THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BEASTS

A review of Graeme Gibson's The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany from this Sunday's NYT Book Review:

December 6, 2009

Wild Things By JENNIFER B. McDONALD

Quick: How would you react were you to cross paths with a lion in the Kalahari? Would you run away? Play dead? Or would you be “too dazzled to do anything” and freeze, boggle-eyed, right on the spot? According to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, whose work Graeme Gibson excerpts in THE BEDSIDE BOOK OF BEASTS: A Wildlife Miscellany (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35), the appropriate reaction is to “walk purposefully away at an oblique angle without exciting the lion”; or, hope that the lion, too, would rather avoid a skirmish and will muster the decency to saunter off himself.

Such silent understanding between predator and prey belongs to an innate “wild self-sufficiency,” a quality, Gibson observes, that centuries of civilization have bred out of domesticated beasts — the human animal among them. This disconnect is a major motif of his nimbly curated bestiary. So is the idea that as much as we have divorced ourselves from the natural world, we cannot escape that we are of it. “We harbor a primordial animal memory in our being,” Gibson writes. “Its shadows dwell in our instincts, just as they stir in our dreams and fears.”

As he did four years ago in “The Bedside Book of Birds,” Gibson, the Canadian novelist (and longtime partner in birding and berry-picking to Margaret Atwood), has compiled poetry and myth, fairy tale and folklore, sacred texts and travelogues in an enchantingly illustrated volume that will awaken something primal in any human who dips into its pages. But this is far from a merely pretty survey of the animal kingdom. It is a book of raw spirit, a polemic against cold industrialization buttressed by Darwin, Forster, Murakami and Neruda, Audubon, Rubens and Leonardo, among many others.

The phrase “Book of Beasts” has a ring of fancy to it, and Gibson does include the fantastical, like Hesiod on “fierce Echidna,” half nymph and half snake, “eating raw flesh beneath the secret parts of the holy earth.” The Taittiriya Upanishad declares, “O wonderful! O wonderful! / I am food! I am food! I am food!” while Kafka spins a cat-and-mouse fable. But mostly we encounter the corporeal: there’s George Orwell felling an elephant (“His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat”) and Tolstoy in a close scrape with a bear (“I realized that he was drawing my whole face into his mouth”). Gibson himself recalls “the only time I thought I might conceivably be eaten,” by what may or may not have been a shark: “It was an unpleasant feeling.” Alongside these entries appears a pageant of art spanning cultures and centuries — paintings, drawings, woodcuts, tribal masks; foxes howling, panthers crouching, a lioness embracing a boy, even as she sinks her teeth into his pliant neck.

The scariest parts, though, come less from tales of sharp fangs and ferocious claws, and much more from the disquieting message, stalking the reader throughout, about a delicate balance disturbed. The dark presence of man is felt most keenly in the section “Killing Without Eating,” where Atwood writes of predators who slaughter recklessly, “angry old men / sneaking around in camouflage gear / pretending no one can see them.” These are not true hunters, she says. “They have none of the patience of hunters, / none of the remorse.”

Thankfully, Gibson favors awe over stuffy moralizing, leaving it to the muscular words and images of his miscellany to reveal human evolution as a beautiful and a terrible thing: it has given us the poetry gathered here, even as it threatens to make the subjects of this poetry familiar to future generations only as pictures in a book.

environment

Throughout the semester environment as been a steady subject. Touch on view point of how we veiw it as a socitey and individuals. We began by looking at the living environment of others. Looking at how it can change in a blank of in eye do to econmic downfall. The environment that you are apart of can make an major impact of your life by alter your life decsions. It is your surroundings that we learn that give way to your emotions.

Environment

Our environment has somewhat changed since the semester started in the summer. I remember the time when I used to come to class wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Around that time, the leaves on the trees were green, now the leaves are no more. Now, I have started to walk to class a bit more bundled up since the temperature outside has been getting lower. So it is safe to say that since the semester started, our environment that we're writing about has been going through its seasonal changes. Much like this last sentence, my perception of the environment has changed too. Werner Herzog's documentary, Grizzly Man has let me into the depths of the harsh realities of nature. I understand that the animals live in a tough environment. Grizzly Man helped me see that nature really is survival of the fittest, through the raw footage captured by Timothy Treadwell. Since the beginning of the semester my perception of the environment wasn't as sharp as it is now. I feel more educated and informed about topics on environment, and have enjoyed writing essays pertaining to it.

