Tim H
One paragraph describing information received from one hour of media consumption
For my one hour of media consumption, I chose to curate my media consumption experience. This is in contrast to Bill McKibben’s approach of watching a collection of cable tv from Fairfax’s cable system, which seemed to bear a quite randomly aggregated stream of information. The information I focused my attention on was from Capcom’s Monster Hunter 3, a nostalgic video game from my childhood. In the game, human society has not developed the technology for large scale industrial farming, but still subsists on a hunter-gatherer style of life. Since hunting is a major part of the culture and a means of survival for the society, they place an equal importance on ecological monitoring and management. The natural world is studied extensively and a careful balance is found between the natural rates at which different animals reproduce and the rate at which they are hunted. What emerges is a form of conservation biology, they ensure their impact on the natural world is not more than can be replenished. This system creates a feedback loop that leads to the conservation of nature and the survival of the human species. If only this sort of thinking could have been applied in our reality. Oh, wait! The way of life I described is akin to the practices of indigenous societies, which have been all too quickly swept under the rug by colonization. This train of thought led me to ponder world history and how things may have been different today if indigenous people had been given the respect they deserved.
Location: Pohick Stream Valley Park in Burke
My hour outdoors in a naturalistic environment started with me walking to my destination, a small stream nearby to my house. Walking past towering townhouses I looked up at one and wondered “Is that a three bedroom or a four bedroom?” before strolling on. I eventually reached the edge of the forest surrounding the stream. Looking at the tall trees, then the medium sized ones, and then down to the smaller saplings, I thought that they sort of resembled the three-story townhouse I was looking at just before. It occurred to me suddenly that you could house a lot more organisms in a naturalistic environment than you could in the same amount of space in a human altered environment. A three-story townhouse sleeps maybe 5 or 6 humans, but a three-story forest sleeps birds, bats, rodents, insects, an almost uncountable number of species. While a human domicile holds maybe 2 species if they have pets (or pests). I noticed a dead tree, looking like it had been feasted on by both bugs and birds. When you think about it, animals live in the same places, dine in the same places, you can really see why the term community is used so frequently in ecology. When I arrived at the streambed, I approached the edge of the water and saw a pile of clam shells picked clean. “Wow!” I thought, “No need for a trash can because that food comes packaged in natural materials.” And that packaging will be recycled into sediment and eventually into a new clam by completely natural processes. A flowering plant with beautiful yellow and orange blooms that looked like tiny trumpets grew along the bank looking almost like orange string lights decorating the bank. Many clumps of grasses had been matted down like something large has been traipsing through and foraging for food. Or maybe it was just having some fun flattening a few clumps of grass. The recent rain had caused a rise in the water level in the stream which flowed vigorously. Suddenly, I heard a loud bird call out from a tree somewhere. What was the meaning of this vocalization? Was it warning to others that there was a large mammal poking around down by the stream? Whether it was a change in my attention from the bird or the number of mosquitoes chasing me down, I decided to move from the stream back into the forest. I noticed a dead cicada on the trail, its body was brown and decaying but its wings were spread out and looking glassy and clean. Funny how fragile these wings seemed yet they remain after the body has broken. It made me think that life itself seems fragile, yet resilient. I began walking back to my house and made note of the color of the sky. The light blue background was interwoven with orange tinted clouds; the two complimentary colors were contrasting beautifully with their vivid tones. Eventually as I made it home, I noted the sky has turned a deep red, a smooth and blended looking hue. Stepping back inside, I wondered how many different shades the sky changed to over the course of a day.
One paragraph summarizing what I learned from this experience
My outdoor hour felt “deeper” than my indoor hour, try as I did to pry a deeper meaning from a video game. I felt free in my thoughts when exploring nature, different from the confined and almost trapped feeling I got when considering history and what has led up to the present after playing video games for an hour. It can be freeing to try and escape this reality by playing in another one, but at the end of the day its not the greatest way to take in information. It is better to be rooted in reality, recognizing the information presented by nature and focusing on correcting mistakes made in the past.