Keegan Interprets

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Unit 7 Blog Post: Music and Nature

Considering the relation between music and nature, and how to find one in the other, reminded me of a popular composition by the composer John Cage, titled 4′33″. It is a piece of music, if you are unaware, which calls for the musicians to not play their instruments for all three movements, and lasts for the titular four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

The purpose of the piece is to draw the attention of the audience to the background noise that they might ignore otherwise, as Cage felt that there was musicality in this as well.

This piece functions well in a lot of environments, but the one it was designed for is a crowded concert hall, with a full orchestra and a conductor, with all ears focused in on the performance. I am quite fond of the idea of paying rapt attention to the regular everyday background sounds of our life, and trying to pick up things we may or may not miss. What sounds get glossed over when we spend all our time with our headphones in, or always reading something, or talking to someone, or just looking at our phones? When we put away all the stimulus that we subject ourselves to, what is left? This precise, focused attention, is something that I try to activate, sometimes successfully, in nature settings.

When you do this, you get all sorts of opportunities to notice rhythms and sounds and melodies and musicality, that occur without any intentional human input. Bird songs are the obvious example, but anything from leaves rustling in the wind, to a chipmunk hustling along a tree branch, has some rhythm or repeatability to it, that can feel like music played out over a much longer stretch of time than we would normally bother to listen to. Even the quiet of a fresh snowfall in a winter wood offers up something if you listen well enough.

As far as songs that remind me of the outdoors, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Hi’way Songs” is the immediate one to come to mind for me. My dad would often play this song on canoe trips, or even just sitting on the front porch, and because of that I strongly associate it with an afternoon spent outside. The lyrics too, portray nature as a way to escape the busyness of the rest of life, with the lines “Just for now I’d like to rest/In the shade of a maple tree/To the blue Canadian sky/I'll say a prayer for the world out there” painting a picture of a place to rest, before carrying on with “real life”.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y&ab_channel=jdavidm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmGBna0JJ_U&ab_channel=GordonLightfoot-Topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4&ab_channel=JoelHochberg

[tcenvs3000w22-deactivated202301]

Keeping History Interpretation Alive

Marcus Garvey once said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” This quote accurately describes the importance of understanding history. Without having a foundation of the past, we cannot grow as people and society. This meaning can tie into the typical response that history is important because without it, we cannot learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future.

Though others have debated this in their own blog posts, I agree with the following quote:  

“There is no particular merit in ancient things, but there is merit in integrity, and integrity entails the keeping together of the parts of any whole, and if these parts are scattered throughout time, then the maintenance of integrity entails a knowledge, a memory, of ancient things. …. To think, feel or act as though the past is done with, is equivalent to believing that a railway station through which our train has just passed, only existed for as long as our train was in it.”

Simply, this quote highlights that if we do not understand and find a more profound meaning to our history, it is like ignoring the foundation that our society, culture and way of life are built upon. Furthermore, the quote is mission-driven, as it connects emotion and the reader’s intellect, allowing for reflection; a technique that is also known as interpretive writing. Currently, our society is the most advanced it has ever been however, it did not just come to be. There have been centuries of history and development, which have allowed us to progress. Interpreting history is thought-provoking. Thus, after much thought, I believe this phrase aims to help us grasp our society’s shortcomings through interpreting history.

Interpretation plays a vital role in sharing experiences to promote human rights, develop understanding, minimize conflict, and strive toward peace. When, as a society, we can understand the mistakes and horrid outcomes resulting from conflict, we will begin to back away from it as our form of resolve. For example, the “Every Person Has A Name” exhibit displayed the names and images of those murdered in Aushwitz to personalize the past (Beck et al., 2018). Museum exhibits, similarly, to other historical nature sites, especially when personalized, allow for meaning to be communicated (Beck et al., 2018). When anything is individualized, it allows the public to reflect on what is being communicated, inducing an emotional response. This goes far deeper than simply saying that history is important because we need to learn from our errors; it is about understanding how history has shaped our society. To illustrate, anti-Semitism, political segregation, and social segregation are a few examples of how the holocaust affects society as a whole today (Weinfeld et al., 1981).

When we look at nature through the perspective of history, we may not only depict historical realities, but also comprehend our society, ourselves, and the impact the past has had on forming our way of life.

