sycamore” by Wendell Berry. Its words moved me so because of a specific tree that has been a part of my consciousness for as long as I can recall and is almost indiscernible from the detailed description Barry provides.
About a ten minute walk through the woods from my back porch stands the most noble, ancient tree I have ever laid eyes on. It is so tall and the branches so far-reaching that it is virtually impossible to decipher its edges from the trees around it. My tree sits in its own special space, surrounded for yards on all sides by flowering grasses and berry bushes in spite of the dense forest around it. It is almost as if all of the other trees avoid infiltrating this tree’s space out of respect for its strength and power. Its trunk is so thick that myself and two companions wrapping our arms around it cannot lock hands on the other side.
For as long as I can remember, I have watched this tree thrive season after season. I have seen it blossoming in spring and decorated with icicles in winter. I have watched its limbs fall and decay after a lightning’s unforgiving strike. I have seen the hollows in its sides multiply with age. I have listened as it cracked and struggled in the howling wind. It has withstood with great honor the attacks of humankind ourselves. One side of the tree bears scars of an attempted tree house aloft in its branches. High above the ground between two branches positioned perfectly for a resting spot, lies the only evidence of Ashley and Jake’s dwindling love affair.
When I think of all the world and life this sedentary tree has seen in my lifetime alone, I am struck by the reality that these events are a mere fraction of its earthly experiences. I am grateful to this tree for its inspiration, its comfort, and its joys. All of the times I have spent with this tree and all of the strength it has demonstrated to me are a testament to the true value of each person finding their place in nature.

The Makings of a Book

The idea that something as simple as a book itself began, literally, as a piece of nature is something we can all too easily forget. Today’s books, admittedly, began with trees and water, but throughout the process of transformation from branch to book, so many unnatural elements are introduced that it is difficult to bring ourselves to have the same connection with the natural element of everything we come into contact with than it would have been, say, 600 years ago.
In her poem “Parchment”, Michelle Boisseau recounts the now ancient process of creating a book from beginning to end using only natural ingredients. She accounts for every detail from page to ink and the process of each element’s transformation. She recalls a list of animals that would have lost their lives to the production of the book, including assistants to the illuminator who dropped “like flies” after preparing the arsenic for the yellow die. Each color, not only time consuming and labor intensive, comes at an additional cost.
The irony of the lesson? All of the hours of work, all of the sacrificed lives, all for the eyes of one lone observer. This book is labored over by the common people who will never have the joy of gazing upon the completed project for the enjoyment of one person with enough money and power to sustain the project.
The beauty of a poem like this, however, ties very nicely into the class topic “Our Place in Nature”. It serves to remind us that every single thing we use in our daily lives originated from a natural process or a natural place. Now in today’s world, most everything is synthetic, but the idea that, at one time, every single thing we take for granted, things as seemingly simple and commonplace as books, originally took this much effort and came from an entirely natural source is astonishing.

Health and Wellness and Nature.

Last Wednesday I attended the Health and Wellness Expo at the Student Recreation Center. Among many vendors for various products and services related to every facet of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, there was a specific display that caught my attention. Shaklee, a company specializing in all-natural products of all sorts, had a stand overflowing with all sorts of cleaning products and personal care products, each one of which was completely devoid of any unsafe chemicals. When I approached the woman behind the display, she immediately started into her spiel about the benefits of using her products.
My interest in this sort of information begins at home. My mother suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and is extremely sensitive to any and all fragrances and chemicals in every form you could possibly imagine. When the saleswoman plugged her products with the statement “Your baby could literally drink this entire bottle and you wouldn’t even have to call poison control.”, I knew immediately that this was something that would be extremely beneficial to my mother. Not only do the ingredients in these products frighten me because of my mother’s hypersensitivity to them, they frighten me because I have spent a lot of time looking at the damage that can be done by exposure to the chemicals within the products. The same poisonous chemicals that are sprayed on crops and are linked with countless illnesses are the chemicals that we willingly spray into the air in our homes and rub into our skin.
So, along with efforts to stay closer to nature in other ways, it is important to remember to stay close to nature even in ways that you wouldn’t normally consider “natural”.

