nature

A simple and uncomplicated happiness

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Argenis Herrera is a rising junior at Williams College studying Political Economy. He is a passionate nature lover and social justice advocate.

Argenis came to the internship with extensive leadership experience in organizations including Greening Forward, a socially conscious youth-led nonprofit focused on sustainability, the Minority Coalition at Williams College, the Committee on Diversity and Community, and the Zilkha Center, advocating for sustainable solutions on campus.

Argenis participated in Williams’ backpacking orientation program for incoming students and experienced the wonder and awe of being immersed in nature. He later became a leader in the program, mentoring other first-year students on transformative outdoor trips.

Below is Argenis’ reflection on the 2020 internship program.

I came to Eagle Eye at a weird time between two places, looking for a healthy distraction from all the chaos in the world. Simultaneously, I sought clarity on a lot of what I’d been dealing with prior to arriving.

After three weeks of living sustainably outdoors at MountainStar Forest, I have found everything I’ve been looking for. There is truly no other place like this. First, there is the committed focus on sustainability that offers a plant-based diet and food grown on-site, and asks us all to be caring stewards of the forest. It’s through this focus that I was able to dismantle previously held notions of the natural world and find comfort in the balance and simplicity of nature.

But Eagle Eye doesn’t end with that. There is also a needed focus on equity and inclusion that has encouraged and allowed for heavy but necessary conversations. Since being here I have felt completely part of a family in spite of my traditionally marginalized identities. Community at Eagle Eye is not conditional; it is extensive and meaningful. 

I will be leaving with memories of a simple and uncomplicated happiness, of a time unmarred by conflict or tension. I will be leaving with snapshots of time spent meditating in the morning sun, jamming out with guitars in the glow of Christmas lights, making dinner in the outdoor kitchen, night swims and bonfires under the moon and stars, and long conversations about life, love, grief, and the simple things. I will be leaving with lessons on mindfulness and communication, aquatic ecology and tree ID. I will be leaving a different person than when I arrived, and I am never going to forget that.

Nature as the grounding force

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Lisa Shore is a rising senior majoring in Math at Smith College. They came to our summer internship with experience working at a nature camp in Germany last summer. In addition to speaking German and Italian, Lisa is a writer and poet. While here, they developed and taught a Nature Writing workshop with fellow intern Argenis Herrera that made poetry and creative writing accessible to folks with no previous experience.

Below is Lisa’s reflection on the internship program, as well as the group poem we created by arranging words and phrases that captured the moment – looking out from the outdoor kitchen at an afternoon rainstorm.

This program gave me the opportunity to reconnect with myself, away from constant news clips and video chats. The site feels like a safe little bubble where we can focus on physical work, eating well, spending time among the trees and the birds, and connecting with others and ourselves. I’m so grateful for this time with myself and others who appreciate the outdoors as much as I do.

I will take with me the early mornings, daily meditations, intentional and healthy cooking, and all the laughter, dancing, and singing under the blue sky and the stars. The conversations I’ve had and self-reflection I’ve been given space to do have pointed me in so many new directions. I’m looking forward to exploring them, with nature always there as the grounding force.

green swaying growth

damp bark

noisy birds

shiny Mother Nature

drip drop song

trees rumble 

crisp wet rain

power glasses

fresh citronella

life in the moment

Perfect moments

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Charlie Mark is a part-time student at alternative school LightHouse Holyoke. She loves being in nature and dreams of being a writer one day. Charlie participated in Eagle Eye’s hands-on learning and stewardship programs with her school the past two years and this year, completed our week-long Teen Internship.

Our Teen Internship program gives teens an opportunity to camp for a week, disconnect from personal technology, learn hands-on outdoor skills, practice sustainable and low-impact living, and build independence and self-confidence.

Charlie worked on projects alongside our college interns, including trail stewardship, using a sawmill to make lumber, natural art, organic vegetable gardening, and plant-based camp cooking. She participated in self-reflection, journaling, and discussion around her personal experience with nature and community.

Below is her reflection on her Teen Internship experience.

I have been waiting since last year to come to this internship

Usually throughout day-to-day life I stumble upon perfect little moments, like a breath of calm or a funny joke, just something to look back on and smile. These perfect moments come about once or twice a day on good weeks and less so on bad ones. Looking back at this past week trying to figure out what to keep with me forever, I seem to only remember one or two moments a day that weren’t perfect.

It was little things, like eating together every evening, to big things like a hemlock tree that is hundreds of years old, that made this week so perfect.

