Journal 3

Joe Hartshorn

Dr. Dan Williams

12 September 2017

Nature Journal 3

            This week rather than meeting in an outdoor setting to discuss readings from the text, we went out to the Fort Worth Nature Center for the second time. At this point we have already been assigned trails to work with, so our group all went to the “Plum” trail again. We now have a decent idea of what our trail looks like holistically and can start cleaning the trail up much more than our previous trip. The weather still felt like it was summer outside, so I began sweating pretty early on into the class period. We spent the majority of our time clearing our trail’s path of any privet that had overgrown onto the path, as well as removing any privet that caused the bench areas to appear unsightly or unappealing to rest at. It felt almost ironic to be clearing away nature in order to provide anyone who uses the trail a better experience in nature, but I suppose that’s what humanity has been doing forever isn’t it? Our trail had already seemed to be fairly well kept up, so there wasn’t a ton of difficult privet to clear away. There were a lot of random fallen branches on the sides of our trail’s path, so we spent some time bundling these together for the nature center employee’s to haul away at a later time. The last time I had done any sort of trail walking was this past June with my family in Red River, New Mexico, so having the opportunity to work with this trail was calming and a breath of fresh air. Our trail for the most part was engulfed by trees on all sides, with many trees hanging overhead covering the trail. These trees were what I spent most of my time observing and contemplating while we worked on our trail.

I started to compare these trees that felt “wild” to me to the “tame” trees I’m surrounded by every day on campus and around the city. Much like how we compare caged animals that live in zoos to wild animals that can roam free, I had a similar dialogue with myself regarding trees. Why do we choose to perfectly manicure the trees that exist throughout our cities and even in the yards of our own homes? It feels as though we’re almost caging these trees for our own viewing pleasure similar to how society creates zoos. We don’t allow trees to grow in the ways and directions that they would naturally grow otherwise, rather we trim branches and cut limbs completely off to tailor a tree’s growth pattern to our liking. The trees we raise in our urban areas don’t appear even close to how they might appear in their natural state. Can you even consider these manicured trees to be “natural” or “wild” then? When I analyzed the trees that existed around our trail, they felt natural. Their limbs shot in all different directions. They grew in the directions that they could due to their natural surroundings. Some trees grew tall among the rest, while others seemed to have grown sideways for reasons unknown to me. Some trees had limbs broken off due to natural causes such as weather. Every tree looked different from one another, all with different features based on their surroundings and how each tree grew as a result of its surroundings. However in society, in any given landscaping design for a building, home, etc., every tree looks practically identical. On TCU’s campus you see rows of the same tree, all spaced from one another exactly the same distance, all the same species, and all the same height and width. How is this concept natural at all? Do we even consider it natural beauty, or was the concept of manicuring and placing trees in our urban areas simply for visual appeal purposes? What was more interesting to me is that when I examined the trees on our trail, my mind instantly seemed to prefer the aesthetic of the tailored trees on campus and in my backyard. It sort of feels like society chose to supplement our urban desires with trees and plants that are tailored to appear perfect as an attempt to allow the natural world a spot in our societal advances, yet I’m not sure that’s what ended up happening.