Hosted by Jennifer Renner and Joe Conrad, of CANI, this month we met at ACRES Land Trust to talk about renewal through recreation and then hit the trails. Joe worked hard to pull together a special opportunity for our group to see this site and spend time together outdoors. The work paid off and in spite of a few rain drops through the canopy, we enjoyed the hike.
Following the brown bag lunch chatter, Jennifer kicked off our conversation with a detour to an ongoing theme for personal renewal in her life: community engagement.
Jennifer shared that most recently, this theme has popped up in her reading – right now she’s reading Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. She read from a passage about choosing to interact with people in our daily lives by slowing down and making a conscious effort to engage and spoke about how this intentional behavior has been a personal source of renewal.
From there, the conversation flowed into how technology, namely Facebook can be seen as contributing to isolation.
Joe brought the conversation back to our individual needs for personal time to rebuild or rejuvenate in order to be able to engage in our community.
Joe noted, for example, that while he knew he would enjoy hiking with our group, the experience would not be the same as being in the woods alone. He went on to suggest that being alone in natural settings restores a lost perspective and focus.
At this point, ACRES executive director, Jason Kissel launched a discussion of the organization’s mission and goals. Throughout our meeting, Jason talked about nature as a non-built environment and what that means.
We talked about the feeling of breathless awe we all got as our cars rounded the corner of Coldwater onto the tree-lined Chapman, in its golden autumnal leaf coverage.
As we mulled over how this plays out in our daily lives, he pointed out that when we’re walking in a city, in a store, or through our neighborhoods we’re guided along predetermined paths. Human eye movements and our behavior are studied and design based on these. We are given limited choices for how to navigate built environments.
Essentially, we talked about how we interact with the natural environment differently than built environments, which is where we spend most of our time.
The biggest difference stemming from the nature of nature is the freedom to choose behavior – from spending hours examining life under a pile of leaves to using that time veer off -trail, to simply stopping, observing and noting simple changes in a world untouched by human engineering. We got at understanding why being in the woods affects so many of us deeply.
We learned about the nearly 4600 acres owned by the land trust and saw images of the properties, here in our own backyards. We concluded with hiking a few trails guided by Jason who pointed out things like the differences in Cedar Creek, the nature of the deep ravines we stood upon in the Canyon and generally informed us of the intricacies of this habitat.
We left feeling good. Better than before we arrived.
