I want an acre

After reading "One Acre" by Joy Williams I have decided it sounds like something I would like to do. Williams bought an acre of land on the edge of the Everglades and just let it grow. She had a house there to live in, but it was a humble house and she made few improvements on it. Eventually, she walled the property in along the road and nature grew wild. From her descriptions, it sounded like a very beautiful place.

It isn't just the beauty that attracts me, it is the idea of creating an area where nature doesn't have to be managed. It can just be. There aren't very many places like that anymore in this world. I understand the reason for that, I really do. I am human and I would like to sustain our population because I believe there are some wonderful things about the population. But as a consequence of population growth, the land around us is affected. Throughout this whole experiment of mine, I have realized, practicality aside, that it saddens me to see so much altered for our civilization.

Protecting just a small area from human change and letting it go through its own natural changes seems like a very nice way of giving back. In a way, it is not actively doing anything, instead it is actively doing nothing except what is necessary. Just as Williams realized, the most important part is making sure it is protected even after I leave it. She searched for the right person to sell it too and I would have to do something similar. I hope I get the chance to facilitate a piece of pure nature.

My wilderness experience

I just got back from a fabulous three-day weekend at Nordhouse Dunes near Manistee, Michigan. It was the best weekend I have had in a long time! The trip was for my Wilderness Writing & Experiences course through the School of Journalism. The class consists of one camping trip. That's it. We turn in a journal at the end of the trip and write a nature essay at the end of it. It is quite literally the best class I have ever taken.

We left on Friday morning, had a quick stop in Muskegon for a lesson on sand dune ecology, and arrived at our camp site around 4pm. There were are 13 students, the professor and a graduate student. The trip was completely unstructured. We were told to do whatever we felt like doing in the park. I hiked with a group to find Nordhouse Lake, a mile or two south of our campsite. Frankly, I am surprised we found it at all because the trails weren't marked all that well!

Lake Michigan. Sigh.....

All in all, the weekend was a perfect respite from the pressure of life here at school and made me think more about my place in the world. The park was an officially designated wilderness area, but it wasn't without touches of humanity. Not only were there the obvious signs, such as the camp sites, but also I saw wrappers on the ground and cans along the side of the road. I saw some of these things even when I felt complete isolated from the world in the middle of the forest. I felt as if I could take 20 steps off the trail and be completely lost from society. But then I would look down and see a gum wrapper and the fantasy would be ruined. But it also reminded me that through human actions and just by chance we are intrinsically linked with nature and the wild and cannot be separated from it, for better or for worse. What that means for how we should be living, though, is something I will have to think about further. 

Beginnings

Welcome! I am a Michigan State University senior studying Journalism and Environmental Studies. This semester I will be keeping this blog for one of my classes, Environmental Attitudes and Concepts. My purpose will be to document my attempt to live sustainably as an MSU student and my quest to discover what exactly living sustainably means.

Before I started taking this class, I would have considered this an easy assignment. What does living sustainably mean? Obviously it means being "green" by purchasing organic and local foods, recycling, etc. Right? Well after a week in the course, I have begun to realize the issues are more complicated than they seem. This course (and our book, Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash) has introduced me to an idea I hadn't considered before. That "wilderness" isn't a type of a physical thing, but instead a state of mind and that humans use this idea of wilderness to separate themselves from nature. This has important implications, because if humans are separate from wilderness then any changes made are unnatural and disrupt the natural cycle. But are humans actually separate from the environment, or are we actually nothing more than over-developed apes? If that is true, then all of the anthropogenic changes are simply part of the natural cycle. These are the ideas I will be struggling with throughout the semester. *sigh*

 ...Wish me luck!

In addition to this internal struggle, I am going to implement some changes in my life to try and live a life more balanced with the natural world. I am going to start small with easy changes like replacing my incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent lights (CFLs) and work my way up to more life-altering changes. Well, time to get started!