While taking Nature's Meanings (ENVS 215) last fall, I began an independent project using the digital tool Prezi to create a dynamic concept map of my reflections on the course material. As I compiled social, cultural, and artistic elements of American environmental history from a variety of media, a narrative of the role of “nature” in American culture began to become clear to me. This narrative—unbounded by certain constraints of traditional forms of academic assessment—helped me to situate these elements within a wider context which visually clarified the interconnections between different accounts of environmental attitudes over time. Within these interconnections, one can better understand how people currently imagine themselves within American “natural” landscapes and behave towards them and, perhaps, how they will continue do so in the future.