Final blog "grizzly man"

Throughout this semester I have learned many new things about nature. As a class and on my own i have read numorous txts about different topics such as nature coexisting with environment, and nature co existing with animals. The piece that had the biggest impact on me was Werner's documentary called "Grizzly Man". This movie was extremely interesting in many aspects. It was filmed by a man named Timothy treadwell, who if you asked me I think he might have been dropped on his head a few times as a baby. Timothy was an interesting man who had a great love and talent for interacting with grizzly bears. Over a 5 year period he shot hours upon hours of film of grizzlies in their natural habitats. To this day his shots are probably the most indept of all filming of grizzly bears. Timothy risks his life each day he spends their interacting with the animals. He adds " I love them with all my heart. I will protect them. I will die for them, but i will not die at their claws and paws. I will fight. I will be strong. I will be one of them"(1). The documentary grizzly man helped me realized the danger many endangered animals face. There should be more people like Treadwell in the world who in some way want to prevent their extinction.

Environment

After this semester, I have a generally more open opinion about the environment. Being such a large subject matter, the readings and film we have watched over the semester have helped to open my eyes up to many of the aspects of the environment that I was not aware of from before. After watching Grizzly Man, I now realize the emotional connection someone can have with the environment once they truly love it. Timothy Treadwell regarded nature on the same level as a worshiper of God would praise him. I have also realized that the environment can even be connected to things in our now more urbanized lifestyles. I made the connection between the wilderness and urban life after reading Gary Snyder’s “The Etiquette of Freedom.” The same way we regard urban environments, we tend to use to describe the wilderness. Although the environment is a vast subject that would require countless hours of research to fully understand, I feel that this semester has helped to make me unbiased about the subject.

Environment

One essay that I had fun writing and helped give me a different outlook would be my essay on Nature and how different environments can effect me. In my essay I stated that "Certain environments do affect our behavior and lead us to present ourselves differently in these environments."(Santana 1) I really enjoyed this essay because it really let me express myself on the paper exactly how I felt making it easier to write. It was easier because I was putting myself in the paper and not have to try to understand someone else's text, just making it overall easier for me to write. As for reading it and revising it, I felt that it was a really good paper and the more I revised and read it the more I got more anxious for the final draft and ready to have others read it. This is because I know I really understood the prompt, which allowed me to freely write easily and have it all come out to be an overall well written paper. As for how my view of environment has changed since I have been in this class can all be summed in one simple sentence. I believe that environment is best looked at through the eyes of the beholder because everyone sees things differently, and that is how I view it also.

Environment

Throughout this course, I have learned a lot about nature. I would say the “Grizzly Man” documentary was the most interesting to me. I learned how much of a connection people can have with nature. Specifically, I saw how much Timothy Treadwell wanted to be a part of nature and that amazed me. The documentary was definitely one of the most interesting and entertaining that I have ever watched. The film also inspired me to be able to write the paper that we were assigned- and it turned out to be one of my best. I had to explore Timothy Treadwell’s emotions while setting my opinions on what he did aside.

Environment

Throughout the semester, I have been asked to examine and breakdown many different essays that have extremely different opinions on what nature and the environment could mean. Many of them were convincing, but the essay that I related to the most would have to be "Coming Around The Bend" by Sarah Rabkin. Rabkin writes about how even in our own environments there are new things to discover daily, and that we can learn a lot from observing our own neighborhoods. She points out that parts of her personal surroundings differ and are new from day to day and give her a sense of curiosity. She continues to write about how everyday is an adventure in her own neighborhood because she has no idea what lay ahead of her or what she is going to see that day. She also discusses that most people only feel curious in their own neighborhood when something is drastically different, instead of exploring it daily. Rabkin opened my eyes to a new way of seeing something as common as my own neighborhood and turned it into my own daily safari.

Environment

During this semester i learned alot more about the environment than i ever thought i would learn. We covered multiple pieces of work that exemplified the environment. We even did an essay of the environments effect on the behavior of people. The topic for that essay says it all, the environment does have an effect on behavior and in “Coming Around The Bend” by Sarah Rabkin i learned alot in regards to the environment.Rabkin discusses that the domestication of land is our own fault. People believe that we have ruined land to make unnecessary things.Rabkin states, “We, wielders of combines and chainsaws, bulldozers, and backhoes, have indeed domesticated ourselves from our surroundings and now we are asking, with increasing urgency, what we have lost in the process.”(Rabkin 43) Rabkin is saying that by using all of this machinery we have hiden ourselves from the natural wonder of the environment and the pureness of life the way it once was. Rabkin is very old school and she is used to doing things the old fashion way and now she is seeing all of these new inventions and she is baffled cause of the fact that they are not necessary for survival and people were able to live without these inventions so why is it so difficult now. She also believes that all of these new buildings and cities have deprived people from acknowledging the true value of nature.

