I can't necessarily name a favorite experience in nature, there simply have been too many. However, I can name one that happened most recently and was quite unexpected. Recently some friends and I found a spot on Nevada ave. where the road diverges and a section of woods from rock creek park opens up. In front of the woods is a long section of an open field. In the clearing there is one tree, stripped of all its branches. This tree is a single simple trunk shooting towards the sky. It is really quite beautiful to sit and look at the night sky and see the tree shooting up towards the moon and stars.

Of course, none of this area is in a pristine state. The clearing we found exists only because it is most likely maintained by man. However, this goes to the question of who decides what is a natural state. More importantly it begs the question, should such an unnatural clearing be saved. I am sure that this area could be bought and developed should the price be right. However, it would truly be a shame to lose some open greenery in the heart of the city. While I was there a famiily of four deer- a Buck a doe and two fawns- grazed past while my friends and I stood almost in awe of how brazen and unafraid they were. It was the closest I had ever been to a wild animal, within 15 feet. It would be a true shame to lose that.

For some reason, I can't recall a favorite moment engaging with nature. My whole childhood, though, I was fascinated with nature. I'd wake up super early in the morning to go exploring the woodsy areas near my house. They're by no means big forests, just small areas where they hadn't decided to put houses yet. I searched for everything: plants, animals, trails, etc. I was especially fascinated with water. I'd jump in creeks and try to figure out how all the little streams in all the different woodsy patches were connected. As I became a teenager and older, most of these different patches of land were developed, except one that was a township park. It made me sad to see these places where I had spent so much time as a child playing become cookie-cutter houses. I realize now that this isn't just isolated to the Philadelphia suburbs. There's sprawl all over this country, all over the world, and there's no places that are untouched. When I was a kid, I thought I was the only one to see those deer or romp through that creek. But I wasn't. Others saw the value of that small plot of land in a completely different way than I did. They saw its economic value, and now the area I grew up in is filled with more ugly housing developments than I ever dreamed.

And of course it's important to save nature! I don't even now how to begin answering why it's important, because it just seems so obvious to me. We all need to conserve ourselves because we all live on this planet, and at this point, we are all responsible for what happens to it. And while our day-t0-day lives seem very far from nature, in reality they are not. Aside from its economic and material purposes, these little patches of nature and wilderness are the places of spiritual awakening, personal reflection, and childhood curiosity. Nature gives us far more than we give it, and it should be a priority to preserve what we can. We need to accept that humans don't need to live on every possible space on the planet.

Enchanting Engagement with the Natural World

Wow, that's a tough one. Coming from the Midwest, I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by nature pretty much my whole life. My family has two lake cabins (pretty typical if you're a MN or WI resident) and I've spent many a summer lounging around the lake, swimming, canoeing, water skiing, etc. I love those times.

I suppose, though, that I would have to classify two different experiences as my most mystical/magical experiences with nature. I went to Australia last May, a trip that involved visiting the Great Barrier Reef and the Daintree Rainforest. I had been snorkeling before in various locales, but the Great Barrier Reef was truly something else. I not only say brightly colored fish and intricately formed coral, but I also saw translucent cuttle fish, giant sea slugs and clams, and pulsating jelly fish (that fortunately didn't sting me). We spent hours swimming around, trying to absorb it all - it's an indescribable, absolutely breathtaking experience.

During that same trip, we hiked through the Daintree Rainforest on two separate occasions, once during the day and once at night. The Daintree is the oldest living rainforest on earth, and flanks the Great Barrier Reef, which is an amazing arrangement to contemplate in and of itself. During the day, we went with a guide, trekking up the narrow path, listening to the babbling brooks, picking our way over the boulders and trying to avoid the leeches. The guide identified dozens of plant and insect species, as well as some cassowary excrement along the way (we were thrilled to be so close to one of those famed birds, and we got a chance to see it from the car later). We were the only ones around, and the serene environment was all too perfect. A few nights later, we took a night walk through a different part of the forest. We had flashlights, which allowed us to see the spiders that blended in with the tree trunks, the sleeping birds on tree branches, the geckos that regrew their own tales and the tiny tree frogs. The coolest part of the whole thing, though, was when the guide told us all to turn off our flashlights. That was the blackest black I could ever imagine! The tree cover was so intense and we were so isolated that it literally seemed as if we were submerged in black ink or something. I couldn't see even an inch in front of my face. It wasn't scary at all, though - it was incredibly humbling and wonderful. This was how nature intended the night to be.

