Good Life Nature Activity at FLMNH by chris Dizenzo
Walking through the Museum of Natural History i had an intense amount of nostalgia of all the other natural history museums me and my parents went during our travels when we were a kid. Me and my brothers always loved nature, and still do. While there i reflected that my love for nature was definitely heightened by the beauty that natural exhibits display.
My first exhibit held the greatest intensity for me. I truly felt like i was there in nature, surrounded by the vegetation and animals in the forest. It took everything i had to resist my natural urge to just start climbing. The log was placed so perfectly i could balance across it to the top of the large cavern. Trees are where i feel most at home, because i love to climb. I'm frequently in urban environments, so, visiting this exhibit reminded me of the beauty in the forests which is easy to forget.
I very commonly read about the size of insects, due to the more oxygen rich atmosphere, of prehistoric times. I remember being so interested as to learning how insects take in oxygen because they don't have lungs. But, seeing the size of the insect in this exhibit startled me and got me to think about how terrifying it would be to have to deal with insects of that size; Or, maybe how humans might have been different also due to the oxygen rich atmosphere. i could not grasp the size of the insect until physically seeing it in the exhibit. In addition, i never considered other plant life that could have lived in that time and fed of the massive insects like the venus fly trap does.
Lastly i stalked this one butterfly that i found personally enchanting. The dark coloration with a flamboyant blue caught my eye and i couldn't keep it away. I set off on a mission around the exhibit to get my picture with it before i left. I loved the experience of being surrounded by so many butterflies, and by looking around i couldn't see another person not sharing the same experience. I think being surrounded in nature is a beauty that is contained in all of us. We have personal connections with other living things because we don't really know why we are here, but we find comfort in knowing that there are so many other things to share the fear with. The museum was a way to connect us to our natural love of the world, and its something that can only be experienced by physically being there. When we continually experience nature, we feel a moral obligation in ourselves to maintain it.