Enviroment

I really did not think that the term "nature" was so complicated to define. But after reading the essay "The Etiquette of Freedom" by Gary Snyder i started to question what i believed nature was. I would discuss the different views of many people throughout my essays but could not determine what i thought nature was. When i read this essay it started to make sense to me that everything is apart of nature but everything is not wild. He also talked on how people thought that just because things are considered wild that people see it as lacking something such as manner or domestication. I realized over time that everything wild has been looked at as negative by all but it really is not. At the end of the day it is still considered apart of nature and we should accept it. I used this essay in more than one essay because it revealed so much about nature and it helped me to break nature up in different categories and classify it.

Environment

Throughout the semester, we have talked about nature and how your surroundings affect your behavior. Over the course of this semester we have read many texts about nature but one text that we read that had challenged my view on environment was John Berger's article, "Why Look at Animals?". Before reading this article I use to think that zoos were benefiting the animals and that they were content where they were. After reading Berger's article, it opened a new outlook for me on zoos. Also, throughout the article Berger describes how there is marginalization of the animals. I learned that marginalization is to exclude or ignore, by relegating to the outer edge of a group or by diverting the public's attention to something else. According to John Berger, the space that the zoo has made for the animals to live in is artificial, and that in most cases the environment is just an illusion. Most of the environment does not necessarily meet the standards that the animal needs to live in to survive. Berger later on goes to say that the environment of the animals is made only for those who come visit the zoo. Reading all these different works from different authors, made me realize that there is no right or wrong definition of nature and that everyone has their own opinions. Berger helped to show me that sometimes things aren't as they seem and you must go deeper in order to figure it out.

Environment

I have always known that the environment each person is in has an effect on them, but throughtout this class I have learned how strong of an impact it truly has. African American writer, Langston Hughes seems to understand this feeling in his poem, "Theme for English B." In his writing, he is speaking to his Caucasian professor. He says, "You are white-yet a part of me, as I am a part of you." That's American Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me. Nor do I often want to be a part of you. But we are, that's true" (41). I love this quote because it shows that you might not always be able to chose your envirmonment or control how it affects you, but it is inevitable that your environment will have an impact on you. Writing our first essay was challenging to me because it was the most personal. I focused on urban environment and I was intrigued to analyze how it affected myself, as well as other authors. I enjoyed Langston's poem because I feel that analyzing and verbalizing one's self is one of the hardest tasks to do. In his paper while defining himself to his teacher, Hughes got to say things he might never been able to express on his own. I have learned a great deal from this class, but personally the texts on urban nature had the most impact on me and my outlook on environment.

On Environment

This semester has really made me put environment into perspective partially because the professor made it fun with his jokes and analogies , and partially because of the numerous sources we looked at as a class. One that stuck most was "Words of Chief of Seattle";the speech of the Native American leader of the Skokomish Indians who responded to the governments attempt at buying more of their land and putting the native people on reservations. Throughout history, there has always been the picture of injustice of taking Native American land from the American point of view. However, the Chief's words help to portray the other side of the story. He argues that you cannot "buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land"(98), and it does seems a strange thing because we don't own it. We abuse the trees by cutting them in excess, and never replant or restore them. We hunt the animals for sport and not need. We dump our waste and debris in the ocean, not realizing the danger it causes for the animals that inhabit it. Yet we have this mentality that the earth is ours to dominate and rule.

Chief Seattle counters that.The earth is sacred to his people , because as he says, "We are part of the earth and it is a part of us...So, when the Great Chief of Washington sends word that he wished to buy our land, he asks much of us"(98). If you look at it from his perspective, it is true that giving up one's home for the sake of greed just doesn't seem right. Those who take over will not appreciate it in the same way because their ways are different.

