“‘I see nothing but road’ Brad replies. Then Brad jumps in the bay and swims three miles to Lonesome Point and back. Says Brown Dog, ‘I didn’t bother asking him if he had seen any fish'” (205). 

I think this is a very common mentality of many Americans, where it becomes less about the journey but more of a focus of achieving a goal, and perhaps some sense of satisfaction by doing so. We lose something by the inability to slow down and just enjoy what is around us.

“Eating crow (boiled), like humble pie of animal innards, may have been distasteful, but eating small birds was a treat, and commonplace” (224).

I find this notion very obvious and quite laughable. I would be horrified to eat a crow or a robin per se, because it is not in the norm of our culture. However, buying packaged meat from the store, such as hamburger, can contain the DNA of over 100 different animals. That fact is so much more repulsive to me and yet this is the daily accepted practice of most Americans on the East Coast.

“Still, feeding wild birds is a form or nature management, although a lot of people who do it do not recognize their hobby as a form of nature manipulation” (237).

I certainly never realized this fact until Sterba so clearly stated it in this sentence. By feeding birds, even though it has low negative consequences, we are still manipulating nature for our own enjoyment and in a way that is unnatural.

I came across this article as I was scrolling through the Nature Conservancy’s website for internship opportunities. We have been talking a lot about the excessive deer populations throughout the country and thought this was an interesting approach to managing the populations. In the “Lawn carp” chapter of Nature Wars they even mentioned bringing geese to a slaughterhouse on Long Island where the meat was then donated to various food pantries. This article suggests a similar practice but for deer.

As we discussed in class today we saw some things in Cabella’s that may have been using hunting as a cover to just sell guns but I think that this article sheds light on the topic and that real hunting is important. There are hunters out there that are using it an art form and really care about the deer. Unlike those that shot birds at Hawk Mountain, the hunters in this article are not abusing their power just to destroy the deer without using their meat. This article gives some light that hunters can really help in the conservation of deer populations while helping the hungry as well.

http://blog.nature.org/science/2015/11/04/hungry-change-deer-management-food-security-hungry-venison/

I’m a big fan of the Adult Swim show, “Off The Air.” The episodes are all about 12 minutes long and are all available on YouTube. The show is a series of strung together vignettes and music that all follow a loose theme. Each episode is a one word theme (dance, falling, nightmares, nature, etc.) and includes stock video, bits from other movies or videos, and a lot of strange animation. These videos are incredibly fun to watch, as they break the traditional “rules” of media and rest gently on the border between profound social commentary and complete nonsense.

The one entitled “Nature”, however, displays some pretty great symbolism that represents and critiques humans’ relationship with nature, especially through film, art, and hunting. I made a bit of a scavenger hunt (much like the one in Cabela’s), and would love to know if you found these things in the video and what you think the filmmakers were trying to say by including them:

1. Flash Drive -> Owl
2. Hunter & Rabbit
3. Digitizing nature
4. Drumming birds
5. Milk & Honey
6. Park Bench
7. “What’s up?” birds
8. Bear & Rabbit
9. Rhino & Airplane
10. Cartoonization
11. Dog “blob”

One thing I want to direct everyone towards is their attempt to reverse anthropomorphization. How did they do it? Do you think it worked?

NAture Wars

Feeding wild birds is, in essence, a form of wildlife management- some say use– in which participants manipulate the natural world to create outcomes they want- in this case, using food to lure birds into viewing range” (234).

It all depends on how you see it. Feeding birds can have the effect of introducing massively more amounts of seed into an environment than was ever intended, or natural, and there are averse impacts that your average outdoor enthusiast could never have seen coming.

Walden

“Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense?… While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will any not endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” (353).

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pondside; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface or the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now” (Thoreau 351). 

This message will be the one that I hold closest to me while concluding my adventure through Walden. Thoreau and I agree wholeheartedly that one of the more threatening dangers to humans is the ease with which we can fall into the deep “ruts of tradition and conformity.” Pair this passage with the volumes of studies done on how mental and emotional health deteriorates due to the pressures of conformity. Falling into these ruts robs oneself of discovering the truth about life and themselves. Allowing each individual within a society to stay in the “cabin passage” inhibits the potential for social progress. Staying below the metaphorical deck does not permit us to question traditions and conformity that marginalizes, endangers, and disrespects members of society as well as the environment in which society resides. If every member of society followed Thoreau’s advice, in this passage, we would be living in a much better society.

