This weekend, my roommates and I went kayaking in an estuary by James Island.  It was my first time kayaking, and I was continuously awestruck throughout the entire two-hour trip by the peacefulness and beauty of the ecosystem.  The waters were calm even as the marsh grass blew in the breeze, and you could taste the salt in the air. The estuary was near a road connecting neighborhoods on the island, so the occasional car was heard, and there were power lines running over some of the trees.  However, at times there was no other sound than our paddles hitting the water, and I wish I could have stayed out on the water all day.

I normally try my best to stay off of my phone as much as possible throughout the day, but I promised my dad some pictures as the trip was a present, so that was the only reason I was on my phone.  It was a beautiful experience to just paddle through the waters with my best friends while scanning the cloudy sky as the sun set. We even saw a couple dolphins swim through the estuary less than ten feet from our kayaks!  

As I live on campus downtown, I do not have the opportunity to experience nature in this capacity on a regular basis.  I also do not have my car with me during the semester, so unless I pay for an Uber or Lyft, I tend to find myself pretty confined to the peninsula.  Even the “nature” downtown is cultivated and kept tidy by groundskeepers for residents and tourists. The parks we have were designed to be beautiful green spaces, but they were designed by humans, which kind of takes away from their natural aspect.

Kayaking, however, allowed me to experience nature without the sounds of cars starting, ambulances blaring past, or cell phones ringing.  Sadly, I feel like my connection to nature has decreased over time as I grew older and became busier, but spending a couple hours on the water this past Saturday reminded me of how much I love the sun and trees and salt water.  I am originally from northeast Ohio, and feeling the sun warm my skin reminded me of how excited I was to move to Charleston, where the sun is always warm and bright and not constantly hidden by clouds. I feel like I have lost the connection from my youth, when the best days were the ones spent with bare feet running on the bright green grass.  This weekend reminded me of the importance of that connection and the need to restore it.

I believe that most of the people living on the Earth today have lost their connection with nature through sitting behind cubicles and under fluorescent lights, always hiding behind bright computer monitors and phone screens.  Many of the issues plaguing the world would cease to exist if people would look up and recognize the nature we destroy every second of every day through our consumeristic habits and materialist lives. If we continue fueling our linear economy, creating mass amounts of waste, throwing away overproduced food, and expanding animal agriculture, soon there will no longer be any nature for us to appreciate, and that is such a terrible thought.

Honestly, I am not very connected to the natural world. It changed a lot, I think last Thursday, when I realized with the help of two very special girls. It is important to connect to the natural world because if you do not than what is the purpose of life. You are going to become like a robot if you do not connect to nature in some shape or form. Well it is interesting to sit down and observe your surroundings, once in a while. So last Thursday, my baby sister (9 years old, third grade) and my cousin’s daughter (6 years old, kindergarten) visited me on campus after our Environment and Sustainability class. It was a wonderful surprise to see those two.

What I loved the most about those two is that they were fascinated by the littlest things. I passed by those same trees, flowers, bushes, water fountains, etc…everyday and they now have started to blend in with the crowd.I am usually so busy trying to make it to my next class that I passed by those things without taking a second to look at the water fountain and enjoy it. Those two little girls asked nonstop questions and had comments about everything they saw. “Is it lunch time? Where are the little kids? Why are all of these big kids outside? Is it recess for everyone? What grade are all these people in? Omg!!That tree is bigger than that house. How old is it? Awww. this is such a cute baby flower. This water fountain is so pretty. Is that a baby turtle sitting on the mommy turtle’s back? Etc…” They were curious and wanted to explore and run around everywhere. It made me miss being a kid and being that carefree and curious, too. It was legit an adventure for those two. The thirty-minutes that I was with them, I too started to lose track of time and started seeing things through their eyes. They both found the campus to be beautiful and thought it was so cool that we had different professors for each subject and different classes for each subject. They loved meeting you guys (Profs. Saunders & Beckingham) and thought you guys were super nice.

After our little adventure of walking around they went to lunch with my cousin and I went back to doing my assignments. What I learned from this is that we are so busy focusing on social media,homework assignments, exams, finals, jobs,etc…that we forget to take time to connect with nature. Truth be told, the thirty-minutes that I was with those two on our little adventure around campus made my day. It was a good escape from worrying about what I had to get done. My point here is that it is healthy to take some time to enjoy life and hangout with family and friends. I am not saying to neglect your responsibilities, but rather try to find a balance. Taking some time once in awhile to observe where you are. Smell some flowers. Sit outside and enjoy some sunshine. 🙂

My personal goal is to pay more attention to my surroundings especially here at campus because our campus is beautiful.