He also makes a valid point, though I don't necessarily agree with it:

"There is no quiet place in the white man's citites. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring...what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or arguments of the frogs around the pound at night?"(99). You can argue that you can hear the birds song in the early morning and the crickets symphony at night, but somehow, it isn't the same. That's why it is so important that we respect and connect with nature. It's important that we protect the environment because in the Chief's words "Contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste" (99). If you look at the earth as it is, we are in danger of being suffocated. The air is being polluted, the glaciers melting, animals losing their homes. All of it effects because we are connected. The man hunts the beast, the man eats the beast, the man dies and becomes part of the earth, the beast eats of the earth. So why not treat the earth as it should be, as our mother, as our home, as a part of ourselves.

Environment Changes

Throughout this semester we have spent time talking about our environment and sharing it with the animals and creatures that live in it. I have taken a lot away from English 701/052 with analyzing and comparing the different aspects of my environment with that of the past. I must say that the environment that I am used to has changed over this semester. I am used to living in Cheltenham Township where it is quiet and you can hear the birds chirping in the morning and deer in the woods. I now live on campus in the heart of north Philadelphia where the closest thing to peace is hearing police sirens. My living environment has changed however I am use to it. I have lived in Philadelphia before and the sirens I hear every night was second nature. Although my environment has changed I believe I have done extremely well adapting to my surroundings.

Enviornment

In my own essay entitiled “The way I see you, see me”, I expanded my thoughts to correlate the way two authors viewed human animal relationships. As I was writing my essay I couldn’t help but think about all the looks I give my dog and the expressions that I try to read on her face. I couldn’t help but think about John Berger’s book About looking when he stated,
The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wart. The same animal may well look at other species in the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. (5)
This statement meant a lot to me, because I recalled the looks that I would receive from my dog at home and think to myself oh I know she is happy because her tail is wagging and she has that wine in her voice, and that eager look on her face just waiting for someone to pet her.
This made me realize that I may or may not have had an effect on my dog as her characteristics are concerned. When comparing her personality to her environment one could state that yes she is hyper because her owner is hyper (me), but based on outside information on beagles, I already know that they are genuinely happy dogs. They get excited very easily and are every friendly to humans and other dogs.
Based on this discovery I can say I believe in some of the things Berger is suggesting, such as the fake environment that my pet is placed in. The suburban area with a routine everyday; wake up, go out, eat, go for a walk, sleep all day, go for a walk, eat, go out, sleep. This daily repetition must have some effects on her, she doesn’t see other dogs unless she is out on a walk, and she doesn’t get as much exercise as she needs. On the other hand I do not agree with him. Animals do have personalities and do not necessarily pick them up form their owners, it is quite possible that I made a clever choice in choosing a pet that is similar to me.

Enviroment

I think that the essay that caused me to think ciritically about the enviornment would have to be the second essay where i attacked the question "is urban nature an oymoron." For me this essay was the hardest to write. I compared a scholarly article with a poem and the transitions were not easy but I came to the conclusion that urban nature does exist because in cities, the manmade unnatural structures are doing their part to become more natural and energy efficient. I spent alot of time on this essay and I swear it produced the most brainpower ever but it was all worth it. I was interested in both of the things I was talking about and just had to find a link. I had never thought about cities being natural and found out alot about cities that I didn't know. I had no idea that Manhattan was "going green" because to me I thought nature was just green hills and sunny blue skies but this essay caused me to look at nature in a completely different and modern sense. Finalizing this essay was by far the hardest part. There was so much I wnated to say but I didn't know exactly how to put it together and I just did the best I could with the help of my peers and the writing center.

This class I must say was different. I never imagined spending a whole semester talking about nature but I must say it was worth it. The back to back papers honestly made me a stronger writer and I loved getting feedback from my classmates and the one on one time with the professor.

On Environment

I think that the essay that I wrote that changed my view of environment and nature the fourth essay, where we had to talk about the wilderness. I discussed about how both animals and people need to escape from their everyday life every once in a while. Which I think is true because if we don't then we will go crazy. The essay tries to reason why Timothy Treadwell, from Grizzly Man, had gone out to the Grizzly Maze every summer until his death. Writing this essay helped me realize the importance of a change in environment every so often, and take a break from work or anything stressful in their lives at the time. A part of this essay that really affected me was watching Grizzly Man, I thought that the story of Timothy Treadwell was interesting, sad, and a little misguided. Now I may not have agreed with everything Treadwell had done nor some of the choices he made, however I really enjoyed the footage of the bears and other animals that he had taken. It was incredible to see these wild animals in their natural habitat and so close to the camera.

