Journal 2

Joe Hartshorn

Dr. Dan Williams

5 September 2017

            This journal recounts our class’ second adventure beyond the walls of a classroom, as we met at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden and held our discussions in the grass in the middle of the garden. While this is my fourth and final year at TCU, I have never actually wandered to the Botanic Gardens myself, so I was interested to see what this experience would entail. My group of myself, Ben, Julia, Katie, and Nicole were presenting over the readings for this week, so we had a presentation prepared and led class discussion in the grass. We discussed the introduction and chapters one and two of Wilderness and the American Mind, as well as Meriwether Lewis’ journals from his famous exploration of America. While the first couple chapters of Wilderness and the American Mind set the stage for many of the thoughts and discussions we would have this semester, ranging from conservationist ideals to America’s consumption culture, the reading that struck me the most was Lewis’ accounts of exploring America.

            Lewis’ accounts were intensely descriptive. These journals of his were much more tailored towards relaying information about the landscape, nature, and wildlife surrounding him during his journey rather than his raw emotion towards what he was experiencing. While this heavily descriptive tone wasn’t the most exciting material to read, it did leave me pondering why no one really writes, or better yet thinks, in such descriptive and detailed tones. Prior to taking this class, I can’t remember the last time I was idle with a focused mind intent on examining every detail of something I encountered in my life, both in the material world and in my experiences in nature. Rather, it seems that for the most part that my generation lacks both the desire and more so the ability to gather such intense detail from our daily experiences. Everything I typically do these days is in a fast paced manner, attempting to gather as much information as possible about the area around me in as little time required. The first thought is that the advancements in technology in recent years could be a major reason for this, as millennial attention spans have been zapped by scrolling through social media, using Google to gather information quickly rather than doing detailed research in texts, and multimedia making information easier to relay. After reading Lewis’ accounts and coming to this realization, I spent some of our time in the Botanic Gardens attempting to focus on the environment around me in a similarly detailed manner.

            Throughout our discussions, I chose to spend some time examining the grass that we were all sitting on, as the grass was easiest to examine closely from where we were sitting and the fact that I am always walking through grass yet have never really examined the plant. The more time I spent contemplating the grass the more interested I seemed to become. It’s fascinating that what we refer to as “grass” all the time consists of literally individual blades. Every single blade makes up what we refer to as “grass”, yet we consider all of the blades as a group to be what we call the “grass”, if that makes sense. I kept getting hung up on that idea. Why are we generalizing all of these individual blades of grass and grouping them into one? Is that even considered a generalization? Are we undermining the beauty of grass in that this infinite number of blades flows together to create one of our most utilized surfaces for standing upon? I started to begin to feel like grass itself is one of the most ‘taken for granted’ aspects of the natural world we exist in. We continue to advance industrially and urbanize our world, yet grass remains essential and valued by all. Everyone desires to have beautiful, green grass surrounding their homes. Why is that? If we strive to continue to advance industrially, why are we keeping grass around?