what is nature...

For several class discussions we talked about the difference between nature and natural. To answer this question we decided to spend a full 24 hours outside, with no food and only a water bottle full of water. The night started off all right, we climbed trees, laid out in Jackson Plaza, and played a few games, finally we decided to go to sleep under the star trees. Later in the night we were disturbed by a stranger who had decided to circle us, we quickly left and wound up spending the night in the basement of Belknap, breaking our 24 hour goal. When we went back outside Sunday morning I really started to notice the difference between nature and natural. We spent the day lounging in our sleeping bags by the Mill Stream watching passersby stare and give us strange looks. I came to find that while the area we were in was natural, there was grass, trees, flowers, plants, it was by no means nature. Nature, to me, is an environment completely free of modern day conveniences. Nature is a place where you can go and not hear the constant roar of traffic, but instead hear the faint trickle of a stream, birds singing, branches creaking in the wind, or the soft rustle of grass. I think that for a habitat to actually be nature there can be no human manipulation, plants and trees grow on their own accord in one giant ecosystem of symbiosis. The Willamette campus has none of these qualities, you will always be able to hear the train no matter where you are on campus, there will always be the temptation of a warm dry building instead of the outdoors, and plants do not grow of their own accord, but instead have been manipulated to grow in gardens that we may or may not find aesthetically pleasing.