Prompt: âThe purpose of this exercise is for you to think about your own sense of ecological identity.  Use the information from your Ecological Identity Tree as assistance. Write down places from your own experiences that fit into the following categories: A special place from your childhood memories, A place that you perceive as damaged, A place that you think of as wild. Choose one of the places above that you feel most contributes to your knowledge and sense of the environment and how it has shaped your ecological identity and expand in a two paged, double-spaced reflection.  This is more about personal experience rather than your ecological or environmental knowledge. Explore your relationship to the earth in terms of personality, values, actions and sense of selfâ
     Since I was born in Iowa, and lived there until the age of four, I always had a thing for cold weather. Moving to California and being raised there I always despised the warm temperature especially during the summer. So, my favorite place to go as a kid which my family took me to a lot was Lake Tahoe. Lake Tahoe is in the Sierra Nevada along California and Nevada and it snows tremendously during the winter. The difference of the area between winter and summer is very contrasting. Every time I went to visit Lake Tahoe, it was always during the snowy season until I was the age of ten, did I witness visiting it during the summer.
      During the winter, youâre so preoccupied with the vast snow around you, you hardly forget about going to see the lake itself. Itâs like a magically winter wonderland with tons of forest trees surrounding you that you can hardly notice that itâs been suffering. The first time I visited Lake Tahoe during the warmer season, I first went to the lake. The water of course was extremely icy cold and super clear. Without any of the snow topping over the soil, I could see how degrading the soil of the area is. Along with the trees, their branches also looked a lot skinnier and naked. What I also noticed and what I was being told by my family members were that the water levels were getting lower and lower.
      Being young and naĂŻve, I thought they were joking about the water levels since I was still very young and tiny that everything looked large and infinite. It wasnât until I was older did I realize how depleting the water was getting. It wasnât just Lake Tahoe that was getting lowered, but a nearby lake called Folsom Lake that was slowly disappearing as well. In fact, about two to three years ago, Folsom Lake completely dried up. From going past your shoulders to barely up your knees, I realized how precious nature is. This also helped me realize that this wasnât just going on in the area I grew up in, but it was ultimately happening all around the world.
      Though Lake Tahoe is a very tourist-y place to go during the winter as thereâs tons of ski resorts and casinos, I still consider it as wild because itâs a large basin where not many venture into. There arenât many boats out on the water as you would expect it, itâs more of a beautiful sight to sit and watch instead of getting into physical contact with. But the area surrounding the lake is damaged due to the constant litter but also the amount of human made forest fires. Since California is a pretty dry state, you can view anything as brittle and flammable. Though some forest fires are good for the forest, human made ones are clearly not.
      Anyone growing up with television can identify who the ranger bear is from advertisements for saving the forest, but for kids at me during the time, it wasnât something I was gaining insight to help solve the problem. So, Iâm grateful for courses like this that are offered at institutions because I know I can still make a difference and help further proposed solutions for saving nature. Growing up, it was always animals that peaked my interest because I understood the things I can do to help âsaveâ the animals. They donât teach you that nature has a sense of feeling and that theyâre just as important as every other living being.  As a kid, I believe nature and its natural resources were always infinite. Being older and more experienced to the world, I now understand just how important nature is to the vitality of everything. Literally everything comes back to nature because it is ultimately the source of everything. So being able to read more in depth about nature through this course has helped me open my eyes even more and gave me more insight on what I can do to help.
