Final Exam

My group chose to address the question, "how do man and nature interact?" I took this as looking at how man affects nature, and how nature shapes man. The passages we chose took various examples of humans in a natural setting, and we then analyzed the relationship. The Feral Child video depicts the natural world and civilization as being completely contradictory. In the story, a boy simply cannot fit into society because of his upbringing in the wild. It becomes clear from the movie that civilization has moved so far away from nature, that a person would not be able to effectively move between the two. Chris McCandless tried to make the opposite switch in Into the Wild, but his attempt proved fatal. In order to survive, he would have needed some aspect of human creation, like a topographical map. Through his journey, and the passage we annotated in the book, I didn't just see how far man has moved from nature. I also saw the change we have made in our relationship to nature. Every part of "nature" that humans enjoy has been disturbed by human creation, so much so that we cannot actually function without human influence.
I annotated a poem which seemed to bring all of these ideas together, in a discreet fashion. The title "Old Familiar Landscapes," suggests a struggle between the natural world and human creation. For me, the word 'landscapes' brings up the image of scenic expanses in nature. However, 'landscaping' reminds me of human manipulation of nature. In my childhood, my parents often had landscaping done to rid our yard of unwanted plants and weeds, essentially taking away the power of nature. More contradictions lie in the body of the poem. The speaker at first seems to miss the natural aspects of their old home, like the trees and singing of the birds. However, as the poem goes on, in the authors memory the natural world makes way for material and man made possessions, such as a large house. Through the texts we looked at, and through my personal annotations, I have decided that humans cannot successfully exist in pure nature because we depend on human creation even in the wilderness. Technology has become such an integral facet of our lifestyles, that we can never actually escape civilization.
I contributed to this project through my ideas. My group thought man's relationship to nature not only epitomized this course, but would be a good final idea to explore. I came with a more cynical take on the relationship, and brought this to light through sharing passages in Into the Wild and from sources like my poem. My idea on our inability to truly experience nature weaved together ideas from all of our sources. However, there are many things I would have changed about our/my process. First, I would have spent more time collaborating on the annotations, as we all picked certain sources to annotate and came up with a uniting idea after reading. Thinking of the answer to our question before doing research would have helped, as we could have used this idea in finding sources. We also had some struggles creating a final work to show, after underestimating the time constraint. In hindsight, however, I think we worked pretty well together, and all shared both our ideas and our research.