The importance of nature was a central theme of my childhood. I feel lucky to have been raised in a small mountain town. I am truly a product of my environment and appreciate where I come from immensely. Growing up, my family regarded nature in an almost religious way, or maybe more spiritual. For my dad, religion is not found in an organized group or building. His deepest connection to something outside himself is found within nature. This may seem like hippy-dippy spiritual mumbo jumbo, but I have found it to be true. Some of my earliest memories are driving up to ski every weekend with my dad. As we piled into the car, he would always say the same sentence before turning the key: “time to go to church”. For him, the mountain represents his religion and exploring it is a method of prayer. There are many ritualistic aspects of being outside and the preparation that goes into it. Overall being completely alone and surrounded by nature in an explicable feeling, and the closest definition I have found to religion. I have had several surreal moments in nature, where the environment you are in just seems to swallow you whole.

Clearly, nature has played a major role in my life, as I’m sure it does for everyone. I recently went on a trip to Banff, Canada where I got to do my all-time favorite activity: skiing. Trips like this one make the seasonal bum lifestyle even more enticing. I went with a group of around twenty CofC students, meaning there was limited alone time. One of the days I managed to ski around three runs alone after semi-purposefully losing the group in a tree run. Skiing alone has been a consistently meaningful thing to me. There is something about having complete control over how you get down the mountain, rather than stopping and planning out which run to take at every turn. Also, the solo chairlift rides are a few minutes of pure silence, allowing the focus to be solely on the surrounding views. The two or three minutes on the chair reminded me why my dad related this experience to a religious one and are almost meditative. Being in a mountain setting, surrounded by snow is when I feel most like myself. Nature has a way of making this sense of self possible.

Overall, nature has the ability to take you out of your own, seemingly large, but actually small reality. Spending time alone in nature gives you space to see past yourself and all your pointless worries. This I believe is why humans crave the natural benefits of being outside. It is an instant relief to sit in the sun, or under a tree, or in the grass. It is an attempt at connecting to our distant and ancestral ties to the natural world. We have, as a society, made an effort to distance ourselves from nature in the pursuit of comfortable lifestyles. Nature is now seen as something separate from us, rather than interconnected.

I believe I am intimately apart of, and inseparable from, the natural world, in the sense that I believe the natural world is the only world that exists. To me, everything is natural because it is a product of nature; myself, a cell phone, or a book included. But nature, in the sense of what is divorced from human creation, is something I wish I was more connected with. Each time I spend time in an environment free from much human intervention, I feel calmer, happier, and humbler. It allows me to step back from the nitty-gritty stresses of everyday life and witness systems of earth that have been functioning for millions of years. As cliche as it sounds, it is so easy to lose sight of what really matters when you are stuck in the same cycle of life. Being outdoors, to a greater or lesser extent, puts life in a different perspective and often jars one’s sense of what they value. Camping, for instance, can shed light on things often taken for granted such as food, water, shelter, and going to the bathroom. And hiking, or any outdoor activity really, can leave one awe-inspired to the beauty and complexity of nature. This is why spending time in nature is so important; because it re-calibrates your values and your emotions. It allows one to reside in an habitat where our bodies were selected to live through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution by natural selection.

As a child, I spent innumerable hours rolling in the sand, rinsing in the ocean, and drying in the sun. In other words, I loved the beach and being out in the sun, I still do. I used to go home, rummage around around the woods, and make lean-to forts on the trees. This sort of childhood primed me for a livelong fondness of the outdoors. For obvious reasons, things have changed a little since my childhood and I haven’t been able to get outside as much as I’d like. In turn, I decided to do something about it and join the College of Charleston Outdoors club. And though I still don’t get outside as much as I’d like, the club has provided me with amazing experiences. Our most recent trip was to north Florida in Osceola National Forest. Simply being out in the woods with nothing else to do but converse and sit by the campfire was a feeling that assuaged all my petty stresses and worries. It was a wonderful trip consisting of pitcher plant sightings, hikes through the palm fronds, and cooking over an open fire. One of the things I noticed though was while we were driving to the National Forest the surrounding towns were very poor by American standards. Dilapidated houses, abandoned stores, and fast food chains lined most of their streets. It was a reminder of how millions of people in this country, and billions around the world, live in poverty. It’s easy to forget about the inequality facing our country going to such a privileged school and living in downtown Charleston.

My connection to nature goes back very far. As long as I can remember I have been in love with all the green spaces around me. I always loved exploring the beach, going hiking, going camping, going out on the boat or on my kayak or anything that got me outside. I was the kid who would be outside digging in the dirt catching bugs, worms, frogs and lizards just to watch them exist. My connection to nature has changed over time in the way that when I was growing up, it was more of a innocent curiosity. Now, I want to make a career interacting with and learning about all different types of animals, plants and insects. I want to spend my life learning about what makes our planet special and helping others understand it’s beauty too. There is so much life on this planet we might not even know about and that’s what excites me about being alive is knowing that there is so much I get to learn about. I think that is important to have a connection with nature because nature is what keeps us alive. We eat food that comes  from nature, whether it be plant or animal based, we build houses from nature, we essentially get everything we need to survive from nature. We need a connection to understand how to take care of nature so we can have these resources that we use every day for years to come.

