This article provides a unique look at nature by taking us back in time to the first settlers of America.\u00a0 These settlers had great fear and respect for the environment and for the effect it could have on them.\u00a0 They had an almost morbid fascination with the sun and the power it had over the balance of the body.\u00a0 With disease more prominent and more deadly, one had to be wary of the dangers of nature.\u00a0 Many diseases were attributed to exposure to too much heat.\u00a0 While these people had a worse understanding of their environment that we do now, they had to live with its effects everyday.\u00a0 Whether this actually makes them closer to nature than we are today is an interesting question to ponder.\u00a0 With all the medicine and technology we have today, it\u2019s easy to subscribe to the idea that nature\u2019s effect can be conquered or beaten.\u00a0 Settlers back then however, had to deal with the daily physical effects that the environment could have on you.<\/p>\n
One of the most provoking parts of the article was the idea that environment, the heat specifically, could actually shape a race of people.\u00a0 The English believe that hotter climates made people \u2018wittier\u2019 and smarter but less physically strong than people from colder climates.\u00a0 That\u2019s why these people were often conquered by Northerners.\u00a0 We tend to ascribe stereotypes to different regions even today.\u00a0 The simplest example is the way Northerners view Southerners and vice versa.\u00a0 When we talk about these differences we rarely discuss environment.\u00a0 However, it was the environment that first created these differences.\u00a0 The warmer climates of the South and the flatter topography led to the agrarian focused, plantation style economy.\u00a0 It was the environment that paved the way for slavery and made the South so dependent on it.<\/p>\n
Jumping into the minds of these settlers raises some interesting questions about nature.\u00a0 Does nature actually have less of an impact on us now or are we just better equipped to handle it?\u00a0 I would argue that nature doesn\u2019t have less of an effect on us than it did on the colonists, we have just developed better ways to counter that effects and live with nature.\u00a0 However, I don\u2019t subscribe to the idea that you can ever conquer nature.\u00a0 No matter how many diseases we cure or preventative measures we take, the environment will always have an effect on us.\u00a0 The countermeasures that the settlers took, although comedic to us now, expose an attitude we still have today.\u00a0 Rather than seeing nature as something we live off of, we see it as something dangerous that we have to fight against.\u00a0 It is something unknown that has to be explained. \u00a0I have to wonder if this attitude has something to do with the American Exceptionalism that Henry<\/a> discussed in his post. \u00a0Perhaps we would feel vulnerable or defeated if we left ourselves at the mercy of an environment we could not control or understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This article provides a unique look at nature by taking us back in time to the first settlers of America.\u00a0 These settlers had great fear and respect for the environment and for the effect it could have on them.\u00a0 They had an almost morbid fascination with the sun and the power it had over the … <\/p>\n