Emily's Nature Blog

Today I am commenting on one of the poems we read in class last week, as I particularly enjoyed it. Our Nature Center trip was cancelled due to inclement weather, and so to make up for it, we all gathered to share our worst rain experiences and read poems.              One poem was “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth. I had heard the phrase “I wandered lonely as a cloud” before, but I had never studied the lines closely before. Reading them this time, I realized they resonated with me in that the poem describes how I have often felt when in nature. At first the poem seems rather melancholy because the speaker muses about how he is lonely as a wispy cloud of air in the sky. But then he notices a “host” of golden daffodils and stops for a moment to take in their gaiety. This memory then stays with the speaker and brings him joy. Nature can have a lot of different effects on the viewer. We discussed this poem as being rela...

Today marked our third class day spent at the Fort Worth Nature Center, and it continued our hands-on outdoor learning, although it was a bit more painful than our past two Nature Center outings. Our first day, we used picks and shovels to dig trenches in the mud for a big water tank, and the second day we used large clippers to clean up the bison observatory deck. Today, however, we got to go a bit more into the ‘field,’ literally. We were tasked with clearing the mesquite trees that grow in one of the bison pastures. We gathered up our tools, the clippers and mini-saws, and got to work. Each Nature Center outing has involved a new type of physical activity that exercises my body in ways it has not experienced before, and this excursion was no different. I quickly discovered that many of the mesquite trees were too thick for the clippers, so I switched to the little saws. I worked at the trees, sometimes moving quickly from one to the next, and sometimes getting hung up on a particul...

For this blog post, I would like to respond to our reading of P.T. Barnum. We read an excerpt from his essay,  The Humbugs of the World , which he wrote as a “diatribe against billboards” (McKibben 81). In it, Barnum condemns people who “advertise in the midst of landscapes or scenery” because it injures the natural beauty and smears it with distasteful associations (81). He calls out advertising in nature as selfish and destructive to its beauty. Barnum particularly uses the words “purity” and “romance” when describing the earth that is violated by advertising and, therefore, greed and desire. One of the first points we made in class that I agreed with was how hypocritical the essay came off as to us. P.T. Barnum is credited for being the first one to use billboards in New York City, and he did so to promote his shows that capitalized off of people’s abnormalities and displayed them as freakish entertainment. He made his living by being a self-promoter and a promoter of hoaxe...

Ever since Cameron Potter from the TCU Outdoors Center came to our class and spoke about what he likes about nature, I have thought about what he said. He talked about the ethics of being in nature and sharing that space with other people, animals, and other living beings. It resonated well with our larger discussion of how humanity has treated the environment since the Industrial Revolution. His words were a good reminder that even though we feel like we have no control over governments and international supply chains, we can control what we do as individuals. We have our domain in which we live, and we can control how we behave within that. If I spend time outside, it is my responsibility to leave the place as I found it. Just as we clean up after ourselves in a self-serve restaurant, or how my mom used to tell us to leave our cousins’ house exactly as we found it when we stay over, we must simply clean up after ourselves. It is good manners within society, and those manners extend ...