To answer the second part of the question, OF COURSE we should be concerned with saving nature! Nature allows us to live yet we continually screw it up, in almost every way possible. If nature goes, humans will go right along with it. It is incredibly arrogant and disgusting for anyone to think that he/she is above the laws of nature and his/her agenda is more important that practicing good environmental stewardship. This is why the environment is one of my biggest campaign issues - if we don't have the environment, nothing else really matters: economic relations would cease to exist (how would any information be transmitted/resources transported?), human contact would be limited (how would we travel so easily between continents?), and disease would be far more rampant than it is now. Who would want that kind of life?

It bothers me that, during my encounters with nature, I am disturbing natural ecological processes to a certain extent. I always try my best to limit my "meddling," but at the same time these experiences have made me love and appreciate the environment even more. I think that if everyone could have similar experiences, we would not face the environmental crisis that we do today.

Growing up in the Poconos meant one thing, growing up surrounded by nature. Fortunately as a child I got to play outside a LOT. My friends and I always went exploring in the woods and would play on the trails made by deer hunters. We found so many exciting places in those woods. There was "Red Rock" which was a big open rocky area covered in red rocks; "The Dump" was a field with an empty kerosene container and some old bus seats; "The Tree House" was a fort used by hunters with a big ladder; "The Swamp" sounds much cooler than it actually was, but it was a marshy wooded area covered in moss and always filled up after a good rain; "The Waterfall" was a small waterfall we'd have races with soda cans on; "The Jumps" was a place filled with big piles of dirt which we'd ride our bikes over; and "The Powerlines" was by the river we'd walk across to get home at the end of the day. All of these places were literally in my backyard. We'd play there everyday and have adventures of all different kinds. I knew those woods like the back of my hand.

Now the woods have been replaced with residential housing. A community was built there towards the end of my senior year and all of those great places have disappeared forever. Growing up in the Poconos made me want to live in a city. Now that I'm here in DC, when I think about where my life will take me and where my life has taken me, I always see myself back in those woods. I look around at the concrete ground and massive buildings and realize what an ugly world we live in. I'd like to consider myself a "naturalist". You stamp something "organic" and I'll most likely throw my money in that direction. This is mainly because I think nature pretty much has everything figured out for us. Nature gives us everything we need and has a way of controlling our entire lives for the best. On top of that, nature can always figure out a way to save itself. However we cannot seem to figure out a way to return the favor to nature. As humans living in the "human world" we have somehow forgotten that we are also a part of the "non-human", natural world. We have disconnected ourselves from nature. What I think we should all do is take a step back and play in the actual, real world around us because saving nature essentially means saving ourselves.

Food and the Environment

I have to be honest, i do not consider the environmental impact of food that I eat. For the most part I consider only whats closest, easiest and cheapest. When i do go to the grocery store i definitely do not buy organic food or vegetables because they are the most expensive. In the morning I have coffee and a random sort of pastry that I am sure has a larger carbon footprint than a mack truck, afternoon i go to subway or boxed lunch where they give you more packaging than you could possibly need and at night i ussually cook food from the local giant-meat from slaughterhouses and farmed fish.

Looking at it now it feels like a terrible way to do things, knowing that how i operate is unsustainable. However, it is convienent and cheap and i am a college student in a city-those are the two most important points.

Vegans Rule the World

My favorite thing in the whole entire world is hands down, no questions asked, absolutely positively one thing: food. Food is by far the most important thing in our lives because it’s unavoidable, we need food to survive. And the beautiful thing about food is that when you eat it you make it a part of your body. Food becomes you. This is why I care so much about making proper food decisions. If you were to take away my clothes, my home, my blackberry, my car what would I have left? My body and the food choices I’ve made within it. So what I put in this machine of mine is very important to me on both the personal and environmental level.

One of my favorite personal attributes is that I am a vegan. A legume munching, soy guzzling vegan. I choose three times a day to refuse dairy and meat and opt for a more Eco-friendly dish. Not only do I whole-heatedly endorse veganism, I am an obsessive compulsive food label reader. I thrive off of organic and locally grown food. If I can’t pronounce it, I won’t eat it. That simple. I’d like to refer to myself as a naturalist when it comes to my diet, others would rather call me a leaf munching lunatic.

