All Woods Must Fail

O! Wanderers in the shadowed land Despair not! For though dark they stand, All woods there be must end at last, And see the open sun go past: The setting sun, the rising sun, The day's end, or the day begun. For east or west all woods must fail.

-J.R.R. Tolkien

Written for Middle Earth, Tolkien's poem, spoken through Frodo, is unfortunately not reflected very well in this world. For Hobbits, Dwarves, Humans and Elves alike, their forests were deep, dark, and full of mystery. And while some grew to embrace that, an endless wood was something to be wary of at the very least. In our world, I would honestly like to find more forests that could are as deep and mystical as the ones imagined by the brilliant but somewhat incoherent English Professor we know as J.R.R. Tolkien. Our woods, such as they exist, are increasingly fragmented, and shrinking in size, being replaced by an even more labyrinthine maze than the glades which our ancestors used to fear: Suburbia and the Urban Jungle.

In centuries past we feared the wilderness because it was so much larger than us, but at 7,000,000,000+ citizens, we are now clearly the majority. As a geography major with a focus on environmental studies, I am deeply concerned with how the human race is dealing with our superiority of technology and influence in the natural world. In centuries past, what did it really matter if an edge of the forest in Medieval Europe was felled to make room for fields? Or what difference did it make if refuse from an 18th Century ship was dumped into the ocean? Nature was so gigantic, and our influence so insignificant, that any poison was merely swallowed up by the enormous mass of the world we inhabit.

I write this journal to track my continued academic interests, as well as personal interests in the field of environmental studies, journalism, and geography. This is also a spin-off from a series of articles I wrote for the Bucknell website (http://ots.blogs.bucknell.edu/author/dmm048/), chronicling the travels of a unique interdisciplinary program at Bucknell University, so you may be familiar with some of my writing already. I look forward to sharing with you in the future, so please stay tuned as I intend to update this at least weekly.

We must away! We must away!
We ride before the break of day!

-Over the Misty Mountains Cold