Beck, l., Cable, T.T., & Knudson, D.M. (2018). Interpreting cultural and natural heritage. Urbana, IL: Sagamore Venture

​​Weinfeld, M., Sigal, J.J., Eaton, W.W. (1981). Long-term effects of the Holocaust on selected social attitudes and behaviours of survivors: A cautionary note. Social Forces, 60(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/60.1.1

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Hi Tatianna,

I like the Marcus Garvey quote you chose, and I feel like it really drives at the heart of this quote, that to keep things unified, and to make clear the connections between events and places across time and space, is to facilitate growth, and change, and reflection. If you can’t draw a line between something terrible, like the holocaust, and the centuries and millennia of anti-Semitism leading up to it, it makes it very difficult to learn anything, and to prevent the recreation of a similar catastrophe in the future.

Another quote I like that speaks on the role that the past has to play on our future is one by Karl Marx. It’s a bit of a long one but bear with me.

“[People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

I like this one because it also emphasizes the negative aspects of how bound to the past we are, but also that we have no choice in the matter. Even as much as we might want to be able to forget the past, and design and imagine our world with the memory of a goldfish, we don’t have that opportunity, because the ways and actions of those who came before us affect how we live, where we live, the state of the natural world, and whether we will be willing to change any of that.

You also mentioned the fact that we live in a very developed society, with very advanced technology, and you mentioned the centuries of development, and I thought that was interesting. When you follow the mission statement of this quote, and examine the pathway that that development took, it can often lead to a much more complicated, back and forth, push and pull history than the straight line that might come to mind first. Looking into history often leads to the uncovering of competing interests, and it can explain a lot about where we are today by seeing who got crushed underfoot, and who did not.

Apologies if I have gotten off track, but your points about the history of a place as a foundation, and your points about the goal and mission-driven nature of the quote really got me thinking! 

Keegan

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Unit 6 Blog Post

Learning about history can often feel like a very detached exercise, especially if it is done poorly. It is easy to tell a story about some events that happened a couple hundred years ago, in an area nearby, and get the sense that they happened thousands of years ago, in a different galaxy. Histories that do not take the time to ground the audience, and draw connections and through-lines to the present day, especially run the risk of allowing this to happen. When history becomes a listing of great achievements, with no explanation of the historical-material conditions of the time, or any explanation of the consequences of said history, a great deal is lost.

To me, this quote is trying to deal with the idea of tying ideas and concepts together over time, trying to maintain a connection between two places and times that can seem very far away. With nature interpretation this is even more important, as people can already feel as if they are on a break from the “real world” when they engage with nature, and it becomes doubly important to emphasize the importance and history of the natural world, and how it ties together with the history of humanity.

Completeness, and maintaining a full and complete history of a place, allows a deeper and more complex understanding, and can even confer an advanced ability to maintain that place. If this responsibility to the past is eschewed, then more than just interesting stories can be lost. When Spanish colonists implemented a ban on their practice of annual burnings of the South-Western California woods (today what would be called Malibu) a practice was lost, but so was the history and understanding of the land that was tied to that practice. For hundreds of years afterwards, strict suppression efforts were put in place, to stop any fire as soon as it started, with the goal in mind of conquering nature, instead of living alongside it. Because of the ignorance of the history of a place, towns and cities, like Malibu and Los Angeles, were built where they never should have been, and now every late summer and early fall the residents there have to deal with the consequences of living in a forest fire. If the history of these places had been maintained, you would not have millions of people breathing in smoke for two months of the year, or fear having their homes burn down.

The final part of the quote fits well with that sentiment I believe, as it is a reminder that no matter the technology or scientific knowledge we have at our disposal now, the past still shapes us. We now have a much improved understanding of how important forest fires are for forest ecology, but that knowledge alone does not move a city of 13 million people.

[ltenvs3000w22]

Controversy of Veganism

This week I had a hard time figuring out what to write about. This week my sister decided to go vegan and did a lot of research on why veganism is the way to go. This made me question what some of the cons to this diet can result in. We all know how many advantages there are but I thought it would be interesting to research the negative effects on the environment!

Does veganism contribute to environmental conservation? Eating a vegan diet has been said to be the most effective way to reduce your environmental impact on earth. Although this may be true, vegan diets and the reduction of meat consumption while gaining grain products harms animals and degrades the environment. 