To reflect on how connected to nature I am, I went down to the Aquarium and there is a small park nearby called The Charlotte Street Park. It is a beautiful park overlooking the harbor. I chose this place because I feel most connected to nature when I am on the water. I love anything to do with the ocean or rivers or lakes. There is something about the mystery and the creatures that lie beneath the surface that fascinates me and excites me at the same time. It makes me realize how small humans are in the scope of every living creature on the planet and how much more I have to learn about what lives on Earth. While I was there, I thought about a lot of things. Every time I enjoy some time near or on the water, I always think about how we don’t know whats under the surface. Of course we know what COULD be there right now, but we don’t know what is right there, right now. I love that mystery. I also began to think about how much trash must be in the beautiful harbor and this thought saddened me. I saw a chip bag floating in the water. It is crazy to me to think that people care so little about something so beautiful. There is a wealth of life under the ocean and we have yet to discover it. This reminds me about how much life has to give you as long as you go out there and get it. I do know we weren’t supposed to be on our phones, but it was so beautiful out I had to take a few pictures over the harbor.

Sometimes it can be hard for people to feel connected to the natural world; for some it is obviously more difficult than for others. Especially living in an urban environment like Charleston, the routines of everyday life can cause the natural world to slip the mind. I have always felt pretty connected to nature because I grew up hiking, camping, and fishing with my family, but I would say that living in Charleston for the past four years has made me feel a bit disconnected. However, every time that I get the chance to immerse myself in nature, I immediately feel that strong connection that I grew up fostering. For example, when I went to Colorado with my dad, a few summers ago, I was in awe of the raw beauty it had to offer. The red rock formations in the Garden of the Gods are probably still to this day one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. On top of this, the view from the top of Pike’s Peak was sublime. For my own eyes, it was very easy to appreciate the raw power of Mother Nature and how lucky we are to live on this Earth. Unfortunately, these thoughts generally only come into my head when I am immersed in nature, which is not very often as a resident of Charleston.

Over spring break this year I went to Costa Rica, which is a country full of natural beauty. My friends and I stayed at a resort in Tamarindo, which is a small town on the Pacific Ocean. One day while I was there, I decided to go sit on the beach without my phone and reflect about my connection with nature and the importance of having a connection with nature. As I sat there and watched the very large waves crash on the rock formations coupled with the palm trees swaying in the breeze, I decided that a personal connection with nature should be important to everyone on this planet. This is our home, and it is the only home that we have. As powerful as nature is, humans are infinitely more powerful due to our ability to affect change in nature. A lot of the damages to the environment and changes in climate that have been caused by humans came before scientific knowledge on the subject, but now the data is in and it is very clear that our actions are having a great effect on the planet. It is great that we now understand what is going on, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy for policy-makers to effect change on what we are doing to the environment. For something to truly be done about climate change, people must hold themselves individually accountable and make changes in their own lives to help the planet. I believe that people who do not feel a strong connection to the natural world probably do not care enough to make these changes. In other words, the importance of having a connection to the natural world cannot be understated, especially in generations moving forward

.

I feel connected to the natural world in many ways. When I was a kid I spent endless hours outside exploring the woods, swimming, biking, and gardening with my parents. Now I spend less time outside, but I still feel connected to the natural world. While we live in a city, I still make use of all of our amazing green spaces and parks on the water. As I have gotten older I have become busier and it is harder to find the time to be outside. When I do have time to be outside I head down to a dock near Water Front Park, this is my favorite place in Charleston. I love watching the water and there are always dolphins flipping out of the water. Boats come in and out of the port and there is an amazing view of the Ravenell Bridge. I feel connected to the natural world the I go outside and mediate. It brings peace to me knowing I’m a small part of a big system. When I mediate outdoors I feel grounded afterwords. There are many benefits to mediating and being outdoors, so I do both at once to maximize my time. Being connected to the natural plays a big part in our well being. It is proven to improve mental health and boost overall mood. For this assignment I went down to a dock at the end of Bull Street, near Lockwood drive. I sat and meditated for 10-15 minutes and then I just relaxed in the sun. A friend showed me this dock, which is not far from campus and a great place to relax or even study. I have always loved the water and everything about it. So for me, heading to the spot on or near the water is ideal for connecting to the natural world. My experience this particular time was amazing, the weather was perfect for a relaxing time to escape from the city. It was quiet and I was the only one out there. It is important to take time and appreciate the nature we have around us. I do not have this quality of outdoor space at home and all green spaces/parks/forests are a 30 minute drive away. It is nice to live a city with amazing and well kept green-spaces for locals and tourist to enjoy. The City of Charleston has done an amazing job keeping these parks and docks a reality for us. Although the amount of time I have spent outside has changed over the years, I still make sure to get out at least once a week and enjoy everything this beautiful and historic city has to offer us. 