With each meal I encounter opposition to my lifestyle. “Why would you do that?” “What do you eat?” “Where do you get your protein?” “Is this really making a difference?” And I always answer the same way: an organic vegan diet is my own personal health insurance. I’m avoiding harsh pesticides, antibodies, steroids, and hormones every time I sit down to eat. Not only am I providing a sustainable lifestyle for myself, but this is the best thing I can do to help the planet which has been so generous to me.

I’ve done a lot of reading on the matter because as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs I love the environment, and as I mentioned before I love food. The two go hand in hand even though you wouldn’t think that by looking at the food staring back at you on your dinner plate. The more I read the more I realize it is increasingly clear that the choices we make about food today are leading to environmental degradation, enormous human health problems, and unimaginable cruelty toward our environment. One of my favorite quotes comes from Ghandi who said, “Violence begins with a fork.” Although this could be interpreted many ways, I like to think of it as a sort of motto to live by which means: The choices we make about what we consume echo throughout this world in unimaginable ways.

I do keep the environment in mind when I make food choices, but probably not to the greatest extent that I could. I'm a vegetarian for a multitude of reasons, one of which is the environmental impact of factory farming. When I grocery shop, I buy organic dairy, and produce if it's available at whatever grocery store I'm at that week. By no stretch of the imagination do I try to buy all organic, because there's no way I could afford to do so. And I'll admit, I've never bought local foods the whole time I've lived in DC (when I lived my family in PA, we did buy a lot of Amish produce, but when I'm on my own, I don't). It does cross my mind that my food has probably traveled the world more than I have. I should probably start trying to increase the amount of local and organic food that I buy.

I'm not really sure how to judge which of my food items has the greatest environmental impact. One of the articles we read talked about the sheer inefficiency of cereal production, so my Cheerios or Pop Tarts are probably pretty bad. I'm pretty sure that my Pop Tarts also have high fructose corn syrup in them, so that ties in perfectly with the environmental problems caused by midwestern corn farms. Or maybe my frozen dinner (not sure) or my coffee, because that had to travel very far to get to me. Not positive, but I'm sure they're all pretty bad.

I think if there's one thing I should do more of , it would definitely be buying local organic foods, especially produce, more often. My family used to do it because 1. things are fresher 2. things are (sometimes) cheaper 3. it supports the local community and 4. you know who grows your food.

Food and Its Role in the Environment

Unfortunately, I must admit that I don't really consider the environmental implications when I eat. I try to eat organic produce and such, but I usually think of it as a personal health issue (it's better for my body to eat it as opposed to it's better for the environment to produce it). I pride myself on most of my environmental views and actions, but now, getting into some of our food discussions and articles, I'm starting to think about the issue a little more: where is this grown? How was it prepared? How sustainable is this production?

Of the food I've eaten lately, I would think that the meat has had the most impact. The other day I ate a chicken breast Subway and had ham on my salad. I admit that I love meat and could never see myself being a vegetarian, although I can appreciate the benefits that come with that lifestyle, and I have several friends that espouse it. I'm sure that it took a huge amount of grain to feed those chickens and pigs, that the land was mismanaged in the process, that the workers weren't paid fairly, that the health standards weren't rigorously adhered to, etc. When I go grocery shopping, I try to buy the "all natural" luncheon meat and cheese, and other organic foods when I can afford it. A lot of times these types of food are hard to come by in your local Giant or Safeway, and instead are twice the price in places like Whole Foods. That, I think, is another reason why most Americans don't eat local, organic foods.

One activity that I would like to do on a more regular basis is go to farmer's markets. The quality and prices are great, and the business benefits the community. If more people realized the benefits of partaking in such activities, I think that the state of the environment and people's general health would simultaneously improve.

Essentially, when most people think about environmental problems, they usually think about factory and car pollution, oil spills, smog, etc, but it's not as easy to associate the production of food with environmental degradation. I find myself falling into that trap more often than not.
Unfortunately, because of this and the sheer propensity of fast food restaurants in this country, I think it will be hard to change the way Americans think about food (let alone actually change what they eat!). Hopefully education about these issues will become more widespread...