A professor at the university of south Wales, Mike Archer, explained how vegans can do more harm to animals by illuminating the one thing they rely on; plants. 

The production of wheat and other grains in Australia result in 25 times more animals being killed per kg of usable protein, animal cruelty, and more environmental damage than farming red meat. In order to produce these grains, agriculture kills thousands of animals and plants by clear cutting native vegetation.

Not only does veganism affect animals and the environment, but it also heavily impacts the human species who partake in that lifestyle. According to WebMD, veganism may result in risks including brain health, hair loss, strokes and depression. The lack of protein, iron, vitamin B, and zinc can cause detrimental health problems.

Although consuming meat creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, I do not believe it makes up for the fact that the vegan lifestyle wastes land that could be consumed by people. The protein from livestock costs a lot less lives per kilogram. I believe it is a more humane, environmentally friendly and ethical dietary option. 

I do not necessarily believe that veganism is bad, but I do think that there are many other ways to conserve the planet and help save plants and animals where people can make an actual change. Donations to animal-oriented organizations and the reduction of waste can have a much more healthier impact than a vegan diet.

Before reading a paper on this topic, I did not have much of an opinion about vegan diets. I still believe that going vegan is a good choice and I support anyone who lives that way. All I know is that there are many pros and cons to the lifestyle. This includes:

Pros: Prevention of overfishing, Overpopulation of cows for food cause pollution, preventing livestock emissions

Cons: Extinction of almond trees - because of high demand, Highly processed foods (tofu) can be bad for environment (Made in factories)

What are your thoughts on veganism? How do you think being a vegan affects environmental conservation? Do you think the pros outweigh the cons?

Reference:

https://dailytitan.com/opinion/benefits-of-a-vegan-diet-dont-outweigh-its-environmental-impact/article_10079b1c-a13e-11eb-aefd-9363be1e574e.html#:~:text=Vegan%20diets%20don’t%20resort,degrade%20the%20environment%20as%20well.

[lmenvs3000w22]

Hey Lauren,

I loved reading your post this week! It was especially interesting to me as a former vegan.

I’ve been vegetarian for almost 10 years now, and around 2016-2019, I was fully vegan, before going back to just being a vegetarian. When I first went vegetarian, and then vegan, I never had any environmental concerns in mind, and instead I purely did it for my own ethical and moral reasons. It wasn’t until I was older and started reading more into it that I discovered the environmental reasons for transitioning to a vegan/vegetarian diet.

The points you raised are interesting. I’ve never considered the idea that veganism might actually be worse for the environment than a typical meat-inclusive diet. If I’m honest, I’ve never really questioned the fact that veganism is better for the environment. While I see the value in your argument, I did want to point something out.

Much of the production of grain/staple crops is actually for livestock consumption, not for human consumption. For example, 77% of global soy is used to feed livestock for meat and dairy production, and additionally, only 7% of global soy is used for direct human consumption in the way of soybean products (Ritchie & Roser, 2021). In addition to this, we have become a lot better at growing soy over the years, resulting in higher yields and increased production (Ritchie & Roser, 2021). Both of these factors lead to overall less deforestation in today’s world, since we now have more productive fields, we need less area to grow (Ritchie & Roser, 2021). So, while it might be true that deforestation for staple crops is still happening today (although at lower rates), I don’t believe it’s fair to blame a vegan diet on this, since the main consumers of these crops is the agricultural industry.

Additionally, I also want to note that while there are definitely some health risks to adopting a vegan diet, these largely only come about when someone improperly adopts this diet. Most vegans who eat a well balanced diet and supplement things they can’t necessarily get from their diet, such as vitamin B12, are not at risk for any of the health threats you mentioned.

Ultimately, for me, the pros of a vegan diet do outweigh the cons. While veganism isn’t something that worked out for me, I think there are still many benefits, and would definitely encourage anyone wanting to try it out to do it! Nowadays there are hundreds of vegan products that make transitioning to veganism from a meat heavy diet super easy!

Again, I just want to say that I appreciate your approach to this post. I always value seeing the other side of things, so I want to thank you for exposing me to possible reasons why veganism might be bad! I’ll make sure to read through the article you referenced to expand my knowledge!

