Final Blog

        During my time at SRS, I’ve learned a lot of things. Not just about conservation and the environment, but a lot about people. Most of my classmates going in to Conservation Ecology had little to no experience with the “great outdoors,” and even for environmental majors like myself, one month ago I couldn’t tell the difference between a pine tree and an oak tree. Now, just after one month, I can see that everyone in the class has developed a deep, personal connection to nature. For a young adult raised in an urban or suburban area to achieve a spiritual connection with a thousand year-old cypress tree, there has to be a major transformation within his or her way of thinking about the world around them. And that is exactly the purpose of this class: for us to think about nature as not just an irrelevant concept separate from daily life, but as something that is deeply interconnected to our individual lives and which connects us to everything else in the world. 

        Even though our Conservation Ecology class is coming to a close, our mission does not stop once this internship is over. We should strive to remain connected with the environment on an individual level, and strive to deepen that relationship. As an Environmental Policy major, one of my goals is to obtain a career in which I can influence other people to care about the environment, or at least to become more aware about how to protect it. But that is not going to be an easy task. Our class of eight people was lucky enough to have such a kind and influential teacher who challenged us to view the world through a new perspective, resulting in a deeper understanding of ourselves. We were lucky enough to receive such instruction for an entire month, in an internship strongly focused on concerns of the natural world. Most people are not so lucky to be challenged in this sort of way, and as a result, they continue to view the world in the narrow lens that our society, which emphasizes “progress” at the expense of nature, has created. My goal is to one day influence people to “connect the dots” just as Dr. Lanham has taught us; to help them realize that tree frogs in South America, the clearcutting of the Amazon rain forest, and efforts to restore America's wild turkey population do impact us all.