“It is obvious that people would eat a lot less meat if they had to hunt, kill, skin or pluck, eviscerate, disassemble, and cook whatever animal or bird or fish they wanted to consume. These tasks are work, and many people would find them unpleasant. The modern protein industry made it much easier and cheaper to get battered, ready-to-eat chicken parts from the freezer section of a food store and pop them into a microwave or toaster oven. Even serious cooks buy raw chickens, whole or in parts, with feathers, heads, and feet removed, usually packaged in a plastic tray, resting on a little paper diaper, and sealed in a clear plastic wrap. Those birds have come a long way from the chicken coop” (Sterba 199).

This is the phenomenon that, for me, is at the root of the overconsumption-of-meat problem. I truly believe that everyone should at least see what it takes to kill and process food, specifically that which was once a living animal. This is yet another reason that I am pro-hunting for food/population stabilization. I truly think people would reconsider their meat consumption if they saw the inside of a slaughterhouse or had to kill and process an animal themselves.

At some point in high school, one of my friends stumbled upon this video and popularized it within my grade. It’s 65 seconds of awkward amusement, and our adventure at Cabela’s this Saturday reminded me of it. A few of us discussed our thoughts on and impressions of taxidermy which ranged from feelings of being creeped out to feelings of being sad for the loss of life and glorification of death by human dominance. I think this video is funny, but what does it say about taxidermy? Is it presented as an art form or as an assertion of humans controlling that which they seek to kill?

My boyfriend and many of my close friends from home attend Binghamton University in upstate New York and have told me about the nature preserve that they have on campus and how beautiful it is. In addition to hearing about this preserve I also heard about the great lengths that the University goes to in order to protect the spotted salamander populations. Sterba’s piece about roadkill reminded me of the efforts that Binghamton University goes to in order to protect the spotted salamander that lives in this Preserve.

In order to migrate from the woods where the salamanders burrow in the winter to Harpur pond in the spring where they breed, they must migrate across a campus roadway. In order to protect them from cars the University actually shuts down this roadway for weeks at a time. The university has also installed salamander ramps. These ramps help the salamanders reach the club and get over to the other side. Before these ramps were installed in 1978, the animals often were trapped in the roadway, died of dehydration or were picked up by crows.

Salamander ramp

What do you guys think of Binghamton’s efforts to save this species? Do you think that Lafayette would ever do something like this if there was a population that needed help? Maybe our new efforts to save birds from flying into windows could be our version of this!

“That is to say, once people moved into the sprawl, they considered it to be damaged habitat, no longer natural and thus less worthy of protection. Europeans, on the other hand, viewed the places they lived as natural ecosystems that required intensive human management, however heavily populated. Living spaces in Europe were thought of as “in a sense, human created nature or natural systems.” In North America, in contrast, the primary policy goal was the protection of nature that was as pristine as possible–meaning the largely peopleless nature over the horizon, up north or out west” (Nature Wars 217)

Harks back on what we classify as nature/wilderness. The view in US of nature as something untouched by man makes integration impossible and may have resulted in an unnecessary degradation of nature in suburban communities.

” The spell of human and livestock waste was part of farm life. On a good, hot summer day wehn the wind was right, we smelled manure from our neighbor’s farm down the road. These everyday smells have gone missing from the lives of most americans…They expected a kind of quiet landscaped outdoor museum in which their views never change and the smells were all pleasant. The concept of a working landscape didnt occur to them” (Nature Wars 196).

Also similar to discussions of nature as something picturesque, that people don’t actually interact with. Reminded me of walden in bemoaning the way that lifestyle has changed in favor of older ways of living.

” However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not as bad as you are. It looks porest when you are richest. The fault- finder will find faults even in paradice. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house” (Walden 356)

Thoreau has a far more positive and inspiring message here than was present in the rest of the text to the everyday man. When earlier in the book Thoreau had told the common man to reject their everyday lives of toiling in pointless jobs, he has now shifted his tune and is telling them to appreciate what they have.