Lauryn

References:

Ritchie, H. & Roser, M. (2021). Forests: Soy. Our World in Data. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/soy#citation

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Hey Lauren and Lauryn,

I am very interested in the idea of whether or not vegetarianism or veganism can work as viable and sustainable replacement for the industrial animal agriculture industry, so I was immediately drawn to this discussion. I am not personally a vegetarian, but I have thought about and looked into the benefits and reasons for adopting a vegetarian diet, both on a personal level and on a global one. 

My impression for the most part has been that vegetarianism is likely to be a net boon for a lot of reasons, including lowering greenhouse gas emissions, increasing areas of biodiversity, as well as improving animal welfare. I was surprised to see some of the points made by Lauren, especially some of the numbers that were used. I read through the article that was cited, and found the claims that caught my attention, in particular the quote ”In Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein, more environmental damage and animal cruelty than farming red meat.” I was able to find the paraphrased article by Mike Archer and I have to say that I did not agree with the stated methodology behind coming up with that estimate. The baseline they chose to represent typical animal agriculture was grazing cattle in Australia, which exists as a significant outlier in the animal agriculture industry. 

The meat from grazing cattle only provides approximately 10% of global beef production. Goat and sheep are slightly more grazing dependent industries, providing 30% of global goat meat and mutton production. These industries are of course dwarfed by the beef industry, which produces around 70 million tons, compared to goat and sheep together, which produced 25 million tons (depending on the source). Despite the lack of production, grazing lands take up 60% of all agricultural land. The reason the use of Australian grazing bothered me so much, was because that is examining the environmental impact on land that was already been used as pasture land, as opposed to examining the impact of clearing land for either pasture or extensive animal feed monocultures. The main criticism I see is, as Lauryn pointed to, the destruction of existing biodiversity to create more farmland. 

There were other significant gaps in the article’s methodology, which were noted at the bottom of the article. I quote these here.

“Editor’s note: since this article was published in 2011 its data have been disputed. A 2018 paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics found this article:

-overestimated the number of mouse plagues per hectare of grain farming, and mouse poisoning deaths, per year

-claims 55 sentient animals die to produce 100kg of usable plant protein when the correct figure is 1.27 animals

-does not take into account mouse deaths on grazing land.”

These amount to the central statistical claims made by the article. That there was an estimation of the animals killed per hectare that was off by a ratio of 50-1, throws the central claim of animal agricultural to killing fewer animals than plant agriculture into doubt. 

This is not to say that there aren’t situations where animal agriculture can exist in a sustainable way. I just don’t believe that it can continue to exist at the same level that it is at now, let alone continue to grow. Vegetarianism and veganism requires less land to be under the plow than modern industrial animal agriculture, with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and more opportunity for retaining natural biodiversity. Specifically to Canada, the indigenous peoples that lived and existed here prior to European colonization (and continuing to this day) have by and large been able to consume meat in a sustainable way. There have been situations in the fur trade where specific species where hunted close to extinction, but these situations were specific to the lucrative fur trade, and not to traditional meat consumption.

I was definitely intrigued by the idea that grazing on pastureland can have some advantages, such as the opportunity to use land that is too poor to grow other crops on it, but unfortunately, as highlighted above, is that grazing produces a very small amount of beef and mutton consumed, and that is not even considering the fact that grazing chickens and pigs are even rarer than grazing cattle. The fact that such a low amount of production takes up 60% of current agricultural land, is another problem with grazing, its inefficiency with respect to land use, even if much of that land is not capable of being cultivated for any other crop.

Overall, I still think it’s clear that global meat production needs to be scaled down, and that having a larger percentage of our diets be plant based would improve our environmental conditions, as well as improve animal welfare.

I really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m glad we got to reexamine some preconceptions.

Keegan

Springmann, Marco, et al. “Health and Nutritional Aspects of Sustainable Diet Strategies and Their Association with Environmental Impacts: A Global Modelling Analysis with Country-Level Detail.” The Lancet Planetary Health, vol. 2, no. 10, Oct. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1016/s2542-5196(18)30206-7.