That’s what I’ll be talking home with me, memories of this beautiful place. I’ll bring home this way of taking a step back from the stress of technology and just seeing the world.

Eagle Eye has let me live a few stress-free days of being in nature, for which I will always be grateful.

The Importance of Community

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Mount Tom Hike-a-thon, October 26, 2019

By Cass Pastorelle, Program Director

I can’t help but feel grateful after our Hike-a-thon at Mount Tom this past Saturday, October 26.

Eagle Eye has been holding this event for 17 years, an idea first hatched by two volunteer instructors as a way to bring the Eagle Eye community together and raise money to support our work.

For most of Eagle Eye’s history, our work took place in the Boston area and at our forest site in the Berkshires. After many years of fruitful programs and partnerships, we closed our Somerville office at the end of 2015 and moved our operations west, where we have had our site since 1991. In making this move for organizational sustainability, it was necessary to transition out of partnerships that were very dear to us. While we are still connected to our friends and partners there (and still hold an annual Hike-a-thon in Eastern Mass), the programs and partnerships have moved west.

Four years ago, we weren’t sure who our new friends and partners would be. Thanks to our network of former staff, board members, and supporters, we started to make connections in the Pioneer Valley, including Holyoke, an urban center an hour from our forest site. We began offering programs on site for Holyoke youth from Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in 2016 and reintroduced our residential summer internship program for college students in summer 2017. We also built relationships with faculty and staff at Hampshire College, co-founder Anthony Sanchez’s alma mater, and engaged their students in outdoor learning opportunities.

When we were connected to Kestrel Land Trust in 2017, our work started to expand. Kestrel had been working with students at Dean Tech (now Holyoke High School Dean Campus) for the past year. We joined them in offering opportunities for students to get outdoors, learn about the environment, play games, connect with each other, and have fun. At the end of the 2017-18 school year, we offered two overnight Learn More About Forests programs to Dean students. The results were inspiring. The power of nature and community were evident as students reflected on their experience of transformation, internal and external. Students and staff alike left with a transformed outlook on themselves, others, and nature.

We are now in our third year of working with Dean staff and students, and are offering not only overnight camping trips, but also an outdoor after-school program that is student-directed and prioritizes connection to and stewardship of natural areas around Holyoke. In the interim, we have connected with many other local organizations and led youth programs with the Holyoke Boys & Girls Club, Homework House, Holyoke High School North Campus, Paulo Freire, and LightHouse Holyoke.

At our Hike-a-thon at Mount Tom on Saturday, I got to see a visual representation of our partnership- and relationship-building over the past four years. Representatives from Holyoke High Dean Campus, Kestrel Land Trust, UMass Amherst, as well as long-time supporters, board members, friends, and former staff, impressed upon me the importance of community in fulfilling our mission. We have never been able to accomplish everything alone, and from early on we have recognized the value of leveraging partnerships and working together towards shared goals.

But the value of community is also intangible. It is the feeling of warmth and connection as people are gathered for a common purpose. It is the feeling of being seen and known by others and being part of something larger than ourselves. I felt that on Saturday and I feel it whenever we bring people together in nature.

Finding Nature and Perspective in The City

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By Kristina Ferrara, Summer 2015 Intern

The way we perceive our world, ourselves, and each other affects our thoughts, behaviors, and interactions with this world we all share. Living in the city provides its residents with a perspective on the world that is quite different from that provided by living on a farm or a cabin in the woods. One of the best things about the work Eagle Eye does is to provide new perspectives to those involved in the program. Many youth we work with have their first experience in nature with Eagle Eye, and it’s incredible to see how their new experience challenges and opens up their perspective on our world.  

One activity we do is to pay attention to the sounds we are able to hear in nature and compare them to what we normally hear in the city. We have the group spread out and find a spot to sit and listen to the sounds they can hear around them. We listen for soft sounds, loud sounds, those caused by insects, by animals, the wind, water. For a few minutes, we absorb the natural sounds all around us, allowing ourselves to feel completely immersed in our natural surroundings. After doing this activity, and going back home to the city, it’s amazing how many more natural sounds we’re able to hear. If we listen hard, blended into the car horns, sirens, and general chatter, we can hear birds, the wind blowing through leaves, bees buzzing in flowers. Appreciating these natural sounds in our city environment is important to realize how connected we still are even when in the city. It challenges our perspective that the city is separate from nature and allows us to feel more connected to our world.

