Blog Assignment for Monday, October 6.

Please respond to ONE of the following set of questions. You will note that I have created three separate blog entries, one for each of the questions. Find the entry for your question. Instead of creating a new post, hit the "comment" function underneath this post and create what is called a "thread." A thread is a kind of virtual conversation. Feel free to read other people's responses to the question and respond to their responses.

A. Thus far we have read Dillard, Pollan, Price, and a selection of poems that all write about nature differently. How would you characterize Pollan's style of writing about the environment? Is he a historian? A philosopher? A naturalist? A scientist? Something else? Use specific evidence from the text to back up your claims.

B. In "Nature at the Mall" Jennifer Price asks: "Is it possible that people in our culture have become so estranged from nature that their only avenue to it is consumerism?" (195). This is a pretty dire statement--do you agree? Are we too estranged or segregated from nature? How can we overcome that division?

C. Price writes: "And in the pool of changing, countermodern meanings, the most powerful and overarching has always been that Nature is not a changing set of human meanings" (180). She speaks of meanings in the 1980s and 1990s, but what is the meaning of nature today? Is it the same set of meanings she identifies? Does the meaning of Nature remain the same or does it change? What is the meaning of nature for people in your generation?