Romanticized Nature

            I know I romanticize nature. Whenever I think about nature, I don’t think about the run down backyards of St. Paul at this time of year, or the sloshing of dirty rain water on the freeway along construction sites. When I think of nature what pops into mind is huge redwood trees which seem miles high, rising above me with the sun shining through the rustling pines as I walk along a trail of red pine needles under my feet, with a small river running somewhere along side me. This seems like a perfect scene to me, except for the fact that I would have to travel to get anywhere that would resemble this kind of nature. This perfect idea of nature is a romanticized version of what nature actually looks like. To say I love nature would be an overstatement, because in order to say that I would have to love getting drenched by rain when walking into school, love being bitten by mosquitoes and other annoying bugs, and love the windy days which mess up my hair. But I don’t love all those things. I love the idea that I have of nature in my mind. Although this idea doesn’t reflect what nature truly looks like 99% of the time, that doesn’t mean I advocate for the destruction of nature itself.

            I decided the song Big Yellow Taxi by Counting Crows exemplified this relationship to nature perfectly. The song depicts a ‘tree museum,’ where people have to pay to go and see trees because they’ve become so rare. All the nature, more commonly referred to as ‘paradise’ in this song, has been replaced by parking lots and other things humans believe we need. The song continues to show how as we neglect nature more and more, we will eventually kill all nature around us, including the trees and birds and bees. The repeating line in the song states “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.” The singers were showing how humans are neglecting nature and treating it wrong because we believe that nature will never truly be gone and that there will always be more time to save nature. However, it won’t be until nature is already gone that we realize that we really do need nature.

Something that worked really well for us was the group dynamic. Mick, Meera and I are perfect partners for each other. We’ve worked together several times throughout the semester, and we always work well together. Also, we all grew up in North Oaks. This worked well for us, especially with this project. North Oaks is more commonly referred to as “the woods.” Although there are houses everywhere, it’s as close to the woods as people seem to get these days. Growing up in this sort of environment was a good experience for me personally- my family and I always took long bike rides around Pleasant Lake, or spent days on the beach with family and friends.  

            Meera, Mick and I were able to split up the work for this project pretty evenly. We all worked together to select passages from our four group texts that we felt reflected that questions that our project revolved around. Once we finished with all of our annotations, Meera and I worked on a script that would depict how each of our sources showed the human and nature relationship in creative ways. Later, Mick scouted out North Oaks to find pictures that depict man’s relationship to nature. Many of these pictures show nature existing by itself, while also showing small areas where humans have interacted with, and in many cases ‘ruined,’ nature. Once he took pictures, he sent them to me in order to come up with a PowerPoint which I believed depicts man and nature interacting with each other. In almost all of the pictures, we see a trend on nature being disrespected by the human race.