Reduce, Reuse. Recycle,

 As I walk across campus, the crisp fall air swirls hundreds of leaves up around me.  Sadly, on this particular walk, I am encountering more litter than leaves.  I am frustrated by the fact that on this many occasions, someone can’t be bothered to dispose of their garbage in a trash can.  It’s not for the lack of available receptacles on campus.  It bothers me even more when a plastic water bottle or a piece of paper blows past me.  Recycling is sort of an obsession of mine (it literally borders on OCD) and the idea that some people don’t do it in spite of the fact that it is one of the easiest and, nowadays, most effortless forms of environmental sustainability truly gets to me.  My roommate actually gets annoyed with me and my sorting and spastic collecting of recyclable products.  One of my biggest pet peeves about living here on campus is the amount of Styrofoam that gets thrown away because of the lack of proper receptacles, but I digress.

The point I am really getting at is that our campus is a beautiful one.  We are extremely lucky.  And we should take the initiative, even the little passive steps, to maintain that beauty.  My connection to the area, I know, has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up mere minutes from campus and my sister and I have spent so much time outdoors in Kalamazoo that I consider this a part of my home. 

Reflective Rantings...

When I was young, I spent hour upon hour playing in the back woods of my home, watching chipmunks scurry past, chasing garter snakes through the trails, trying to catch fish with my bare hands in the stream.  Consequently, my first thought, whenever anyone says the word "nature", is of animals.  I have always maintained a strong connection with the animal kingdom.  My childhood home was always been filled with animals: dogs, cats, mice; we even had a hedgehog once, and my plan, before deciding on illustration, was to become a veterinarian.
This class, though, has refocused my attention on the parts of nature that aren't quite so "alive".  As the breeze rolls through the rustling leaves, as the rolling brook splashes against the fallen oak, I see life all around me.  Each drop of rain, each spring elm bud, represents a cycle from which each one of us has come and to which each one of us will someday return.  (Can you tell that Lion King is my favorite movie? I might as well break out in song.) But until you have been awakened to the immensity of that life, you are ignorant to its beauty and consequentially will not be empowered to act on its behalf. And that is the goal of this course, I suppose, to bring that beauty, that life, to our attention, to bring it to the forefront of our minds so that we, as the next generation, will be motivated for its protection.

Top of the Food Chain.

I sit in my World Ecological Problems class, a lecture hall filled with about sixty other students, and my teacher is lecturing about the food chain. The worry that it was going to be a very dry lecture day quickly turned into a picture of me hanging on Professor Wilson's every word. Our lecture weaved in and out of the basic concepts of food chain, but quickly turned to our choice of foods and the energy price we in turn pay for those choices.

In essence, as the sun's energy moves up the food chain, as much as ninety percent of that energy is lost. For example, when a cow eats grass and humans then eat the cow, much of the grain's energy will have been lost on the cow's metabolic process. So, eating meat is far less "evergy-efficient", so to speak, than eating a vegetarian diet. The lower on the food chain we eat and the more of the sun's energy we use, the more people the Earth will ultimately be able to sustain. In addition, far more fossil fuel energy is used in the production of meat as opposed to the production of crops. "Calorie for calorie, researchers estimate that beef requires 16 times more fossil fuel energy and creates 24 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a mixed diet of vegetables and grains" (Withgott 154).

My thoughts turned to our class discussions of Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and her ideas of keeping your food choices as close to home as possible, as natural as possible and as sustainable as possible. If each of us could take the small steps to incorporate more of these ideas into our routine food choices, the impact would be incredible.

Withgott, Jay, and Scott Brennan. Essential Environment: the Science behind the Stories. San Francisco: Pearson, 2009. Print.

Art in Nature. Nature in Art.

