Blog 10: My personal beliefs, goals, and ethics as a nature interpreter
Hi everyone, welcome back to my final blog post of this term! I’m very sad that this will be my last post, but I am excited to share my final thoughts regarding this entire course as well as deeply interacting with this week’s blog prompt. So without further adieu, let’s get into my personal thoughts and ethics behind being a nature interpreter.
As someone who is an avid nature explorer and viewer, I feel that this course truly attacked and challenged my understanding of being a nature interpreter, and I am very grateful for it. I had never thought about the importance of being a guide to others in helping people experience nature through a focused lens, but that is the main idea that I got from this course as a whole. I am going to first focus on reiterating what my definition of a nature interpreter is, after which I will cover the specific roles I believe nature interpreters have in our society before ending with my personal beliefs and ethics of being a nature interpreter.
Being a nature interpreter is more than just a job or a role in a community, it is centered around being a leader. As I have discussed in many of my previous blog posts, a nature interpreter is someone who is trying to inform the naivete of the importance of nature and its role in their lives (Beck et al., 2018). They try to bridge the gaps in individuals’ knowledge in an attempt to broaden their understanding and encourage them to make active steps towards a more sustainable lifestyle (Beck et al., 2018). Going off this, we can assume that nature interpreters can be anyone who is passionate about nature and who shares their knowledge with others. This could likely be anyone from a professor to a park ranger to just a passionate individual.
Currently, there are many issues we are experiencing in our world such as climate change, habitat degradation, and multiple other factors. As someone who is in Environmental Science, these topics are something I am very passionate about as I am actively learning about them through my classes as well as outside of my education. It can feel like a big responsibility to take the role of a nature interpreter, because looking at the bigger picture can be extremely overwhelming. This is often why, in my opinion, many people ignore or disregard environmental issues because being aware of the topic can feel terrifying. However, to avoid this, it can be important to view the issue as the smaller steps you can take to improving everything. For example, instead of thinking about the idea as a whole, it is good to start small, such as improving your surrounding area by being active in your community or by joining clubs with like-minded individuals. This is why nature interpreters have such an important role: they act as the guide to show people the small steps they can take, or even just making them aware of the things they might not have known of previously. This way, they are not overwhelming them with a large amount of concerning information, but instead introducing the topic in small steps to make it more approachable.
It can be quite upsetting when you really think about it though, hence the importance of introducing the topic in smaller steps. It can often feel hopeless and that our efforts are null in the big picture of things. When you consider the impacts that some industries have on the environment, it can feel like using reusable bags or reducing your food waste is not enough to cancel out the drilling of oil or the mining practices worldwide, especially when considering the pollutants that are released from those activities. However, it is my personal belief that while some of our smaller efforts might not make a big enough impact, we are so much stronger as a whole. It’s a silly example, but similar to Disney's “A Bug’s Life”, the ants are controlled by the grasshoppers because their outlook has always been that one individual is powerless against a single grasshopper, let alone a small gang of them (Lasseter, 1998). When they realize that there are hundreds of them, and only a handful of grasshoppers, they are powerful enough to eradicate the tyranny of the grasshoppers and begin again (Lasseter, 1998). I view this as a metaphor to the current situation we are in. The people in power believe they have the upper hand, but there are billions of us to their few hundred, and banding together would surely be enough to enact a widespread change. This is my thought at least, that if enough people are up in arms about something, then something would have to be done. This is why it is so important to educate people on this topic, because the more people who join the cause, the more power we have in overturning certain activities.
