Emily's Nature Blog

A couple of class periods ago, our class went to the Amon G. Carter Museum of American Art to look at landscape paintings. Because of construction, apparently many of the paintings we intended to see were not on display. However, we still got to see some stunning landscape paintings and a plentiful amount of other paintings that seemed to honor nature and man's interaction in it. I really enjoyed the paintings depicting the American west, with its cowboys, Native Americans, and cattle.  One painting that I could have stared at forever was Sunrise, Yosemite Valley , and Albert Bierstadt painted it around 1870. Yosemite is one of the most breathtaking places in America, and it took me back to when I visited there with my family a few years ago. It struck me how easily I recognized the scene. A man painted his view in 1870, and I came upon the same scene about 140 years later. I felt like I was really sharing an experience with the artist because I had the same memory and feeling a...

From One Sun to Another I walk along the sidewalk after class. It is a bright, blustery day, but the wind does not bite as hard as it often does. Still, I scrunch my shoulders and wrap my coat sleeves around my hands to keep them from the cold. I feel the wind glide around my jacket-encapsulated torso, and I am grateful the material breaks the wind instead of allowing it through to my core. I do not do well in the cold. I walk quickly on to minimize my continued time in the cold, and as the sun’s heat does what it can to warm my face, something jumps out at me from the corner of my eye. I turn to look behind my shoulder, trying to find it again. I backtrack a few paces and there it is. The grass glints varying hues of green all around, and the season has spewed the dead brown leaves throughout the blades. The ground is a canvas of this uniform green and brown pattern. One thing has disrupted it. Up from the range of little green shoots and crumpled brown leaves rises a bright yell...

For this blog post I want to remark on some of my reflections from our class discussion of the Annie Dillard reading, “Fecundity.” As we discussed, ‘fecundity’ is the ability to produce an abundance of offspring or new growth. It is basically nature's response to death. Because living organisms cannot control when they die, the natural counteraction is the biological urge to reproduce. Dillard portrays the phenomenon of fecundity in a detailed fashion that makes the act of reproduction seem like a tool for increasing population mass in a gross manner. She describes eggs “dribbling out in we bubbles” and the goo of animals’ bodily fluids, the “broth” that is the aggregation of barnacle bits. The grossness gives the phenomenon a feeling of vile death and sickness rather than the sacredness we typically associate with birth and new life. But these are just natural processes viewed from a zoomed out lens. The scale is something we never encounter as humans, and we are accustomed to ou...

“Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost has always been one of my favorite poems. Whenever I have a long night of studying ahead of me, I have always told myself wryly, “only miles to go before I sleep.” Despite my joking manner sometimes, I also genuinely love this poem. I love the forest scene, with its quiet snow, a cold breeze brushing by, a horse’s soft snort. It follows the theme of solitude in nature that we have been contemplating in class, and while the poem has hints of loneliness, I more strongly get a sense of peace from it. I also find its descriptive imagery aesthetically pleasing; I can easily imagine the scene as if it were real. The traveler has endured a tiring journey, but in the moment that he stops to look around, I feel a sense of peace as he silently observes the forest. I imagine I am the traveler on my horse, feeling the girth of the horse between my sore legs, the simultaneous warmth in my core from activity and the cold frost on my extremities...

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...