Meditations

This question is so appropriate with only a few weeks before Thanksgiving.  I have been so lucky in my life, having had a number of exhilarating experiences, isolated, in wonder with nature.  Some of my favorite experiences have been out backpacking the Wind River Range in Wyoming, hiking around on the burren in Ireland, and climbing to the top of the highest waterfall in Australia to look down as the water literally turned into mist beneath us.  I've been so lucky.  When I search my memories for the most exhilarating/magical/thrilling experience, however, I keep coming back to a handful of experiences I had looking at trees back home in Colorado during the summer after Freshman year.  
After finishing my first year of college I was so relieved to be going home.  I took up a job with the Boulder County Youth Corps as a assistant forestry team leader for a group of 10 teenagers.  We were responsible for pulling the slash and dried logs left in previous years by chainsaw teams, working to prevent wildfires in the front range.  The task was grueling, but as the summer wore on, I became accustomed to it, and was able to appreciate my surroundings and the people I was working with.  I remember in particular one afternoon at the end of a long, hot work day.  It began to rain just before we had to head back home, and it crescendoed into a downpour.  All 12 of us ran down the mountain to our van through the trees, covered in mud.  When we made it out of the forest, laughing and trying not to trip on the uneven ground there was a rainbow to the East, and gilded clouds illuminated by the low sun.  

Looking back, that summer was one of the most important times as I have tried to discover myself, and what I value.  Working in the forest, interacting with nature every day with all its hardships and thrills, grounded me - bringing me back down from my DC/SIS rush.  So, yes - nature is worth preserving.  But it was not only the trees, the dirt, and the sun that made that summer (and every summer with the Youth Corps since then) so extraordinary; it was also the people I was with.  Nature is best enjoyed with people, despite what the Thoreaus of the world might have you believe.  The best part of nature is the fact that we are a dynamic part of it, something worth preserving because it unites us as all as something we depend on, and as a common denominator for humanity.  The conservationist ideal of a sterile wilderness is misleading, because we can never see nature for what it truly is.  Every time we engage with our natural surroundings we make new meanings of it by virtue of our presence.  When we make such meaning alone, we learn about ourselves; but when we make sure meaning together, we learn about ourselves as a species.