The World is Too Much With Us - William Wordsworth

Reading this poem this past week was extremely applicable to me considering I am an officer for the new Grizzly Grreen Team on campus (no that is not a typo). Today's society is focused so much on the self that I believe people have begun to ignore their surroundings. Especially as teenagers we are so caught up in what is going on in our lives as students that sometimes we forget there is a world outside of high school. When we go up into the mountains for a vacation or watch a video on the environment in class we enjoy and learn for a little while but go right back to our lives again. Teens who try to talk about how exquisite nature is and how we should help preserve it are simply seen as environmental activists. The truth is that people like them have helped preserve what little of the natural environment we have left in national parks and preserves. We all live and thrive in areas that have nature around them. It may not be as obvious as 100 years ago, but it's still there. Our predecessors were much more intrigued with nature and appreciated it a lot more than we do now. In fact, one treatment for diseases in earlier eras was to be sent by the doctor to live in the countryside to get some fresh air for healing. If Wordsworth were alive today, he would be even more disgusted with us than people of his own time because of the irreverent way we treat the nature around us. One of the main goals of the Grizzle Grreen Team is to raise awareness of how we can help preserve our natural world. I think if Wordsworth were a teacher at Los Osos now, he would be the advisor.           - Dorothy Z.