Livestock and the Environment: Meeting the Challenge, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, https://www.fao.org/3/x5304e/x5304e00.htm#Contents.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/237632/production-of-meat-worldwide-since-1990/

https://www.tridge.com/intelligences/mutton/production

https://www.tuskegee.edu/Content/Uploads/Tuskegee/files/CAENS/Caprine/US%20Goat%20Industry%20Assessment.pdf

Archer, Mike. “Ordering the Vegetarian Meal? There's More Animal Blood on Your Hands.” The Conversation, 15 Dec. 2011, https://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-theres-more-animal-blood-on-your-hands-4659.

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Week 5

I spend a lot of time thinking about the different relationships people have with nature. Just recently, I started reading “A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor” by John Berger. It is a non-fiction story of a country doctor, John Sassall, who works in the English countryside. The stories mostly (so far) centre around specific patients he treats, their injuries and maladies, and his ability or inability to cure them. As the only doctor in a large rural area, he is given a lot of authority while treating a patient, which can contrast with the somewhat independent and self-reliant nature of large swathes of rural life.

One story that stuck with me was actually the first one in the book, about a logger who was not able to get out of the way before a tree landed on his leg. He was working with other loggers, who had shouted out to him, but he was not able to respond in time. The men are obviously quite uncomfortable in the situation, despite the calming presence of the doctor, as it exists as a stark reminder of the dangers involved in their work. However, that must be compartmentalized in order to complete their tasks on a day to day basis.

This is in stark contrast with what is often the mentality of backcountry campers, where it is important to always be cognizant of any potential dangers, as even a sprained ankle becomes much more serious when the only way out of the backcountry is often by foot or canoe. This is a more reasonable mindset to have when you are on a trip, as the experience is focused and specific, and it can be easy to let go of those worries once you are safely back in civilization. Working full time in nature means that burden is ever-present.

I have also spent some time listening to the podcast “Out Alive” which gets survivors of adventure-type disasters to relay their story, whether it’s almost being murdered by a bear, or breaking your back falling off a rock wall. These stories are interesting, certainly, but sometimes it feels like they exist and are popular in order to magnify the danger that exists “out there” and to make it more severe as well as more foreign. Does this serve to make nature more accessible to people, or discourage those who don’t understand how rare these types of situations actually are? Does it glorify the backcountry camper as a risk-taker and adventurer beyond what is reasonable? 

I would watch Bill Mason documentaries when I was younger. He was a naturalist, who wrote and produced a lot of work about canoeing and the wonders of the natural world, including one of my favourites on the history of the Great Lakes. There was always an element of respect for nature, and an understanding that one is taking risks when going on a trip like that, but he was careful to not blow it out of proportion. Sometimes I feel that a lot of material produced about backcountry camping today exists to emphasize the extremes, and make it about taking risks, going as close to the edge as is possible. While this can certainly boost the ego of those who exist on the side of the experience camper-adventurer (myself included) I feel that it may also exist to exclude others, and to make the leap into backcountry camping larger than it actually is. I enjoyed Bill Mason’s work because he would provide useful tips, and make it clear that you can do this too. It was always about asking people to come along with you, as opposed to trying to impress people with your stories of how close you came to death.

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Blog Post #3 Privilege

The use of the lens of privilege and self-examination of that privilege in nature interpretation can be an interesting one, especially depending on how it is used. On the one hand, examining the different advantages and opportunities that are available to a subject can illuminate how variable an experience with nature can be. What it means to be “in nature” can mean something different for a well-off farmer, versus a marginalized minimum wage worker who lives in the middle of the suburbs, but makes an effort to take the bus to a public park once a week. A farm owner is likely to see nature as something that is waiting to be brought under the plough, so that value can be drawn from the fertile topsoil in the form of various cash crops, maybe canola or soybean. The worker might simply appreciate a municipal park with some trees for shade and a creek running through it as a brief reprieve from their usual scenery, or maybe a place to cool off in the summer, if they don’t have access to air-conditioning in their house. Someone who is homeless might see the same public park as one of the only places in the city they will be allowed to rest for the night, as one of the few areas not designated as private property in the modern city.

A fourth person, someone who spends their summers in northern Ontario guiding canoe trips, but lives in the city in the winter, might not even see this specific municipal park as “nature”, instead viewing it as a well defined plot of land regularly maintained by the city. It would be easy to miss that, despite this park coming well short in terms of area, flora, and fauna, it exists as a far more regular and accessible part of nature, in comparison with some backwoods piece of land that takes a week to travel to.

