Beginning to "Think Like a Mountain"

           Coming into this class, I often thought about nature as something to be valued and experienced by people. Growing up, I was always outside, using trees as my personal jungle gym or the wooded area of my backyard to supply the ingredients of magic potions and roly-poly houses. I experienced the outdoors as a place to be free and creative. However, the outdoors I grew up with was far from wild, and probably a decent amount of it consisted of non-native species. After some years of experiencing a wilder type of nature, while working at a summer camp, it has invoked a new fondness for the peace that nature radiates. Now, I view nature as a healing place, a bubble that protects me from the fast pace and overwhelming aspects of my day to day.

           Upon delving into Thoreau, Wordsworth, and Leopold in class, I have learned about their personal philosophies on how humans, society, and nature should or should not come together. Learning about their spiritual ideologies of the wilderness, and how essential maintaining wilderness in the world is essential to life led me to reflect on how often I disregard nature. Although I have a great appreciation for nature when it is convenient for me or I experience the benefits of spending time in the great outdoors, I my everyday life, I am too caught up in school, work, clubs, technology, and planning the future to concern myself with the freedom that comes with nature. In his 1854 essay series, Walden, Thoreau states, “inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways,” He furthermore shares, “actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day . . . He has no time to be anything but a machine.” Thoreau’s radical sentiment towards society as of large and his high esteem for living present with nature contrast with the modern view of a good and successful life. Although his ideas are radical, I find Thoreau’s message to be one that many people in modern society need to hear. The societal norm of devoting one’s life to an occupation and striving for the material things we think will make us happy trap us in an apathic mindset towards nature. Apathy is one of the most dangerous human mindsets towards the survival of the wilderness on this Earth. In addition to apathy, Leopold argues selfishness and greed are other societal shortcomings that create massive environmental problems. Selfishness, greed, and apathy distort societies’ value of nature to regard it as something that should not be protected unless it is profitable to industry. Being able to understand land ethics, Thoreau’s general nature philosophy, and the society versus wilderness relationship, has enlightened me to a new sense of my relationship to the wilderness. I am excited to begin devoting time to work with the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge because time spent in the wild is time spent in freedom.