Due to very cheap airfare, I decided to take a trip to my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama this weekend. While I have been told in the past that I do not look or sound like I am from the South, I think that many people assume everyone that is from Alabama has a thick southern drawl and does not know what shoes are. Another assumption is that Alabama is home of all farms. Where I live, this is not the case. There are no farms for at least an hour and a half out of Birmingham. Since my family recently just moved into a new neighborhood in a suburb of Birmingham while I was away at college, I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood to see what I could encounter with nature.
There were many things that I noticed that were completely different from my usual walks down the streets of Chicago compared to my walk I was currently taking in my very wooded and damp atmospheric neighborhood. It had just stopped raining, and the mosquitos were swarming. There are hardly ever insects in Chicago, but in the south, they are everywhere. When I am home in Alabama, I am always amazed about how green and lively everything looks compared to when I am in Chicago. Just by taking a 45-minute walk in my neighborhood, I am astonished by how hilly the land is. I can literally see hills and mountains, where in Chicago everything is very flat and there are hardly any trees. One of the main things I noticed on my walk was this patch of mushrooms growing behind one of the bushes of my neighbor’s yard. It was like nothing I have seen before. These mushrooms were very vibrant, large, and exquisite. I couldn’t help but take a picture for my personal keeping, because it was not something I can easily see walking down the sidewalks of Lincoln Park.
I feel that whenever I am home I appreciate nature more because I can actually hear the trees sway, and the birds chirping instead of those noises being drowned out by the sounds of cars and ambulances on Fullerton. Even though I interact with nature every day in Lincoln Park, I feel as if the “nature” part is very artificial. Almost every tree has been strategically placed to make room for people to walk. Humans force nature to adapt to us, and in someway we make it so we have to adapt to nature. For example, because we cannot change how the weather is in the winter, we do what we can to adapt to nature.
My walk resembled Kuo’s more than Muir’s due to the fact that Kuo explains how arboriculture limits the crime in neighborhoods and encourages neighborhood interaction. Because my neighborhood does have a lot of well-kept lawns and trees, I feel as if this encourages interactions between neighbors and does limit crime to a certain extent. I think Kuo’s and Muir’s writings differ in that Kuo was describing ways in which one could improve their neighborhood and how arboriculture could benefit those in residential neighborhoods while Muir’s writing was depicting vivid scenes of nature in different areas. It also did not talk much, if any, about arboriculture. Muir also wrote in a way that made his ideas sound like poetry. Both Kuo’s and Muir’s writings greatly differ such as the nature in Birmingham and that of Chicago.
