Nature Is Neat: Justification 

Throughout this course we were able to discover some of the natural beauty of Texas that we had not really seen before. Discovering all these little bits of nature interspersed within Fort Worth helped us see a new side of the city.  With most of us being from places that are defined by their picturistic scenery it reminded us how thankful we are to have grown up in a place where nature is so easily accessible. While reminiscing about our childhoods and easily accessible nature we also recalled the old educational videos we were shown in school that were filled with awkward pauses, questions and word art. We decided for our nature video to pull in these memories from our childhood and create an ‘informational’ video about nature in the true 90s style.

We filmed our video at the Trinity Trails Airfield Trail Head, out by the waterfall. While we were enjoying the scenery we decided to make the word ‘nature’ an acronym and come up with an object that we found on the trail for each letter in the word nature. We believe this was a crafty way to incorporate our current surrounding and to base our film in objects of nature. ‘N’ stood for nest, which we spotted up in the trees. ‘A’ stood for agua or water which we had walked along. ‘T’ stood for the trees that surrounded us. ‘U’ stood for underground because we discovered some holes in the ground off the side of the trail. ‘R’ stood for rocks which surrounded the edge of the river and waterfall. ‘E’ stood for eggs, because we found lots of spider webs and spiders lay eggs. From here we recalled a little bits of information that we had learned about our objects and shared our facts as a part of recreating the ‘informational’ films they showed in elementary and middle school.

The hardest part of creating our video then laid in reflecting on the course, but we decided to connect to objects we had chosen back to authors we read and videos we watched that stood out to us the most. We connected the nest back to the nest that Linda Hogan had discovered with the blue thread in it, and commented on the connectedness of life and how all of our homes are here on earth.  Agua or water we connected back to Bill Mckibben and Leonardo Dicaprio and their comments on climate change and how no one is doing anything about it, because fresh water will be one of the first things to disappear. For trees we connected it back to Wendell Berry and the tree he observed growing through the chimney, and how it takes a very long time for earth to undo the damage humans cause.  Underground and rocks were harder and we did not have any good connections that weren’t a stretch, so we did not directly connect those to our course work. For Eggs we connected them to Annie Dillard's work ‘Fecundity’ and how she talked about the cycle of life and how some animals lay an excessive amount of eggs. Although she argued that nature is all about death and just trying to survive, we took the more ‘kid friendly’ approach to go with the theme of our video and comment on how creating life is beautiful.

Overall, we had a lot of fun creating our video and worked hard to incorporate material from class as well as our surroundings and current knowledge regarding objects in nature.  Also a side note, Reilly sang her scat song while we volunteered at the nature center and we felt that the whole class should enjoy a last rendition of it.