Environmental Autobiography

I've identified with a few different environments, being from the Boston area, and spending a lot of my early life at or near the beach. I was always interested in the water, rarely swimming but instead just letting the waves and the tide push me around. I also would walk the beach, looking for interesting shells and rocks shaped by the water and salt. It also made me really conscious of changes to the area, especially because with storms or especially high tides the sand could move, changing the shoreline.

When I moved to Vermont I ended up spending more time in nature, and now am more surrounded by nature. Between running and skiing, both nordic and alpine, I also have explored the area around me much more, discovering all kinds of trails, and also seeing changes, both big and small again. These have been especially noticeable recently with flooding, with downed trees, streams and rivers shifting, leading to blocked old paths and sometimes clearing new ones, alongside large scale changes, such as the landslide at Fosters trail.

It also has extended my appreciation for the land around me, as thinking back to when I was younger and would be on some trip going through the forests and mountains of Vermont, I would often ignore most of it, whereas now when I look and see all the differences in things like the types and density of trees and the mountains and valleys and their shapes, thinking about how many of them were carved out by rivers or glaciers over a nearly incomprehensibly long amount of time. It also can be so interesting to think about how a lot of the things that make a certain region different, and a lot of the things that make Vermont distinct, such as the mountains and maple trees were formed and shaped entirely independent of humans, despite us now taking pride in them.