Nature Blog - Prompt Entry #8

I feel like this has been the perfect class to take during my final semester at Chatham. I've taken two other eco-critical courses, and in this course I finally got to take what I've learned and apply it in my writing. I think my other classes were more focused on the issues and the literature, and less on the craft, so here I was able to combine my opinions with writing. My attitudes and views toward nature, the natural world, and the environment have changed pretty drastically since I started this master's program. I was very conservative and not at all environmentally-conscious; now, I am very aware of the relationships between natural world and humans, and I'm aware of how those terms are used and by whom. I feel like I have more questions to ask of any nature or environmental literature that I come across, and I can enter into the dialogue of the genre intelligently. I feel like I've read a pretty wide spread and I'll be able to place any future literature I come across in a context. And I have been making small changes in my day-to-day lifestyle that reflect my increased awareness. I recycle everything that I can, I try not to waste water, I'm conscious of my effect on my environment. I am still conservative, but I've found ways to bridge being conservative and taking action.

I have really appreciated this course and the opportunity to write about places and things that matter to me. I truly believe that place is an important aspect of everyone's life and that exploring it is interesting and fruitful. I've also come to believe that writing about nature and place and environment can be done in really beautiful ways, and as we've talked about in our discussion boards, is a way to get information and ideas about the state of the environment to a large group of people.

Though it wasn't always easy to get down to my "place" for the semester, it was a wonderful experience to observe and examine and at least mentally engage with a single place for an extended period of time. I felt like I got to know it in a way I hadn't before, even though it was already very familiar to me. Writing about it every week was a challenge, but it forced me to get creative in my format and descriptions. The weather was also a big challenge in this assignment because the seasons didn't really change until the very end of the semester. And the blog prompts really helped me to see how many different perspectives there are in writing about any one place. I feel like I've developed a new way of thinking and looking at the whole world, and I'm excited to further this and see how it continues to affect my life and writing. Nature and environmental writing is something I would definitely like to pursue and continue to develop as a skill.