Earlier this summer, when I was reading and thinking about environmental philosophy and deep green more, I also went back and re-read my journal from Semester in the West * and realized that I wrote a lot of good things over the course of the semester that I’d like to be out there with my name on them. To that end, I’ve typed up my journal and created an archive, which is now up on the blog, with entries backdated to reflect when I actually wrote them. In some cases, the entries aren’t word-for-word as they appear in my journal; rather, I used my journal text to expand on something brought up by my experiences. Where necessary, I’ve also prefaced each entry with information about where I was and what I was doing at the time to add context.
I’ve tagged all entries with SITW, which was the tag I used for all SITW blog entries published during the semester as well. If you only want to see the newly added journal entries, I’ve also used the tag SITW journal.
If you’re interested in specific topics, some common themes are activism, grazing, climate change, environmental philosophy and nature writing.
If you don’t want to pore through three months of my rambling thoughts, here are the entries I think are the best, in chronological order:
• Wolves and ranchers (best summary of the wolf issue from a personal standpoint)
• Ecology scares me
• Camp life (best reflection on what's it's like to live outside)
• Managing nature
• Putting plastic squares on fences (best musing on conservation/environmental philosophy)
• Walking through canyonlands (best nature writing)
• Tracking
• Climate nihilism (best thing about climate change, inspired by visiting a coal plant)
• Industrial solar in the desert
• End of the semester: this I believe (best summary of what I learned over the course of the semester)
I’m still working on revising and organizing my more polished Semester in the West writing, but when I finish that to my satisfaction, I’ll get it up here too. And at some point in the future, I’ll try to create a better record of all of the writing I’ve done for the Pio (Whitman’s newspaper) as well.
*For readers who don’t know me in real life or are unfamiliar, Semester in the West is a field program run by Whitman College, where I’m currently a junior. It takes twenty-one students on a semester-long road trip around the American West to study environmental issues, environmental politics, ecology and environmental writing. I participated in the program in the fall of 2010. It was possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever done.
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