TOWN & GOWN: IN & AROUND TEMPLE

Reading these posts on environment, I'm glad to see so many of you have related our studies of environments to the built environments of Temple's campus and the surrounding communities. I think that any person is going to feel some sense of culture shock as they move from one environment to another, and it doesn't require a radical change in one's environment to feel that shock, so long as we're mindful of how space and place influence everything about our lives. And I think it's fine to feel uncomfortable in certain environments, so long as we're always asking ourselves why we are feeling what we're feeling, and what it says not only about our environment but about ourselves.

Something that many of the writers we read this semester emphasize is that all environments, including built environments like North Philadelphia, are in a state of constant change. Like the "built environments" of the essays you've written, neighborhoods can be thought of as organisms that grow and change and die and become other things in the process. For a writer like Elijah Anderson, this dynamic manifests as "pockets of resistance," where neighbors come together to rewrite, as it were, the vision of what a neighborhood can be. For a writer like Ray Oldenburg, we create "third spaces" between the private sphere and the public sphere in order to revitalize our sense of self in the social sphere. And then of course for others, like Timothy Treadwell, so-called civil spaces are anathema to what it means to be alive and human. And so he retreated into the Alaskan wilderness. But even deep in the wilderness, Treadwell created a space to feel at home: a "made" or "made-up" wilderness. And even the Times Square sinkhole of Tom Wolfe's "Rotten Gotham" is very different now, 40 years later.

So . . . some questions to ask yourself as you finish the course: "What does Temple's environment mean to me?" "What do the communities around Temple mean to me?" "How do I define myself as a student and a citizen living in North Philadelphia?" "How am I part of the many communities in and around Temple?" "How do these environments interact?" "How do they perceive each other?" "How do I perceive them?" "Years from now, how will I see my years at Temple--not only as a student, but more broadly as a human being?"

Like all these spaces and places, "natural" and "civil," your writings are also built environments. They are put together: composing, decomposing, and recomposing visions and revisions of what is possible. This idea of writing as a cultural artifact and a natural process informs much of the thinking about ecocomposition and the relationships among readers, writers, and environments.

For those of you who want to pursue some of the ideas that we've explored in class this semester, especially relationships between Temple and its local communities, check out the Faculty Herald article and interview with Eli Goldblatt on a new community-based learning project at Temple, the Community Learning Network.

Click here to read.

Environment

Option 1
Most of the texts we have read this semester have lead to the change in my thoughts on the environment. The most important one seems to be "O Rotten Gotham" by Tom Wolfe. It is amazing to think of the world, or even Temple's campus as a whole. The amount of interaction we have between people everyday is unbelievable. Just walking on campus, you see thousands of people, all crowded into a small area. Everyone's behavior in this situation is changed, as everyone has somewhere to go to or something to do. This behavioral sink Wolfe describes seems to be very possible if not likely. I had never spent much time thinking about overpopulation in the city before, but after reading this text, it does seem to be a serious problem.

Environment

Option 1. From the beginning of this school year at Temple, I have felt uncomfortable with my surroundings. While reading Tom Wolfe's article "O, Rotten Gotham" in A Forest of Voices, I found words that I could relate to. In his article, Wolfe determines that living in a "sink" is bad for human health. A "sink" is any environment where many individuals are living in close-quarters together; New York city is the first example of a "sink" that Wolfe uses. He goes on explaining other "sink" environments: eighty or so lab rats that are placed in a relatively small cage together; deer that are living to close to each other in their natural environment due to human development of their habitat. Wolfe says that in a "sink" situation, the adrenal glands swell up and stress takes over the human mind, leading to serious psychiatric issues. When I read all this, I saw my dorm, my classroom and my cafeteria at Temple. I had been wondering why my spirits had sunk so low after the second week of school, and now I know the answer. Being so close to everyone else really stressed me out, I felt like there was someone or something (security cameras) that could always see me. Even in my dorm, I did not feel safe or at home, instead I felt crowded. All I wanted to do was get away and be by myself. It was impossible to find complete solitude on campus, so I moved my stuff out of my dorm and started commuting from home. I am no different from the people in New York, the lab rats, and the deer, I need space and solitude in order to live out my life happily. I realized that through reading Tom Wolfe's article "O, Rotten Gotham."