It can be easy to treat privilege as a 21st century form of confession or even indulgences, except instead of confessing your sins, or paying for them with donations to the church, you confess your advantages in life, or donate to some charity, and your wealth or skin colour or class position is no longer held against you. Simply to state that you were born with two parents, who worked quality union jobs, with two cars in the driveway, and that you were exposed to the outdoors very young, in a country where wilderness exploration is very accessible to those with the time and means to pursue it, does not in itself wash away those privileges, or end the reproduction of those differences for the next generation. 

In my mind, the use of the invisible knapsack in nature interpretation is to lay out what can be done to change those disparities, and make the enjoyment of nature no longer exclusive. Maintaining passenger rail lines out of the suburbs would make not owning a vehicle less of a barrier, as would designing cities with more greenspace within their limits to begin with. Increasing funding to public schools to give them the ability to host robust outdoor education programs would ensure that everyone has the opportunity to see what is out there. Eliminating private, for-profit school boards would ensure that the wealthy parents that send their kids there for a “better quality” education instead put that money and effort into the public board, ensuring that if they want their child to go on weeklong discovery canoe trips, then so can every other child, regardless of their parents class position.

[odenvs3000w22]

Blog 3

I am someone who has been familiar with the concept of privilege, and interrogating my own, for a long time. Part of that is a result of my age; I grew up at at time when “social justice warriors” were openly mocked in the mainstream, and yet as a young person who was just beginning to learn about the depth at which inequity is embedded in our system, social justice was also a rallying cry. I was also online at at time when discourse was (and continues to be) a very important word, especially among the young queer people, and especially on platforms like this one (anyone who was on tumblr in 2014 will know what I’m talking about!). And a huge part of that discourse was unpacking the privileges and biases you might be bringing into any conversation about equity.

Considering this background, I was surprised when the course write-up for this week suggested that material regarding privilege was something that was “likely little of it familiar to you until now.” In fact this week’s assignment, a write-up of our own privileges, assumes that the audience of the course is largely privileged. While this might be a fair assumption considering the audience of this course are university students, I’m not sure it’s the most useful lens in exploring challenges to nature access. Discussions of personal privilege encourage us to individualize the problems that threaten nature interpretation (or nature more broadly!). It reminds me of the “carbon footprint” concept, a campaign that encouraged us to take individual responsibility for how much carbon we contribute to the atmosphere. The utility of a concept like this is belied by the fact that the personalize carbon footprint was a marketing campaign sponsored by British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world (Solnit, 2021).

Why would BP launch a campaign like this? It isn’t to actually get people to cut down on their use of oil, of course. It’s because oil companies, like so many other driver’s of the world’s reliance on the use of fossil fuels—and, following from this, the destruction of nature—know that individual action is a weak tool against systemic pressure. What they fear is collective action, situations where we band together to examine how our actions are guided and enforced by the systems we live in.

Personal privilege is a useful tool as a first step in the exploration of these systemic forces. However when I acknowledge my whiteness as a privilege, I cannot stop there—I must ask who benefits from telling me my whiteness is a source of superiority, and who might be interested by dividing me from those I share material interests with, on the basis of skin colour. When I acknowledge my able-bodiedness and neurotypicalness as a privilege, I must ask why our system insists on leaving behind disabled people, and ask why the ability to be productive trumps human dignity and respect.

When it comes to nature interpretation, my interrogation of my personal privilege will only be useful if it leads me toward a critical interrogation of the socioeconomic reasons behind why so few of us have access and familiarity with nature. Our textbook points out that the reason minority populations have low rates of park attendance are economic barriers, cultural barriers, and communication barriers (Beck, Cable & Knudson, 2018, p. 132). As an individual, there is little I can do to expand a bus service, or change a culture that undervalues access to greenspace. But from a collective action perspective, I can see that the need of a capitalist society to be constantly productive means we are endlessly using up natural resources, meaning there is less and less nature of us to experience. The need to underpay workers in order to make profits off of them requires those workers to live in cheap housing, in crowded urban centres, far from nature. A capitalist focus on individual success leads to an unwillingness to contribute to social programs and public infrastructure, which means those same underpaid, often racialized workers, have no bus system with which to access pubic parks.

