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My whole life, I have always felt more comfortable being out, surrounded by nature, than being downtown in a city. For me, going into nature is like getting away from the world of worries and responsibilities. It’s a release—where nothing else matters outside of the trail I’m hiking or the…

I have always been quite well protected by the comfortability of metropolitan life. In the past five years in Singapore, everyday life revolved around travelling from one well-constructed metal box to another in air-conditioned subway trains or double-decker buses. It was not the case that I could not see any…

I consider myself an environmentalist. However, after all my experiences my relationship with the environment is very confused. In some ways I subscribe to Muir’s Preservationist mindset – seeing beautiful places from my childhood slowly degrade by poor care and overuse. In other ways I subscribe to Pinchot’s Conservationist mindset…

European colonialists initially were scared of and threatened by nature, but a love of nature arose once European settlers felt a distance from nature in their everyday lives. Do you feel more comfortable in the woods or downtown in a city? Why do you think that is so? Does your comfortability shape…

I find it interesting the process by which popular opinion on a matter changes. On the topic of nature/environment in particular, the way in which the idea of it transformed from being detested to revered from one period to the next. How did this happen? Before the 18th century, most…

Do you feel more comfortable in the woods or downtown in a city? Why do you think that is so? Does your comfortability shape what you value? I once read an article published by Kamehameha Schools about how contemporary geographic growth patterns point out the rise of placelessness across the…

The wilderness is not a symbolic construction. There is a danger that lies in the early romanticization of nature and in the separate-ness and alienation from it in our contemporary technocratic society. To both idolize and consume “the wilderness” is to misunderstand it, and in so doing, lies the tragic…

The following question, which I will respond to in this blog, was taken from the discussion questions at the end of chapter 2 of the Cox reading: Is wilderness merely a symbolic construction? Does this matter to whether or not you want to protect it? The most immediate task in…

Discussion prompt from Cox: Should we set spaces aside where humans tread lightly in order to enable nature to thrive? Or should we find ways to cultivate nature efficiently for increasing human demands for wood, paper, drinking water, and more? As environmental sustainability has become a hotly debated topic over…

New York City is not known for its natural sites. Other than Central Park, there are very few places in which you can look around and see many trees and greenery densely populated in an area. Even Central Park is not natural. The majority of the giant rocks in the…