SAVE NATURE!

From when I was about six until I hit thirteen and began rejecting my parents’ enthusiasm towards family trips, my parents, younger sister, and I would drive eight hours up into the Adirondack mountain range in upstate New York. Every summer we drove up and to go backwoods camping at Forked Lake- packing our gear into a canoe and paddling out to find a small clearing along the edge of the lake for our two weeks of tranquility. I grew up without television, and as a result had an incredibly vivid imagination; the non-human world to me was a fantasy-land. I remember one summer in particular I read The Mists of Avalon nestled in the roots of a giant fallen tree that jutted out over a waterfall. The story had come to life for me, and it was truly magical.
On one of the same trips, I remember walking to an outhouse by the side of a trail with my sister and my mother. We rarely, if ever, saw any other humans at Forked Lake, so we were alone with the stillness and the occasional squirrel or chipmunk. It was my turn and as I sat in the outhouse I heard my mother gasp. I creaked the door open and not 4 feet away were 3 brown bear cubs. They stared at us, unmoving, and that’s when we saw mama bear amble out of some nearby foliage. It was a silent, locked eye contact, standoff between two mothers and their young. I remember being frightened because the night before we had a visit from papa bear, who growled menacingly at my dad and his flashlight as he devoured our marshmallows. After a few minutes of tension the bears wandered off and we breathed sighs of relief. I have many more enchanting and thrilling memories from Forked Lake, whose serene landscape taught me to appreciate the majesty of undisturbed nature.

Saving nature is absolutely something we should concern ourselves with. Not only for our own enjoyment and spiritual gain, but because as cohabitants of this planet we have a responsibility and ethical obligation to preserve the habitats of our fellow “Earth-dwellers”. For human beings I would argue that it is incredibly important to have undisturbed nature to escape to and surround ourselves with. Being alone in nature is a deeply spiritual and therapeutic experience that everyone should have the luxury of access to.
It is important to save nature in order to preserve ecosystems as we know them to be today. If we fail to take measures to conserve nature, biodiversity will essentially be wiped out and we will be left with man-manipulated species and environments, which defeats the concept of nature at its very core.