Nature Video Presentation

Link to Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBAAD266mTg&t=1s

For our final project, our group chose to reflect on how we could interpret the works of great environmental writers and academics within our personal world. Therefore, we chose to explore how we saw environmental literature on TCU’s campus; however, as we explored the topic further and further, we found that it became easiest to understand our authors by documenting where our society might have failed. It became obvious to explore our topic through a satirical lens due to the lack of nature present in the surrounding area. We chose to portray the idea of our society’s lack of concern for nature through a imagined, television episode of the series Treks and Texts. Within this context, we explored the works of N. Scott Momaday, Wendell Berry, and Bill Mckibben, as their ideas apply to our campus.

We began with a study of N. Scott Momaday’s theories within the environment of the Greek Village. Momaday was born in 1934 with a mixed heritage of Native American Kiowa and American pioneer. He wrote multiple books and essays on Native American and American pioneer interaction and how these two different groups treated the land which they both shared. We decided to focus our video on Momaday’s comments regarding improper treatment of the land. For this reason, we chose to begin at the Greek village -- a community gathering space for TCU’s campus. It did not take close observation to find that habitual destruction and carelessness was destroying the landscape. Laziness and disregard for our environment led students to run through the planted groundcover and make (quite literally) a human footprint.

Next we talked about Wendell Berry. Berry was born in Kentucky and attended the the University of Kentucky. He later taught at the New York University but returned back to Kentucky to live on a farm with his family where he could truly be one with nature. His work focuses on negative consequences of our consumer’s culture and its modern development. We chose to comment on Berry’s view by referencing Texas Christian University's (TCU) construction of the new performance hall. Not only did the hall represent the preliminary profits that would be derived from ticket sales, but also its construction resulted in a manipulation of the natural environment.

We then explored the writings of Bill Mckibben, who was interested in global warming. After working for the New Yorker, he continued his environmental activism by writing his first book on global warming. He then created many activist groups to draw more attention to the cause. As Mckibben spoke a lot about his time in his backyard, a forest with a creek, we chose to observe the creek in our backyard--frat pond. There we saw that, rather than nature being resilient, nature was destroyed and littered with beer cans and trash bags. Nature did not, unlike in Mckibben’s experience, recover from human abuse.

We surveyed the greek village, frat pond and the construction of the performance hall to show the lack of concern for nature present on our campus. Through this exploration we found that it was easier to find a lack of nature rather than nature in its own right. While we chose to display this message in a satirical sense, our concern for nature is prevalent and present. This class has taught us that nature is precious and should be treated as such. The TCU’s mission statement reminds of these responsibilities: it is our duty “to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens.” It is frustrating to see that this treatment of nature is neither ethical nor responsible. We found it ironic that we have spent the entire semester studying literature that addresses these problems on a national and global scale when our own community disregards rather than address these said problems.