My answer as to what role privilege plays in nature interpretation is that while explorations of personal privilege might be a useful first step and opportunity to modify our personal actions, ultimately we need to ask bigger questions about system inequalities in order to truly and effectively allow access to nature for all.

Beck, L., Cable, T.T., Knudson, D.M. (2018) Interpreting Cultural and Natural Heritage For a Better World. Sagamore-Venture Publishing.

Solnit, R. (2021, August 23). Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed. Keep them on the hook. The Guardian. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook)

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Hi Olivia!

I just want to say that I think you hit the nail right on the head, as far as my own feelings about the role that privilege discourse plays in individualizing problems of access and equity to the natural world. Sometimes it is tough to have an idea of how extensive other people’s experience with privilege discourse might be, but I feel somewhat confident in saying that probably most people in this class have already seen that video of the race with different students starting at different positions. It was quite popular on various social media platforms at one point or another, but I mostly feel that it has run its course in terms of improving the material conditions of groups that lack that “invisible knapsack”. There’s only so much time you can spend raising awareness about something, before it is time to get to work! 

One credit I would give to discourse about certain aspects of privilege discourse, is it can lead to examining structural sources of problems, and as long as it is focused in that direction, it can be fruitful. For example, I noticed a few of our classmates had mentioned finding it difficult to spend as much time in nature as they would like to in our first blog post, because of growing up in the suburbs or some dense urban core. If we chose to problematize the privilege of growing up in the country closer to nature, or in a city with easy access to the natural world (either through well maintained public parks or accessible transit that led out of the city) we could start to discuss urban planning (or the lack thereof) and how that can limit our daily exposure to nature. If that were to lead to integrating the natural world into our daily lives in the city, I think that would be beneficial.

Keegan

[htenvs3000w22]

Blog Post #1: My Relationship with Nature

Describing my relationship with nature is quite tricky. On the one hand, I understand the importance of nature and how it shapes our everyday lives and our future. The impact it has on different aspects of our lives because it is the foundation of our economy, culture, and our basic life. The food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we use to irrigate our crops are all provided by our forests, rivers, oceans, and soils. We also rely on them for a variety of other goods and services that are essential to our health, happiness, and financial well-being. However, I feel like my personal relationship with nature has changed throughout the years. Like many children, when I was a kid I spent the majority of my time outside, exploring and learning new things about the environment around me. Nothing brought me more joy than being under the sun for hours as I played with friends. Playing sports outside, learning about different plants, going down paths that led to different trails and discovering new things were all parts of my childhood that I adored. Going on trips with my family to see different natural attractions was something I always looked forward to during summer vacation. Although, the current me has definitely been more disconnected from nature than I would like to admit. As I’ve grown older different responsibilities came upon me and less time was available for me to spend doing activities that I enjoy, especially those involving nature. This is probably common among many people but I recognize that I could do more to be more appreciative and involved with nature.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that one singular person offered me a “sense of place” within nature. I feel like I’ve had different interactions with many different people, all who have contributed to me finding my place in nature. For example, when I was younger I visited my family in Eritrea, which is an East African country, for three months. Over those three months I got to learn the importance of nature to our culture and how they use it in every single aspect of their lives. Each day I spent there was an adventure. There was always something new to learn, see and do, and I found this very eye opening as a child. Getting to experience the place where my parents grew up, the different villages, and attractions was honestly like a dream to me. Each time we headed out I would get to go with somebody different in my family and this to me was incredibly fun. Being introduced to new things by a different person each time was almost like their way of welcoming me into their environment. Through those opportunities I feel I was able to discover my own placing in nature. Now don’t get me wrong, I was a kid then so my placing has definitely changed, but I value all the knowledge I had the opportunity to gain and am incredibly grateful. Who knows, maybe I’ll head back there someday soon and will be able to reconnect with nature.

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Hi!

