521 prompt #12, or "further on down the road"

Brace yourselves for my potentially generic question…

How has this class changed your conception of man’s relationship to nature?

In more than a few significant ways, but I’ll try to narrow it down a bit:

Since my first backpacking trip nine or so years ago, I have harbored what I know now could best be described as a Romantic appreciation for nature. I have loved being in nature, I have loved writing about nature, and I have loved musing on nature when my day-to-day life has kept me within this or that city. One thing this class has done for me, though, is to show me that this at-a-distance appreciation isn’t enough. To treat nature as something to be kept at a distance, cradled and held aloft, is not only limiting, but in our current state of environmental crisis it is also irresponsible. Nature is not just a rarely-visited, sectioned-off old-growth forest in the middle of a National Park: it is instead part of our lives even in the hearts of our largest cities. Even in a sea of concrete, nature is vitally present through its very absence, through our need to acknowledge our place in the cycle of life and death. To fail to acknowledge this, I’m starting to think, is to miss the point.

For their part, the Romantic poets and other writers we have studied in this class are no longer abstract ideas to me. I no longer prize, say, Emerson simply because he said a few nice things about trees. There are ideas worth taking from Emerson, and there are flaws in his ideas that need to be addressed; the same could be said of any of the other authors we’ve read this semester. Whereas I previously saw anyone who had famously written on nature or the environment as a bit of a kindred spirit, now I see such revered members of the nature-writing canon somewhat similarly to various religious denominations: each has some things to offer me that are of interest, but I’m unlikely to ever set foot in any of their churches and put money in their offering plate again.

One thing that I am certainly interested in continuing to explore is the borderline between our contemporary perception of the idea of “nature” or “wilderness” and the urban spaces we so desperately insist on differentiating from these ideas. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of exploration of this differentiation in the readings we have done; indeed, it seems this is an issue that is just recently becoming en vogue, perhaps due to writers such as Edward Abbey, who problematize the idea that somehow glass, concrete, and cars insulate us from the natural world. When we die, do we not still return to the earth?