Coming from the suburbs of New Jersey, surrounded by farmland, woods, parks, and creeks, feeling a connection to nature while in the city was something particularly important for me. Growing up, my friends and I spent the vast majority of our time outside exploring nature. Whether it was hiking in the nearby woods, splashing around in the creeks, or searching for fossils at the fossil beds, we were always on some type of outdoor adventure. Nature has always been the place where I feel most connected not only to the rest of the world but also to my own thoughts and emotions. For me, nature is where I go whenever I need to take some time to ground myself and get a better perspective on whatever is going on in my life. My first few months living in Boston, it was really hard for me to adjust to city life. Being surrounded by buildings when I was used to being surrounded by trees made me feel quite small and cut-off from the natural world. Working with Eagle Eye has helped change my perspective of being separate from nature by helping me see how connected we still are even in the city.

Feeling connected to the natural environment is important for our mind, body, and soul as individuals, but also for our world as a whole. I believe that it is through the feeling of connection and love for nature that stewardship blooms. If you’re asked to give back to or care about the environment when you’ve never been able to experience and appreciate its beauty, it’s much harder to be enthusiastic and passionate about getting involved. When we feel connected to the environment, when we’ve been immersed in its beauty and we have seen firsthand its importance, then, and only then, do we feel compelled to act.

The most rewarding part of working with Eagle Eye, for me, is seeing the desire to give back grow in our youth participants.  Their perspectives on nature change – they no longer view nature as something separate and distant to themselves, but as an integral part of us all. Youth recognize that by protecting nature they, in turn, are protecting all life on earth, including their own, and this transformation in perspective is an incredible thing to be a part of.

Ethnicity and the Environment

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By Vaidehi Pidaparti, 2014 Tisch Active Citizen Summer Fellow

Working at Eagle Eye Institute this summer, I was welcomed into a caring community of people that have an unshakable belief that nature is truly for everyone. Being part of an environmental organization dedicated to diversity led me to reflect deeply about what place the environment has in my cultural background. While I was lucky to have a nature-loving mother who took me to national parks, the seashore and the mountains, speaking with other Indian-Americans I realized that these nature experiences were not common for people who share my heritage. In fact, some family friends have wondered, “Why do you go hiking? That’s only for white people!” In speaking with a Korean-American friend who is an avid outdoorsman, I discovered that his family has made similar comments – they do not view nature as something to explore. It never occurred to me before this summer that different ethnic groups perceive nature differently. This notion led me to consider how Indians and Indian-Americans, at the very least, interpret their relationship with the natural world.

On the one hand, the very concept of camping and hiking are foreign to Indians. My mother claims that unlike people in the West, Indians simply do not put nature into a recreational category. She attributes this to the fact that India has never had a tradition of protecting parcels of land for use as national parks or conservation. There is a definite dichotomy between how cities and villages maintain natural beauty in India, and pollution of land, water and air is increasingly common. In fact, many religious ceremonies are responsible, in part, for this pollution. On the other hand, Indian culture is founded upon principles of environmental stewardship and a feeling of kinship toward all living things. Many of the main schools of Hinduism, India’s most predominant religion, maintain an adherence to the practice of vegetarianism as a form of non-violence toward other living creatures. I was raised vegetarian for this reason, and I will continue to adhere to this tradition for the rest of my life. In addition to this belief system, an extensive knowledge of how different plants and spices can help maintain or rectify health is a mainstay in many Indian families including my own. A tailored diet is as much a part of my family’s medicine cabinet as a bottle of Advil.

I am not yet sure how to wrap my head around these contradictions – I am just at the beginning of this personal and cultural exploration. At the same time, I can see pathways towards creating a unified culture of environmentalism. I have realized that my respect and love for nature came, in large part, from the fact that I was raised a vegetarian. When I was a young child, the religious principle of not harming other animals made sense to me. My vegetarianism was a foundation in which I developed a more concrete set of environmental beliefs. Similarly, the fact that my grandmother and mother viewed food as a vital part of maintaining health led me to become a med student who believes society needs to return to basic nutrition as a means of controlling disease. I realize because of the way I was raised, with Indian traditions, I am a more environmentally-conscious person. I have a sense of responsibility to protect nature for the health and enjoyment of current and future generations. I have come to realize that the connections that people of color have to nature are not nonexistent, as people sometimes assume, but are simply different. Given my own experience, I feel as though making links between people’s cultural traditions and nature is vital in providing environmental programming to youth of color. I think characterizing people’s cultural relationships will help develop, perhaps, a more universal culture of environmental stewardship. And I for one am inspired now to try.