The Nature Conservancy

methodology. His ambitious goal is simple, “to change the way you think about American history.” (Steinberg, ix) In order to accomplish this, Steinberg places the natural world alongside human characters as an active agent of change. To the author, nature has never existed in a vacuum, waiting…

gender, wealth etc., each division separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. In the same way, a division between humans and nature has been socially constructed to divide the “western society” and the “other.” From these constructions, the term ‘wild’ has come to attribute primeval and savage characteristics to nature and animals living within nature. It is common to consider animals that life in nature to be ‘wildlife,’ yet using this term lends the same primeval and savage characteristics to animals. Many…

The Natural World The poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman is talking about him listening to an educated astronomer lecture using his proofs, figures, columns, charts, diagrams and how to add, divide, and measure them. While he was sitting in the lecture room with that astronomer teaching, the rest of the room began to applause. It seemed to be too much for him because he became unaccountably tired and sick. He felt that way until he left the room and went outside and…

Some environmentalists write stories of the complexity of the environment without mention of human experience, while other writers take an inward approach to evaluate the change of nature throughout human history. David Quammen’s Wild Thoughts from Wild Places is a compilation of personal accounts that addresses different natural phenomena and looks deeper into the environmental and social justice behind human involvement in the natural world. In Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, Quammen points…

Introduction Debates between religion and science have been ongoing ever since both disciplines have co-existed in society. Can one accept scientific understandings of the world and still preserve their faith in a higher being? In order to analyze the compatibility of religion and science we should define each discipline. In this essay, science is knowledge of the natural world based on facts learned through empirical evidence, theories and data, while religion is the belief in a higher being…

Nature is a continuing theme in Old English that reflects and explains certain observations in everyday life. Nature is used as a way to validate faith in occurrences in the natural world that are seemingly only explainable by a higher power. The use of nature to explain certain feelings and actions strategically allows an acceptance of hardships in life. Many poems have been written using nature as a backbone of faith. Poems such as “The Story of Caedmon”, “The Dream of the Rood” and “The…

iconic role played by Charles Darwin in atheist apologetics. Before you read the article, you may want to read the questions below so you can focus on his arguments against scientism (science can answer all questions) and philosophical naturalism (nature is all that exists). After completing the Blackboard reading, “Science and Faith at Odd” answer these reflective questions. Type directly into this worksheet, save this document on your own computer (docx or pdf files only) and then attach and…

Humanity’s relationship with nature periodically shifts between symbiotic and parasitic. We feed off nature in order to survive, and in exchange, we carefully monitor how our behavior affects the environment and the organisms within it. Responsibility is the price we pay for dominance and sentience. To help fulfill this duty, the United States government established the Wilderness Act in 1954 with the intention of becoming passive “guardians” of nature instead of encroaching “gardeners.”…

and static, for no permanent description can be made about its nature if said nature were dynamic, and even so its dynamic nature in itself would be a constant, making any other assumption im-possible in the first place. The notion that the state of the universe is variable depending on the perceiving it must also be rejected for the purposes of this paper, as, similarly to the aforemen-tioned misassumption on the universe’s dynamic nature, such a notion would not allow for the description of a…

Jensen & Page Reflection Both Jen’s Jensen and Russell Page are poetic naturalists who successfully describe the intimate relationships among plants. They write to share their own experiences with plants in hope to teach the delicate art of planting that should accompany design. Both speak to the importance of the horticulture science when practicing landscape design. Together they recognize a designer is only as good as the harmonious or inharmonious plant combinations they choose. In…