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| Western |
I recently read a story about a man, James, saving a piece of land from being bulldozed to the ground. It was about him stumbling through it and his time in there and among other things made him change his mind about the building project and cancelling it. There is way more to this great story but I would like to focus on the difference from a plot of land that is all nature versus how society uses that nature. I read this story on campus Thursday. For a college campus Western’s buildings are pretty mild compared to bigger universities. So walking to my class and driving home later that day I looked upon land that was filled with nature. Western is a great campus in the fact that its buildings are never over 6 floors tall, and usually the 6 floors are for dorms. Buildings that have classes in it only get to 4 floors if that. Most of the buildings also have their first floor underground so the building isn’t very tall. In the story I read they had planned to put an “unnecessarily tall” building up. One that you would walk by and feel dwarfed by. I do not feel overpowered by buildings on Western’s campus. Driving home I mostly passed houses all of them with multiple trees in their yards. If I passed any commercial buildings there were small and only one level. Quite unlike the building planned in the story. My house is in a neighborhood filled with trees so even then I wasn’t overpowered. Portage is a very nice town because it isn’t a huge city and overtaken by 20 foot high buildings. My calm was about to be interrupted.
I am at Michigan State University currently. I am here visiting one of my best friends from high school. We have known each other for a good chunk of our lives. This is my first visit as last year I did not have a car. I bought my car about a month and a half ago. Between both of our busy schedules this was the only weekend that worked out. So after a year of wanting to visit I was finally able to do so! I drove up with another friend who was visiting her boyfriend. We left just before five o’clock so we hit rush hour traffic on the highway. I was abruptly shoved into our speedy and human made world. I was no longer driving down Oakland admiring the colorful trees surround me, I was passing cars and getting passed. And getting to State, I was overcome by all the buildings. They weren’t jammed packed but they were defiantly impressive. The dorms were 6 stories high and educational buildings were just as high or taller. Multiple parking ramps were scattered across the roads. I am not saying State is an ugly campus. In fact it is very nature filled with the grass surrounding the buildings and trees lining the sides of the roads. It also has a ton of open spaces throughout the campus as well. It was just a lot compared to what I am used to at Western. At Western you park and then walk to class. There are no roads going through the middle of campus. At state there are so many roads all over the place.
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| State |
Driving along those roads trying to find a parking lot I could park in I thought about what it looked like before all this construction. I thought about how Western must have looked before any buildings were there. I thought about all the commercial buildings and grocery complexes and flat spaces of parking lots that litter our earth. Do we really need all of that? We are a growing population that tries to fit way too many people in certain areas, like Lansing. It feels like we have no other option then to build higher and tear down trees so we can extend buildings or place a new one there completely.
I want to be like James. I want to have the power to stop 20 acres of tree from being demolished. I want to have that power, I don’t, but hopefully someday I will. In real life most people don’t have the experience like James did. They go about their everyday lives, hardly glancing at the buildings let alone the nature around them. Real life isn’t like story book nature. At least not very much. There are people out there trying and making a difference. We just need more of those people. People should consider trees a thing of wonder not a part of architecture that looks good with a building.
There is no specific person we can point our finger at and blame for how commercialism has taken over the nature world. And there is no specific person we can point to, to fix it. Those fingers should be pointed at ourselves. We all need to go out there and do whatever we can. From saving a 20 acre plot of land like James to just planting a tree of our own to recycling pop cans to refusing to do what society tells us to do.
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