Environment

(Option 2)

This semester I have learned a lot about the environment. I never gave nature and the environment any thought but during the course of this semester I have had time to process my own perception of the environment and nature. The first essay topic: Space and Place, really changed m perception of the environment. After reading Elijah Anderson's essay, "The Social Ecology of Youth Violence" I was fascinated with Philadelphia and the people who live here; simply because I'm not from this area. When Anderson talked about his interview with Old-head, Mr. Don Moses, I was stunned by the reality of the situation: living in Germantown. “Keep your eyes and ears open at all times. Walk two steps forward and look back. Watch your back. Prepare yourself verbally and physically. Even if you have a cane, carry something. The older people do carry something, guns in sheaths. They can’t physically fight no more so they carry a gun” (75, Anderson). Could it really be that bad in Germantown? In my home environment in Lorton,VA, I've always felt safe. There's no need to carry a gun or watch your back. In my environment everyone goes to college and will probably do something amazing with their lives. But in Germantown the kids barely attend school and a small percentage of them will go to college. So I learned, your environment does affect your behavior. I didn't notice till I read Anderson's essay and looked around me as I walked around Philadelphia. I've noticed how my behavior has changed from care-free in Lorton, VA to more attentive in Philadelphia, PA. It's natural to do so. Elijah Anderson would say, "It's just the code of the street." I've learned a lot this semester but this is the one thing that changed my view of the environment. Thanks Dr. F:)

On Environment

I am happy to say that my first semester at Temple University was mesmerizing, and I have give a lot of credit to my professors, because I learned so many new interesting thing that I would have never been subjected to if I would not had met them. Usually I hate English, but I enjoyed writing almost every single paper I produced. It was a challenge and the book and article that I read made it a joyous experience. Ray Oldenburg’s, “The Problem of Place in America,” opened my eye to the many issues that I am facing in America. He made me think that I am living in a world that is over stressful and if I think live was hard as a child then I might not be ready for the future. This is weird because I can remember childhood a lot different than the childhood that most children are living now. When I was a child my family use to get together all of the time, and we all lived like right around the corner from each other, but now that we don’t my family is not the same anymore. This makes me sad because this is what made me the person that I am, with strong values and family morals, but the children of our future (meaning in my family) won’t have that. The bad thing is I didn’t think or care about this until I read Ray Oldenburg’s article. Another article that I read was, Wallace Stegner’s, “Wilderness letter.” In the letter he talks not only about wilderness but the idea of wilderness. Before I read it I thought to myself, “How can wilderness be an idea, when it is something that already exists?” Then after reading it I realized wilderness can be an idea. I believe that we all think of this miracle place, that is somewhere in this wild, that we can escape to. The place where you are free to be you, nobody there to judge or label you, I guess I am trying to say it really made me think. The last thing that I want to talk about is the film “Grizzly man” directed by Werner Herzog. As I said, or may not have said, in an early post, Timothy Treadwell was a very brave individual. I am not saying this because he thought he lived with bears or because he tried to become one of them. I am saying this because he had the courage to do something that no one else did, he notice that this world was a prison and he tried to escape it, and I thank him for that. After reading this I guess you can say that my Introduction to Academic Discourse is a class I will never forget because it made me look deep into myself and search for a truth, thank you Dr. D.

Environment

Throughout the course of this fall semester we have read over various texts and documents pertaining to the environment, more specifically nature. After exploring all of the essays in class, my perception of the environment has definitely been altered. More specifically my view of animals, along with their relationship to humans. Having read "Why Look at Animals?" by John Berger and watched "Grizzly Man" produced by Werner Herzog, my prior opinion about the environment has transformed. Before going over these two resources, I really didn't think or care much about the environment, and I felt that there was no connection between humans and animals. Now however, I developed an understanding that animals have been granted some of the same characteristics as humans, and are therefore related. Also, one can take advantage and learn from animals. By properly observing animals in their natural habitat, it is much easier to fully appreciate their existence. This is seen for example in the movie "Grizzly Man", as the life of Timothy Treadwell is portrayed. It is clear that Treadwell expressed love for grizzly bears, and developed a connection with these animals. This connection is what allowed him to survive a miraculous thirteen summers unarmed. I don't believe it's possible for everyone to develop such a personal relationship with animals, but I do think people can learn a lot by observing and studying animals, both wild and domesticated alike. Ultimately, it is vital that people strive to protect animals, and preserve the environments in which they live.