Before I moved to Charleston, I lived in a more rural area. Living in the city has been a big change. I grew up with a large backyard complete with extensive woods and a creek. I spent my childhood playing and exploring outside. I always felt I had a close connection to nature. Moving to the city was a big change. The closest natural area is Marion Square and that area only has grass and a few trees. I’m now surrounded by concrete day in and day out and it is hard to maintain that connection to the natural world. Being connected to nature allows one to stay grounded and levelheaded. Nature is beautiful and has given us so much. Remembering that we humans only make up an extremely small portion of Earth’s history is important. We tend to think that humans are the most important part of the Earth even though we occupy so little of it and have only lived here for a short time. Realizing this allows us to remember that we have a job to treat the Earth with respect as we are only visitors. Being exposed to natures beauty helps to remind us what we stand to lose if we aren’t careful. Scientists proposed the concept of the Anthropocene because humans have come to have such a large impact on the environment despite only being around for a small part of the Earths existence. The climate is changing and animals are going extinct because we are losing our connection to nature.

To reconnect with nature I went to an empty portion of the beach and sat for a few minutes. I could hear the waves crashing against the shore, the sand beneath me, and the sun shining down on me. There was no sirens, ringtones, or car sounds only the squawking of birds and that crashing of waves. It was very relaxing and reminded me about the beauty of the natural world. Leaving the city and entering nature allowed me to regain that connection to nature that I’ve lost. It put everything we’d been talking about in class into perspective. The relaxing sound of the waves is coming from a polluted ocean. The squawking birds could possibly be extinct due to said pollution in the near future. The sand beneath is littered with trash and is becoming overtaken by the tourism industry. Focusing on the development of sustainable practices will help us to fix these problems and protect the Earth from human actions. Reconnecting with nature allowed me to remember how valuable nature is and why we need to change our ways. Being in nature makes the problems seem more real. It’s easy to ignore a problem when it’s out of sight. Sitting on a beautiful beach and then looking over to see a water bottle and other trash scattered around ruining the postcard-worthy image is inspiring and encourages me to continue with my attempts to live a more sustainable life. A connection with nature reminds us of the importance of the fight for a more sustainable world.                          

Living in Charleston I do not always feel that connected to the natural world. I live In North Charleston and travel to downtown for classes and work. Most of the city is very urban and it can be hard to find a connection to nature in that setting. It is very rarely quiet and peaceful and it can be hard to hear yourself think let alone commune with nature.

I grew up in Knoxville Tennessee which is surrounded by the Great Smokey Mountains. My parents instilled love and respect of nature in me as a child. My dad took us hiking in the Smoky Mountains often when I was growing up. As I grew older, my love for the mountains also grew. However, also as I got older my use of technology and electronics also increased. It is easy to get lost in the world of technology and forget about the natural beauties that surround you. When I was in high school I would try to go hiking at least a couple times a month if I could. It was a time that I felt most connected to nature and truly peaceful. There is no cell signal in the mountains so it was easy to put my phone away for the day and just enjoy what was around me. When I moved from Knoxville I felt lost without that special time to just be. I missed the mountains so much and it was a truly hard adjustment.  While many places are beautiful here in Charleston, I have never found a place that feels as peaceful as being in the Smokies.

I traveled home this past weekend and was determined to get in some “mountain time”. On Saturday morning, a friend and I drove to the trailhead for a hike called Mount LeConte. It is a very beautiful and strenuous hike that is about 11 miles round trip. When we reached the summit my friend and I split up to explore the area a little bit. While it was a slightly chilly day it was warm at the top with the sun beaming down and it felt so nice to feel the warmth hitting my skin. I found a large flat rock and decided to sit for a little bit and enjoy my snack there. It was so incredibly quiet at the top of LeConte. I could hear the wind moving in the trees and feel the warmth of the sun coming off the rock I was sitting on. At that moment, I felt such inner peace that I wish I could always feel. I did not have my phone nor did I feel like I needed it. The only thing that mattered in that moment was what was surrounding me. Reflecting on this time in the mountains makes me understand that those moments are special and I must appreciate them. Finding that peace in our ever-moving world can be difficult and when you do, you need to stop and enjoy as much as you can.

I did not realize how much my time in the Mountains really meant to me until it was something I was not able to do as often anymore. As humans it is easy to get caught up in our own lives and our personal worlds. I think taking a step back every once and while to appreciate what nature has given us is so important. It can give us perspective that the world is larger than just us and that we must appreciate and protect it now, before it is gone.