civilized life vs. life in nature

Final Project Blog Post

We as a class decided to combine as one large group and perform a skit modeled after a game show. Within our large group, we split up into smaller groups to do the majority of our work, and come up with focus questions that we would bring back to the large group. Additionally, each group was assigned a character or author whose views they would be representing in the performance. My group represented Chris McCandless. The three questions my group came up with are: “What could be defined as living with nature?”, “What aspect of leading a civilized life is most corrupting?”, and “How important or valuable are material human items?” We thought that these questions directly related to the ones voiced by Into the Wild and Chris McCandless. The questions all mainly lead back to idea of the differences between living with nature versus living in culture (and against nature), and which (if either) is “better”.

I used an excerpt from My first Summer in the Sierra by John Muir as my outside source. Chris McCandless was greatly influenced by romanticism and nature writers. I decided to choose an excerpt by John Muir because he is a well known environmentalist and author who has influenced and shaped many people’s views on nature. In my annotations for the passage I note how Muir both Romanticizes and personifies nature and the things that make it up, like plants and animals. Additionally, Muir also makes connections between nature and religion, eventually leading to the idea the nature is the source of everything, and that everything is connected through nature. I thought that this was interesting when looking at Chris McCandless’s views on nature and culture. On the one hand, McCandless would seem to agree with Muir, with the idealization of nature and experiences in it. Both Muir and McCandless find joy  and healing in the wild. However, McCandless acts cynical towards many aspects of nature and rejects human possessions and material items, as he sees them as having no value. Muir seems to express two opposing viewpoints. He describes aspects of human manufacturing as unsightly and a disgrace, but also talks about how humans (and everything else) originates in nature, and is a part of the same universe. These ideas and the blurred distinctions between humans, nature, and culture brought me back to the first weeks of class.

I contributed to this project in my small group by annotating finding and annotating two sources, and contributing to the formation of our main ideas. I contributed to the large group by helping brainstorm ideas, writing a question for the dialog, writing and answer for the dialog, acting in the performance, and bringing in props. I think that this project was overall fairly open-ended and unclear, but it also had a lot of requirements. In hindsight, I think sticking with a very typical monologue or spoken work performance would have been the easiest route for our class to have taken and still gotten all the requirements done. It was just that at the time that seemed boring, and the game show idea was more exciting and interactive. I think in the future the project should have more guidance, but less annotation requirements, because after a point it seemed like we were just finding passages for the sake of having passages, and not to actually contribute content and quality to our project. Maybe having a guiding question such as “How do you interact with nature” or “what is the future of humanity’s relationship with nature” would have made the project less daunting to tackle.