Your emphasis on nature as a part of, rather than apart from, the rest of our society, really speaks to me, as I feel it is too often treated as simply a place for tourism or adventure, as some vehicle of escape, rather than defined by the heavy industry and economy that it supports, and vice versa. I also thought the picture you chose was interesting, as the inclusion of train chuffing across a manmade bridge might disqualify the environment as natural, but I think it highlights how intertwined industry and nature are. In the North American context, I often think about the advent of the national park system in the USA, and the mirror introduction in Canada at the same time. These were presented, at the time, as campaigns to preserve “pure, untouched wilderness” ignoring the fact that there were people who lived in and used this “wilderness” to survive on an every day basis for thousands of years. Tangential maybe, but whenever I think about nature I have a hard time no thinking about how slippery of a word it is to define, and whether there even is a definition that can be useful.

Keegan

[kahwenvs3000w22]

Connection with Nature

I grew up in a very small farming town in rural Ontario, with slow internet and not much to do indoors without driving to the nearest city. Because of this, a large chunk of my childhood was spent outside, either walking the municipal trails, playing in various creeks that ran through town, or just wandering through the bushes of various neighbours’ back acreage (whether they knew it or not). This was how I experienced “nature” and the outdoors in my day to day life. I also spent a lot of time camping growing up, through all four seasons, although winter camping was usually limited to once a year. 

This was a somewhat different relationship with nature, as camping usually required travel, by car almost exclusively, as opposed to walking out the front door. This created the idea of a destination, and a purpose to some nature experience, which always prompted questions. Why am I visiting this place? Is it because it is a different outdoor environment than I am used to? Why is that worth examining? What am I supposed to learn from this environment? Was it always like this? Does this place exist for tourists, or for other reasons as well?

Some of these questions I asked at the time, and some of them I spend more time thinking about now. I had the good fortune to spend four summers working in Ontario Parks, from 2017-2020, and I started to appreciate parks in general as a part of the built environment in a way that I hadn’t before. Before that experience, I answered most of my questions about the value of nature with ideas of untouched wilderness, and the ability to “get away” from society, which is a nebulous concept, to say the least. Seeing the work that goes into making a park function on a daily basis, and the people and infrastructure behind it all makes it harder to see it as somehow separate from the rest of our society. You can’t have a backwoods vacations spot without the production of the cities.

I remember being asked by tourists, quite regularly, about what there was to do at the park, and sometimes having a hard time finding an answer that was satisfying. I might answer by listing various trails in the park, or referring them to the visitor’s centre to learn more about the history and biology of the park, or introducing them to the idea of camping. This was often enough for a given tourist to go find something to do for that day, but not always enough to satisfy me, especially knowing that they were likely coming to me from a life where they did not have as much of a chance to experience nature, and were maybe confused as to how best to go about it, with some questions of their own to ask. Am I here to take pictures? To experience an epiphany? To get fit? To belong in a culture that values some nebulous concept of “outdoorsyness”? Will I get more matches on tinder if I have a picture of me on a hike?

I would often feel like a gatekeeper of nature, especially with the opportunity to gauge recommendations based on my sense of the camper’s comfort with the outdoors. Are they an inexperienced hiker, wearing what appear to be skateboard shoes and have an iced coffee in their hand? Probably going to tell them that the shortest trail is actually the nicest, and you will find a beautiful view at the end. Is it some young “active” couple who drove up from the city and have purchased all the gear required? Then they should go on a longer trail, they seem like they’re “in shape”. Or is it someone who clearly spends a lot of time canoeing and hiking, with a deeper knowledge than I have? Maybe then I would try and impress them with some insider tip, access to a difficult portage that isn’t maintained anymore, or try to tell some cool story that I stole from some years-old pamphlet in the office.

While useful in terms of health and safety, and trying to prevent people from getting out of their depth in nature, this also has the effect of limiting the ability of new people to break into the outdoors. One of the questions I was supposed to answer here was who has offered me a sense of place in their environment. Individual interpreters have of course made my understanding of a specific environment deeper or more profound in some way, but it is much harder to point to one individual or another as being responsible for my relationship and belonging with my environment more generally. My parents could be one example, in their decision to take me camping from a very young age to their decision to bring me and my siblings up in a small town. I could also point to various scout leaders, who offered me new perspectives on the outdoors, and certainly wider opportunities. I could also point to various friends who were willing, at one time in my life or another, to go outside and poke around. But I think that this would miss the broader point, that I was always in an environment that made nature accessible, and an easy choice to make. 

Me, biking along the Icefields Parkway near Jasper