As an aspiring illustrator, art is an immense part of my everyday life. As a person with such a deep connection to nature, it too is very important to me. When I visited ArtPrize in Grand Rapids last Sunday, I realized how many other people share that same passion for both art and nature. When we first entered the main display area in the open air of downtown Grand Rapids, I was blown away by the sheer strength of some of the artworks displayed. Below, I decribe some of the favorite pieces I encountered.

Dancing With Lions
by Bill Secunda

One particular piece, for example, was a sculpture of a family of lions made entirely of old welded nails, entitled "Dancing With Lions". The artist's statement mentioned the importance of lions throughout the artist's life as a symbol of strength and perserverance. This particular piece of artwork meant the most to me of all the ones we encountered that day. Nature is an aspect of life that can empower and inspire those who encounter it.



Broken Tusk
by Lori Hough



In the artwork "Broken Tusk", the artist used paper mache to emody half of an elephant's face with one broken tusk. The sculpture represented the fragility of even the most immense and regal creatures.



Fibonacci Sequence

by Danielle Burnside



Some works were even more subtly inspired by the beauties of the natural world. "Fibonacci Sequence" seems to be inspired much less by nature than by a mathematical or scientific source, when in fact, the fibonacci sequence appears in many natural places. The pattern of the florets in the center of a sunflower, the spirals of a shell and the arrangement of a pine cone are all representation of the mathematical sequence.

See the Forest Through the Trees

by Jacqueline Gilmore

"See The Forest Through the Trees" and "The Death of Mother Nature" both reflected many of the ideas represented in the stories we have read in class. Humankind's destruction and disregard of the natural world are obviously resonating with much of society.



The Death of Mother Nature

by Gary Bacon

Many of these artist's opinions about nature and their connections to it and their representations of the natural world reminded me of the discussions we have had in class. As I walked through the collections of artwork that day, a particular quote from one author we've read stuck in my mind. 

"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads" -Henry David Thoreau



Photos taken from: artprize.org

What will you leave us this time?

As I roam aimlessly through my backyard woods, Buddy rushes past me, intent on overcoming the rabbit that preceded him.  Notes from an acoustic guitar wind their way through computer chips and plastic, into my headphones, ultimately reaching the part of my soul that is perpetually moved by their every motion.  The child inside me is soothed by their connection to infinite emotions and memories.  As of late, the lyrics of this particular song have touched me in an oddly different yet similarly inspiring way.  Feeling particularly thoughtful, I locate a patch of dry leaves near the river and settle in for a respite.

At first glance the lyrics seem completely devoid of reference to issues of environment, but when I hear the song in these particular surroundings, my first thoughts are of my generation’s responsibility to the environment and my personal obligation to the protection and appreciation of our earth.  What, I question, makes us so willing to ignore the signs of the damage we are doing to our home?  Maybe we are just too fortunate.  Maybe we take for granted the beauty of what we have.  Too easily, we brush off the idea that our earth needs our help in sustaining itself. 

From the top of the tree under which I sit, a squirrel descends, scurrying past and interrupting my thoughts.  Just as that seemingly insignificant squirrel plays a definitive role in the processes of his home, we have an even greater part in maintaining the balance of our own.

Maybe we find it difficult to feel sorry for something that seems so powerful, so eternal, so larger than life.  I admit, sometimes I find it hard to contemplate that I might make a difference to something this grand.  But that’s exactly it.  Without us, without our help, the earth will waste away.  It will fade and wither, becoming only a remnant, a washed-out memory of its former majesty.  This entity that gives us life does so asking nothing more in return than for us to afford it the same respect.  It’s ironic. We hold the cards. 

The final notes of the song play out and I am rocked by the pulsating beat of the next song on the playlist.  Swiftly, I rip the headphones from my ears, hoping to maintain some of the wonderful connection I had felt only moments earlier. 

As Buddy and I make our way over the last of the heavily-wooded hills, I gaze back to my resting spot.  My reflections leave me with the gnawing feeling that something must be done.  Something must be done to protect this universal house.