This mindset can start to sound a little controversial at times, but if we keep continuing down the road we are on, there will be disastrous consequences to the good of our planet and the human race. What’s funny is that the Earth has gone through so many mass extinctions over its 4 billion years of life, and it has always rebounded (Ritchie, 2022), yet we think that we are a permanent aspect of this world. It is therefore this mindset that we need to get around: we as the human race are not permanent, as nothing is truly permanent on this Earth. The Earth is a closed system that is fueled through its internal processes that maintain an equilibrium, and we just happen to be along for the ride (BBC World, 2012). A great example of this is the idea of the Snowball Earth, presented by Paul F. Hoffman (BBC World, 2012). Let's take a deep dive into what the Snowball Earth is, and how this applies to the topic at hand
Snowball Earth is the idea that the world froze over from pole to pole approximately around 2.4 billion and 540 million years ago (Britannica, 2024). Hoffman had many pieces of evidence to back up his claim, such as the dropstones that are found around the equator (dropstones are large stones/boulders that are held in icebergs which are dropped into a body of water as over time) (Young, 2009; Britannica, 2024). However, we know that the negative feedback loop that maintains our climatic system consists of water absorbing a lot of heat from the sun to warm up the area (hence why coastal cities are warmer) and ice reflecting that solar radiation back into the atmosphere (hence why the Arctic is so cold and why climate change reducing the ice caps is so concerning) (Center for Science Education, n.d.). How then, did the Earth return to what it is today if it was entirely frozen (i.e., all solar radiation reflected back due to ice creating a positive feedback loop to maintain the cold temperatures)? The answer lies within volcanic activity, which occurs regardless of the surface conditions (Young, 2009; BBC World, 2012). With this volcanic activity, ice melted and sulfur gas and carbon dioxide are released, which are very powerful greenhouse gasses (EPA, 2024). This gas increased the amount of heat absorbed in the atmosphere, which over time melted the ice caps enough for some areas of liquid water to occur, which, due to its high heat capacity, was able to return the Earth back to its normal climatic conditions (BBC World, 2012).
While this example seems a little off topic, it greatly applies to the message I am trying to get across: nothing is promised, and the Earth is able to maintain itself, regardless of whether we are here or not. With this in mind, we are able to see that our mindset that we have conquered the Earth is not accurate, and if we keep using these limited resources as if they are unlimited, we are going to drive the world into something that we cannot return from; but the Earth can.
This belief may seem to contradict what I said earlier about taking small steps, but I am viewing this as the end goal, whereas the small steps are the processes we need to take in order to reach this goal. This reinforces the importance of nature interpreters in being the guide for these small steps. We need to slowly introduce the topic to entice people to learn more, and we will eventually reach a point where those people will want to do something, which is where this second role of nature interpreters comes in. Therefore, nature interpreters can come in two varieties: those who are working with the naive, and those who are working with the knowledgeable. They both have the same end goal, they are just at different stages of the process.
Overall, this topic is something that is extremely important to me. I believe that understanding this might encourage others to change their mindset from viewing the Earth as something we control to something that we need to work with. The Earth is a self-maintaining system, and our attempts to mold its processes to suit ourselves is futile. We need to take a step back from our ego-centric lives and view everything as a whole, not just and ends to a means. This is the role I see for nature interpreters, and it is the role that I hope to achieve in the future. Our planet should be considered a safe haven, a gift; not something that we are in control of, but something that we are partnering with to sustain ourselves and our futures.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my beliefs on what I think it means to be a nature interpreter, and the responsibilities I feel we owe not just to ourselves, but to the Earth as a whole. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic, and how our views might differ or coincide. Enjoy!
BBC World. (2012, December 23). Snowball Earth. Dailymotion. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xw5nro
Beck, L., Cable, T. T., & Knudson, D. M. (2018). Interpreting cultural and natural heritage:
For A Better World. Sagamore Venture.
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2024, March 14). Snowball Earth hypothesis. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/Snowball-Earth-hypothesis
Center for Science Education. (n.d.). Climate Feedback Loops and Tipping Points. Feedback Loops Can Be Positive or Negative. https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/earth-system/climate-system/feedback-loops-tipping-points
Environmental Protection Agency. (2024, February 16). Overview of Greenhouse Gasses. Greenhouse Gas Emissions. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/overview-greenhouse-gases#:~:text=In%20general%2C%20fluorinated%20gases%20are,nitrogen%20trifluoride%20(NF3).
Lasseter, J. (Director). (1998). A Bug’s Life [Film]. Pixar
Ritchie, H. (2022, November 30). There have been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/mass-extinctions#
Young, G. M. (2009). Snowball earth hypothesis. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series, 907–910. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4411-3_211