Closing Thoughts

When the course first started I wrote an initial response paper that highlighted the relationship I had with nature and technology. Upon revisiting the paper I discovered that in all the emotion that resonates the most throughout the paper were feelings of disconnect. I felt disconnected from nature because of the lack of experience I felt I had with activities such as hiking– I paired my connection to nature based on how comfortable I felt outdoors. I felt disconnected from myself because of my unhealthy relationship with technology, specifically my phone. Technology allowed me to become easily isolated from myself, school, and others yet I never took action to help myself which led to me having feelings of discomfort that never got relieved. Even though the initial response focused on what I felt disconnected from, I was still hopeful that I would have a better relationship with nature and technology by the end of the semester. Now that we are actually at the end of the term I can confidently say that I developed a better understanding and relationship with both nature and technology. Throughout this course I learned to take a different approach on how I wanted to better these relationships– I found that reworking what connection to nature was and what steps I could take that felt the most helpful to me in terms of phone usage were the two most important insights I gathered from the course. Outside of my own personal development, I also developed an almost liminal position of hopefulness and pessimism about the current, as well as future, human relationships with nature and with technology. 

My approach to better my relationship and connect myself with nature was to feel comfortable with all that the outdoors has to offer. I saw that as a big challenge since my uncomfortability made me skeptical of reading things like this in class, “I believed that being in a spectacular or even just pleasant natural environment helps me distress, think more clearly and feel grounded in a way that made me a better person” (Williams, 2017, p. 51). Being outside was stressful for me, I never grew up in an environment like Vermont but slowly I realized that it wasn’t the outside environment I needed to connect myself with but to feel confident in my own ability to reflect and find the pieces of nature that made me feel grounded– I had to relearn that connectivity isn’t about how long I could be backpacking for but appreciating what nature is to me. It was about how I felt when I heard the trees sway with the wind, the sound of birds, the smell of the dirt, and most importantly how I felt alone. Reworking what connectivity meant for me was helped by how calm I felt during my time outside– a mixture of what I was seeing and hearing–  I found that I connected the most by the quote “‘we should think about soundscapes as medicine’ he said. ‘It’s like a pill. You can prescribe sounds or a walk in the park in much the way we prescribe exercise. Do it twenty minutes a day as a life time approach, or you can do it as an acute stress intervention. When you’re stressed, go to a quiet place’”(Williams, 2017, p. 97). I did feel calm and less stressed when I would go outside even if it was just to listen to birds chirping and breathe in fresh air. I started to actually feel that this worked for me which was something I couldn’t in the past. One other idea that helped me realize this difference in connection was deep ecology where instead of focusing on hard facts about ecological crises we can shift our thinking into a more personal space that allows us to see how we are engaging with the word (Aeon Essays, n.d.). I started to focus on how I was interacting with nature and how nature itself was a calming source instead of how it might frighten me and more of how confident it could make me. I spent most of my time outdoors alone which gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I wanted to do outside and how I involved myself– when I was with others I found myself boosted by their experience leading me to do more than I would. When I was alone I saw that I was less daring but more reflective, thinking about how I feel satisfied with my relationship to nature and I don’t need to be extremely outdoors. This reworking through acknowledging how nature could be calming and what I want it to be, through reflection and isolation, is what allowed me to grow into a better relationship with nature. 

When it came to technology I already knew that my phone was a problem in my life yet there was no desire to fix this unhealthy relationship. I know that based on how I felt about this in my initial reflection that I actually never took a moment to ask myself “why do I feel embarrassed for being on my phone so much?” it’s not about the hours I spent there or what I was doing but rather the value I felt I had about other things (i.e. my philosophy of technology) and how I was not meeting those expectations I had. The issue there is that I had never dug deep into myself about what exactly those values were. In class we had to make a philosophy for technology and mine centered around how I want my phone to be a tool, to be able to connect with others and use it when I need to. After finding out what values I have with what I want out of technology I started to rework my relationship with technology and try to make myself more connected to the world. When it was time to do the digital detox for this class I felt I had more clarity around what I wanted, “When digital technology use is perceived as a threat to personal values, self-regulation, and self-esteem, a digital detox is attempted to align behavior with the ideal self” (Vialle et al., 2023). This quote aligned with what I was going through with the relationship I had with my phone– I wanted to recalibrate my actions with my emotions– what would make me feel better? What was going to help me reach my values as much as I can? How I was able to rework this relationship was helped by my experience with being outdoors, how the outdoors could be calming for me even without using my phone so I tried to apply this solitude reflective learning into phone usage– “the ability to experience solitude is not only dependent on the social conditions they encounter but is also influenced by an individual’s potential to temporarily detach from societal norms and focus their attention inward” (Wilderness Solitude in the 21st Century: A Release from Digital Connectivity | IJW, 2021) I had to detach myself from problem apps and focus on what I wanted out of social media and my phone or I wouldn’t get this deep reflection I wanted. It was also the three weeks leading up to the digital detox that helped me find steps that felt the most useful for me which includes the three W’s from Price’s How to Break up with Your Phone. The “WWW (What For? Why Now? What Else?)” (Price, 2018, p. 156) These questions had me not only reflect but also practice putting the phone down. They kept me grounded with what values I had and kept my reflections alive outside of nature which I had not felt before this course. 

Although I feel I have changed based on the materials given to me during the period of this course– the discussions we had in class still made me think about how overall humans’ relationships with nature and technology are on a seesaw. When we talked about climate change, one of the articles we read stated that “media representations are likely to play a large part in determining people’s perceptions of the risk, as are the behaviors and expressed attitudes of one’s social context (Norgaard, 2006). To some extent, climate change is a culturally constructed threat; both perceptions and responses are likely to vary across cultures” (Clayton, 2020), which led me to think about how skewed perceptions all around might be. The media plays a huge role in what people believe about technology and nature, especially with the role of our phones being the informant. I, for one, only started this journey with nature and technology because of the course and actually found it to be rejuvenating but this opportunity isn’t available to all. People don’t value nature as much as they should, there are laws being put into place that ban phones while designing an operative use of Artificial Intelligence yet there are still people who forest bathe and detox from technology. I feel that in this course it either leads me to feel an impending sense of doom or hopeful that humans’ relationship across the board could change for the better. 

It was difficult to make changes and to face this reality that my initial thought process was obstructing my ability to harvest a better relationship with both of these main subject matters. This class made it possible for me to reflect, in a productive way, about how I treated these relationships in tandem to the values I hold. Both nature and technology are deserving of equal treatment in my life– nature, in any shape or form, allows me to center myself, to think clearer, as I need. Technology is what allows me to capture moments and connect with those I don’t see often. Both of these need space in my life and reworking what that meant to me was a much needed remedy. This work isn’t necessarily done, I still need to strengthen these relationships to make more cohesive and structured pathways. In this way I also see how overall humans have the ability to make these changes as well but even the to start there is a barrier of accessibility of knowledge– this is what I find to have me in between hopefulness and pessimism.