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by The Concordant Stratum of The Cypher Nine. . 86 reads.

Culture Update: Week Of 4/22

Forest has been bustling the last couple of days, with everyone being excited and passionate about Earth Day. Here is an update on recent happenings in forest:

The Earth Day Scavenger Hunt is in full swing, with Mount Seymour, Esterild, Altmer dominion, Turbeaux, Love and Nature participating. Their photos are coming in and can be viewed Linkhere on the forum. I am impressed with everyone's dedication to the hunt. Some of the tasks can be repetitive but its good to remind ourselves of what the planet provides itself.

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In other news, I asked the region an earth day question "what experience do attribute your love of the planet and nature to" and got a huge response from everyone including some faces that haven't been seen in awhile:

Murmuria: Probably my years as a seafarer. Witnessing the full might of the ocean had me on my knees in awe. And - from the human point of view - the sea the great equalizer. Believe me.

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Moorhen: Well, basically, I really like Newts. Newts are cool.
Moorhens too.

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Horusland: I was born and spent my childhood in the mountains. They change with the seasons and the weather. It's like seeing a different painting every moment. It makes me feel like the world around me is alive, and I'm just a small part here to enjoy it for a while. The sterile environment of an apartment is dull and unchanging.

Romania has been a complete anarchy since the revolution. There's no laws in place to protect anything. The few that do exist never get enforced due to bribery and corruption. Our forests are in danger, waste isn't being disposed of properly (or at all), and our projects are prone to environmental disasters. The realization that the beauty of my home may cease to exist during my lifetime makes my home so much more beautiful. When you don't take something for granted, it gains beauty.

Regardless of current issues, though, the reason I love nature is because I love art. I like colors, sounds, experiences. It's really a primal, instinctual thing, and I could explain it with as much difficulty as I can explain why I love music or the Eiffel Tower. And honestly, I'm glad humans have the gift of enjoying things so arbitrarily. Why prefer this song/painting/landscape over the other?

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Forest turtle: Born in a big city and raised in a big city. I am not a big city person. I hate the traffic and the noise. Right now I still live in a fairly large city, but I get out as often as I can. I love the quiet and fresh feeling compared to the loud and busy city life. Not sure whether that answers your question completely since my experience is still kind of going on. ------- Thought about this question some more and realized that another thing that got me to love nature was running. Before I started running, I didn't really grasp how important the Earth was. Now that I do long distance running (recreational), I run on trails and love it.

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Altmer dominion: As I was growing up, my parents took me outside. Every. Day. Simple as that.

I grew up with (and still have) Mountains just a stones throw away, and I was taught to explore the trees, rivers, cliffs, wildlife. Every Holiday was a new National Park. At this point, I've been to almost every National Park west of the 100th Meridian (minus Alaska). It wasn't just Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. My vacations were everywhere from Lassen National Park to the Great Sand Dunes.

It's kind of funny, really. Once one sees the vast beauty of what the Earth has to offer, you never really want to leave.

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The new bluestocking homeland: Similarly to Altmer Dominion, I attribute it to my parents taking me on summer holidays and letting me explore. As a child, my parents would take me to the same place every year. We'd go to this spot on the coast, and I spent a lot of time playing in rockpools on the beach and larger amount of time in these gardens: weeping willows, climbing plants and a wooden tower nestled among the trees, from which I could see way out to sea (and which made a very good fort, where - at age four or five - I'd play happily for hours).

As a city-born, city-bred child, it was magical to feel something other than concrete beneath my feet, smell fresh air.

I still live in the same city, but get out as often as I can. There's still something about the smell of the sea, the sight of it appearing over the horizon (even the sound of circling seabirds getting louder), that puts me in an instantly better mood.

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Aeterno tranquillitas: When I was a kid, my parents would take me outside after I finished my homework (whole other ball game, THAT challenge was). As assignments and such were hard for me, my parents inadvertently painted the outdoors as a reward for simply doing things that must be done (like education and whatnot). Although I'm certain humans have a biologically hardcoded desire to seek nature due to how we evolved, I think in modern society one needs that childhood exposure to "reawaken" this desire we all hold.

It was this sort of way of living that probably brought me to appreciate nature for what it is; *positive words of expression*.

I can't even find a string of words to describe what being outside on a good day feels like. I'm certain you all know that feeling, so I'll let you fill that in for yourselves.

Along with the fact that I have always been one for solitude, peace, and relative quiet, the soft howl of the wind, birds, and rustling of trees, combined with the lack of city cacophony, really puts me in a place that no other medium could possibly achieve.

Sadly, I don't get out nearly as much as I should, due to life and personal issues and whatnot, but the rare times I feel like I must go outside NOW, I treat is as one of the greatest rewards living has to offer.

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Canaltia: A couple reasons. One, I spent a lot of time in a national park near our house, and I've seen a lot of really neat stuff there. I love being outside, and I feel more relaxed in nature. The Rocky Mountains are an hour away from me, so I've done a lot of hiking as well.

Also, we have a family farm. It's always a great experience to go out there and work a day without wifi, television, electricity, and running water (we sold the farm house). We raise cattle there, so it's also the reason I can never be vegan. Cows are so obnoxious sometimes.

