Naturalist Essay

On my observational nature walk I decided to start walking from south down Kenmore at Webster. I chose the route because I thought it would fit nicely with Frances Kuo’s essay on the link between “green space” and a social health. The area of on Kenmore that I started on is just outside of DePaul’s campus in Lincoln park and there is a lot of trees and green vegetation everywhere around you. As you walk south the trees that line the roads by the beautiful houses constantly shade your head. However, I knew that as I continued south I would start entering more impoverished areas like Cabrini Green. Sure enough by the time I was at North and Hasted the land was much more barren. After a very short stint in Cabrini Green I ,think but am not sure, headed west the Brown Line Sedgwick stop to head back. The more west I moved and away from Cabrini I went the greener and nicer the community was.
I didn’t really notice anything physically different then I normally would have but I did notice a strong connection between green space and social adhesiveness that I had not thought about before. I really love the nature around me. In the city it is really hard to be surrounded by nature but when you do fine a place in the city that has a lot of trees around you I feel a lot happier and more positive about everything. It makes me feel like I’m not just a bum sitting in an apartment. Being out side gives me a fresh feeling about life.
Nature interacts with my life in a lot of ways, way more then you could count. For one everyone wonders weather or not its going to be warm or cool out that day to decide what to were. I ask my self all the time if I think it will rain so I can make sure my bike is inside. I also feel safe letting my cat out because I know there are a lot of safe areas for him to explore because of all the “nature” around. There are also ways we interact with nature everyday as well. Humans are constantly driving cars, cutting down trees or plants and basically keeping everything nice and neat in nature, especially in the City.
I think my walk was an interaction more described by Kuo, mostly because I sort of set up my walk to be an experiment of his analysis. I purposely walked from a socially higher area to a lower one to try and test for my self if there were fewer trees in run down areas. Muir’s walk would have been a beautiful one but in the city I think it is hard to find such pristine beauty as Muir was describing.