Nature Journal 8

Barry Lopez’s The American Geographies was an engaging read. Lopez writes in a more familiar and easy-to-digest way, which I believe allowed for a better in-class discussion. After I finished the passage, I talked to my mom about the concept of local experts. I believe that my dad is such a person. “…they are nearly flawless in the respect they bear these places they love. Their knowledge is intimate rather than encyclopedic, human but not necessarily scholarly. It rings with the concrete details of experience.” (Lopez, pg. 916) I immediately think of my dad, who has lived 90% of his life in the town that I call home. We live on his family’s farmland, land that he has worked and explored for many years. If given the chance, he loves to share his knowledge about this land.

About half a mile away from our house, there is a bend in the creek surrounded by flat, sandy land. My dad spends most of his free time out there, fishing and enjoying the woods. My mom’s family is from northern Indiana, so whenever they visit, he brings them down to his place in the woods and tells them the history of the area and his plans for the future. He wants to build a small cabin on the cliff side so he can stay out there longer. For as long as I can remember, he has always been eager to share his knowledge with others. He didn’t study forestry or geography formally, but he learned through years of exposure. Every time we go to the restaurant in town, he stops and chats with the older folks about history and how it connects to current events. He used to be the town’s historian and welcomes conversations that flex his memory from that time.

Now, as more and more of my town’s elderly pass on, my dad grieves for the history that is lost with them. “Year by year, the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles.”(Lopez, pg. 917) For my town, this is especially true. Young people don’t have many opportunities there, so they move away to bigger cities and towns. For a long time, I tuned my dad out when he started with his story telling, but now I realize how important it is to listen and take to heart the history of the place that I will always call home.

Nature Journal 7

Tatopani, Nepal – March 19, 2019 – 8:00 a.m.

My classmates and I woke up early to pack our bags because today we were trekking up to Khibang village, the village we would be staying in for a week. I walked out of the room that I shared with two of my friends and I am welcomed by the sight of Nilgiri, one of main peaks in the Annapurna range of the Himalayas. The trek would take about four hours, so we ate a big breakfast at the tea house and started on our way. Before we left Kathmandu, one of our last language lessons was trekking vocabulary. We learned words for swinging bridge, rest points, and steep cliffs. As we walked up, we practiced our language skills we our teachers (when we got back to the city, we had our final exams).

I have asthma so I stayed a little behind some of my friends. I am thankful for this ailment because it forced me to take many mini breaks to catch my breath. While walking, I kept my eyes down on the rocky terrain but during these breaks, I looked around and admired the views. After a few hours, we came across a group of construction workers who were working on a road. They stayed in tents while building so we stopped to take a break and chat with them. There were goats nearby, so my classmates and I gravitated towards them. We were able to play with some of the babies.

I ran out of water before we got to the village. I was able to fill up my water bottle at a small shop, but I had to wait 30 minutes before I could drink because I was using iodine tablets to purify my water. It ended up working out because soon after, we saw the distinctive blue roofs of the village. Seeing our destination inspired a second wind in the group and we pushed on towards our home for the next week.

Nature Journal 6

I found Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary “Before the Flood” to be incredibly engaging. His educational journey to learn more about the issues related to climate change is similar to my own. I was first confronted with the reality of our world’s consumption habits when I was living in southern China in the summer of 2018. I took a ferry from Guangzhou to Hong Kong and saw countless shipping craters, ready to take all of the world’s stuff to the ends of the earth. I had my eyes glued to the window for the entire four-hour journey because I had never conceptualized what it means to be the world’s producer. I saw the waste and pollution that comes with it, as the Chinese government tries to keep up waste management policies in a booming city with 13 million people.

Fast forward a year and a half, I’m talking with farmers in rural mountain regions of India and Nepal. Their crops are irrigated by waters that melt from the glaciers in the Himalayas. They attribute many of their problems with crop yields and pests to global warming and climate change. We were instructed to take their testimonies with a grain of salt; many of them blame climate change because it is an easy scapegoat. Regardless of the scale of climate change effects, it is real, and it is having an adverse effect on some of the most vulnerable populations in the world. This is what stuck with me. I can choose to ignore these issues because my life in the U.S. is easy; I’m not confronted with the consequences of my habits.

After my semester in Nepal, I spent the summer in Europe. I spent a few days with my German friend at her home in Coburg, a small city in northern Bavaria. We got to chat about environmental policies in her country and what actions her and her family are taking to reduce their footprint. They are growing almost all of their produce in their garden and are considering buying livestock for meat. My friend said that this isn’t an isolated movement within her family, that many people in the countryside are moving towards this kind of lifestyle.

my Indian homestay family's livestock

planting corn behind a team of oxen in Nepali village