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Turbeaux: I was raised in the city, but went hiking/camping with my father often. I suppose that contributed to it. Also, the monsoon brings rain and neat storms to AZ and peaks right around my birthday. Consequentially, I have always loved a good thunderstorm! I like going outside to experience them.

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Esterild: My answer will be different from many of yours because I'm not an outdoorsy person. I am allergic to the majority of nature (all grasses, all weeds, half of all trees...). Sure, I like the outdoors, but a couple of hours a day spent outside is more than plenty, thank you very much. It's more easy to be comfortable indoors, and I spend most of my time reading or doing computer stuff. You probably couldn't pay me to go camping.

Probably part of my interest in the environment comes from being an animal lover (I'm allergic to lots of animals, too, by the way). Destroying the environment, of course, means taking away natural habitats. I value nature for its own sake, too, but that might be one of the early things that made me interested in the environment.

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Shwe Tu Colony: I find that some scenes in nature are aesthetically pleasing, like Hạ Long Bay, which is my primary banner for this nation. In fact, the reason that I focus on Parfuhmerie & the Thryllasian Region it's in the most out of all the other civilizations & cities I have in my mind is because of my bias for tropical climates, although I actually live in a desert. :U (sshhh I swear I didn't quote the wrong post)

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Chan island: I grew up in a rural setting. Life just seems odd to me without a healthy background of greenery, trees and hills for me to look at nowadays, and seems like a permanent feature of my life. It's as brutally honest now that since I virulently don't like living in big cities, I will make dang sure that I get nice, pleasant, healthy countryside environments to live in.

Beyond that, in the more abstract I value very highly the continued existence of the human species. A lot of my politics and attitudes revolves around this simple goal, and protecting the environment is one of those policies that is much more likely to mean humans get to exist for much longer.

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Bad hair day zombies: Growing up, my backyard was woods and a creek ran around the home. I spent my childhood outdoors building tree forts, and making nature trails. My grandparents had a farm of strawberry fields and blueberry bushes. The smell of the leaves and flowers, the songs of the birds are just wonderful

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Reannia: I spent a lot of my life being a home body. I liked the comfort of indoors and being clean and what not. At some point in the last few years I wanted to get in better shape, so I started walking on the paved path through the county park. There were always too many people though, and I'm a bit of an introvert. So I wandered up a path into the woods. In a span of maybe 10 minutes, my mind cleared so much and I realized how much I had been missing. Now all I want to do is hike. The 20 mile trail that goes around the perimeter of that park is my second home. I've maintained it, cleared it, cleaned it, learned it and re-blazed it more/better than any park "employee" has.

I went and took some pictures today, although the early spring, while beautiful in person, didn't translate well to photographs. But I broke my phone when I got home anyway. So, maybe when I get the phone back I'll post those pictures. I don't have many older pictures even. I'm more about living the moment and having the memory in my head. I'll never understand people who go to a concert and then watch the whole thing through a blurry rectangle six inches from their face. I mean, when are you actually going to watch that video? That dark, grainy video with terrible audio.

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Uan aa Boa: Like many other people here my appreciation of nature stems from childhood. In my case that was in what is now known as Middle England, seeking out the little pockets of woodland, stream bank and otherwise wild space in a crowded and overwhelmingly managed landscape - the leftover bits that nobody was using for anything. I remember picking berries, riding tractor inner tubes down the stream and grinding up plants to make "perfumes"/stink bombs. Holidays to places like Snowdonia, Dartmoor and the Yorkshire Dales showed me the possibility of larger spaces on our crowded island that weren't obviously dominated by humans and their activities (I realise now, of course, that they aren't quite as virgin as they first seemed). It's not hugely surprising that as an adult I've made my home in the Highlands. I could wax lyrical about space, peace and freedom but I suspect that it might actually just be a healthy dose of misanthropy.

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Ruinenlust: It was my grandfather. Everyone in my family likes plants and nature to some extent, but my grandfather absolutely loves nature. He instilled that in me from a young age, and he is only 47 years older than me, so when I was young, he was young. And now that I'm in my 20s, he's still young. That's the benefit of close generations, lol.

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And my personal favorite just because of how classic it is for CWA -

Candlewhisper Archive: I don't really love either. In fact, the sooner we expand human existence off this fragile little ball of rock, the better our chances of long term survival will be as a species.
However, I think environmentalism is also a pragmatic and moral approach, as we're not anywhere near the Great Leap yet, and we have to be able to have earth sustain life for a little while longer. Plus, of course, its just wasteful to ruin a good quality ecosystem, when early glances at space suggest to us that planets like ours may be relatively rare.
As for nature, it's just a semantic thing. I don't personally make any distinction between man-made and natural, as we're all just living beings altering our environment and being altered by it. Cities are as much a natural phenomenon as mountains are. I'm more interested in sensible use of resources and responsibility in using up non-renewable resources (and I don't just mean fuels, I mean things like the world's forests, biodiversity, the potential value of species that are dying out, and so on).

So there's no love here from me for planet or nature. Just cold-hearted pragmatism and logic, dictating that both are valuable to humanity.

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In addition, I am still currently working on going through the survey responses and updating our favorite tree graphic. If anyone has any suggestions for updating, please let me know!

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