“A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and always will be.”
Of all our readings in class this semester, the one that struck me most was “The Trouble with Wilderness” by William Cronon. Throughout the article, Cronon discusses the varying viewpoints of wilderness throughout history. He notes its progression from an entity that was seen as negative, “savage,” and fear-inducing to one that was seen as sublime, spiritual, and emotion-evoking and as an uninhabited frontier, open for exploration and individualism. I was very intrigued by the differences between each of these perspectives, but the one that had the biggest impact on me was what TLB calls the “homebody” perspective.
Regarding the “homebody” perspective, Cronon emphasizes the importance of not just seeking nature on the tops of mountains and in famous national parks, but noticing the nature all around us. Many people have this view of nature as only being something that an individual has to go far away from home in order to witness, Chaco’s and backpack in tow. However, we often fail to identify and appreciate the nature we encounter each and every day, from the chirp of birds that wakes us up in the morning to the rush of wind that whispers to us as we return home late from the library. He says, “Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away—a lesson that applies as much to people as it does to (other) natural things.” As an example of this, Cronon discusses how a tree in our backyard is just as worthy of our admiration and appreciation as a Kaori tree in Waipoua Kauri Forest (my favorite type of tree – they are HUGE); they are both equally parts of the nature that makes up this extraordinary world.
This passage really hit home for me because I can definitely tend to be one of those people, one who forgets that there are trees in my own backyard. At school, I often find myself, as Mike words perfectly in his post “Stepwise Learning,” “isolated in[my] own academic coma.” Sometimes I find myself becoming disconnected from the world because I am so bogged down with meetings and lab reports and essays that my main objective is to simply make it from one place to the next, overlooking the solace of nature that is right in front of me. I take for granted the beautiful campus that UR is and the opportunities for exploration that it offers.
Earth Lodge has really helped me to rouse from this academic coma and to strengthen my connection with my surroundings. Even after our short journey on the first day of class, I began to appreciate UR’s campus so much more. In my blog post ” Unrequited Love,” I talk about the contrast between man and nature around Little Westham Creek, a creek that I never knew existed until that chilly Wednesday afternoon. The idea that our campus was part of Westhampton Lake’s own little watershed was something I had never considered before and made me realize just how connected it is with the surrounding land and how important it is to our campus. In my blog post, “The Giving Tree,” I discuss my discovery of the importance of Gambles Mill Trail, a trail I thought I knew well but actually knew close to nothing about. Also, hearing Andrew McBride discuss the extensive planning that goes into the aesthetics of campus, such as engineering the road so that when cars turn in to campus they immediately see Boatwright Tower, stirred up in me an even great admiration for the campus that I meander each and every day. While before I certainly did appreciate the tranquility of the blue heron that occasionally graces us with its presence and how the soft light of the stars reflects off the lake at night, gaining an increased array of knowledge of our campus has allowed me to grasp the importance of each feature and to reinforce my relationship with the place that I spend 8 months of my life each year.
Another part of Cronon’s article that struck me was that “wildness can be found anywhere . . . even in the cells of our own bodies.” Back to my struggle with my academic coma – reading this really helped me to see the connectivity between my academics and the nature around me. As I was perusing last year’s Earth Lodger’s blog posts, a post by Hans called “Nature and the Scientific Mind” really grabbed my attention. Hans discusses how after realizing he didn’t need to separate science and nature, it made nature even more beautiful. After reading his post, I really got to thinking about all the science I have learned and connecting it to things I see everyday around campus, such as how the antioxidants in the tea Earth Lodgers drink work and why we only ever see one side of the moon. Before, while I was completely in awe of them, I was struggling to find the ultimate value in having an understanding of such microscopic processes like DNA replication and membrane transport. However, being able to see nature and wildness in these entities and being able to connect these processes to the world that surrounds me has allowed me to really treasure what I have learned and appreciate how it connects with my environment.
It seems like I was just returning to school after summer, apprehensive about what exactly Earth Lodge would entail. I had no idea our class would incite in me such a desire to get to know both campus and Richmond in general. However, it has done both and has exceeded my expectations with regards to having applications to the real world that surrounds me. The “homebody” perspective in Cronon’s article emphasizes discovering a “common middle ground in which [everything] from the city to the wilderness can somehow be encompassed in the word ‘home.'” I believe that Earth Lodge is helping us all do that and I can only hope to further this feeling and to increase my ability to find wilderness in my own backyard.