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 ...

           Last Wednesday, our Honors class made our first nature excursion together on the Trinity River. We met up at the Rec center and piled into the vans hauling the canoes and other floating supplies. I grew up kayaking and canoeing with my Dad at our farm and around Arkansas, so my excitement to try out a new river grew as we got closer to the take-in spot. I actually used to be quite good at kayaking-I got to where I could do Class IV rivers at one point!-and some of my funniest memories are of my friends and family canoeing together down the Buffalo River. I have not yet done the outdoorsy activities in Texas that I usually like doing in Arkansas, like hiking and canoeing, so I was interested to see what this experience would be like. Wednesday was the first time in a long while that I had carried a canoe from the trailer to the river, and I must say my arms were extremely out of shape for such an activity. It was probably a comical sight to...

For my second nature blog, I walked around campus for a bit to find a subject I liked. Since I wrote about a tree for my first nature blog, I decided to shift my focus, and look down, for my second one. I walked to one of my favorite spots on campus, which is also one of the most underrated spots in my opinion: the sundial circle right next to Ed Landreth Hall and the Walsh Performing Arts Center. I have always liked it because it is a little garden unlike most of TCU’s other beds. Various flower bushes encircle a concrete pad with a sundial painted on the floor and a small pedestal rising up bearing another little sundial. I like the circle of dense greenery speckled with color rising knee length high, sequestering off a little astronomic sanctuary. Because the spot is nestled away from most of main campus, it is also always quiet and never busy. It always feels so peaceful when I walk by to my theater history class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. I often look over at ...

First Nature Observation On my nature observation, I walked around TCU’s campus for a bit trying to find something that captured the serenity that I enjoy experiencing best when in nature. I found it in this tree. Located in front of Jarvis Hall, it is unlike any other tree I have seen on TCU’s campus before. As I was walking around to find a subject to observe, I realized I rarely look away from my phone or the path in front of me in my hurried walks to class. So, there could well be more trees of this kind and I just have not noticed before. I reflect now that I ought to slow my pace from time to time and take in more of my everyday surroundings, because there is much more to take in than a first glance suggests. On campus it feels as though everything is familiar, and the trees are all in their preplanned spots, and I am aware of all that is there. But taking in this moment has showed me I am mistaken.  I am not familiar enough with trees to know what kind this one is, ...