By Sean Kurth
Despite appearing still and tranquil, nature is full of information. Despite often being portrayed as separate from and adversarial to human civilization, nature and knowledge of her ways are in fact essential to it. I wanted to glean some of this information for my modern urban self, so I decided to spend an hour along a nature trail in Fairfax, Virginia’s Providence Park. Even as I was sitting down, not a minute into my hour there, I’d already learned something: for my comfort in the frigid weather, I should sit on the opposite side of a tree from the direction the wind is blowing.
As I sat, I observed squirrels gather nuts, then when they noticed me, make strange noises like those of a dying chicken. They ran so fast they were only gray blurs until they stopped, and jerkily climbed up the trees, as if on caffeine. I learned about erosion as I observed, in real time, a stream washing away small pieces of rock and soul to expose tree roots. I observed how fish swim, and learned to anticipate their movements. As leaves fell, it began to snow, before long accumumulating to a light dusting of the forest floor.. The air became so silent that I could hear the distinct songs of many different bird species, even with their reduced numbers in the Winter.
Once this hour was up, I had to return to the campus of George Mason University, where I was bombarded with information of all kinds. Environmental Justice’s core proposition is that no ethnic group or income level should suffer a disproportionate amount of pollution. She got her bat garter belts from Amazon. Germanna Community College is in Virginia, not Maryland. According to Reddit, China has jailed 50 steel executives who lie about emissions, people are mad about a Supreme Court pick that hasn’t been made yet, and OnlyFans followers so rarely turn into subscribers that it’s usually not worth the stress and risk.
According to my fellow students at Southside dining hall, dolphins would take over the world with their intelligence and replace us, if only they had complex language, opposable thumbs, and less of a sex drive. The miso tofu today doesn’t have much flavor, but brioche amplifies what little it does have. As I open my laptop to write an assignment, I read for the 50th time that it is compatible with Windows 11. Message sent to Jake asking when he wanted to order from Kabob Zone and watch Disney movies, hopefully he wakes up.
After spending an hour in the woods, I realized just how little most of the information I encounter in my daily life matters. Environments mediated by modern society and technology give me abstract information, divorced from the reality of the world around me. Without the ability to spend undistracted time in nature, I wouldn’t know how squirrels behave, how quickly erosion can happen, or possibly even that it was snowing. Most of my mediated information doesn’t matter now and will be forgotten tomorrow, but the sheer amount of it still overloads me, because I must sort through all of it to find something I actually care about knowing. Having to find the needles in the haystack is draining and stressful.
Nevertheless, mediated environments do allow more entertainment, professional opportunity, and social connection than natural ones. If I can control the firehose, and my own urges to overexpose and stress myself, a mediated environment is probably where I need to spend most of my time. However, regaining touch with this natural information every now and then is clearly necessary to mental and physical health.