Kylie's Nature Blog

 For my final nature journal, I decided to go back to my roots and focus on the time I spent at home during Thanksgiving break. As I have discussed previously, my hometown of San Marino, California, is only 3.77 sq. miles and has only 12,000 inhabitants. Within this small area of land, we have no malls, grocery stores, or fast food chains. Our entire town consists of a park and residential areas with grassy front yards and historic trees. Whenever I go home, I look forward to spending time outside through power walks with my mother and leisurely walks with my dog. "Do you want to go on a walk with me?" my mom questions me everyday that I am home. And my response is always the same: "yes, of course". My brother and father are never interested, but I suppose this allows for a more intimate bonding experience. As we depart from our house and make our way down the street, I take in the unique Southern Californian environment around me. In front of each house lies vibran

Kylie Spindler, Ashton Martini Justification             Throughout this course, a vast amount of material was covered regarding different perspectives of nature and personal experiences from different environmentalists. In addition, we each interacted with nature copious times through nature observations, where we implemented some common themes that we learned. It is a challenge to condense everything covered throughout the semester, so we decided to focus on a few common themes that stuck  out to us. The overarching theme included the dynamics between human interaction with nature. We as humans can either alter nature for better or for worse. This also leads into a theme of industrial tourism and how threatening it can be to the natural environment. Between our many interactions with nature, we have directly observed the circle of life through the active work of the biotic pyramid. These themes drove the structure of our video and what we decided to discuss.             Since we part

 After my last blog post focusing on the fruit trees in my backyard, I realized that I missed one crucial part of my backyard and neighborhood: the wildlife. What is the environment without the fauna inhabiting it? Attending school in Texas has made me notice how different and unique the creatures were in my hometown of San Marino compared to here. The United States is so vast that the nature varies greatly between the different regions. Even my hometown alone differs from the surrounding suburbs, which I will highlight in this blog. I previously discussed the many squirrels that inhabit my town and destroy the avocados of our tree. Therefore, I would like to discuss more distinctive species. At night, we have rats that scurry along the roof of our house and are able to climb the trees in our backyard. I am quite convinced that they are mutant due to this apparent "superpower" they possess. I have never witnessed them during the day, but sometimes they become trapped in our t