Personal Topic #3

The Resort

At home, I work at a ski resort. During the winter, I work in a rental shop, setting up ski and snowboard equipment. During the summer, I am able to work outdoors as zipline, ropes course, and rockwall attendant. The resort provides an odd melding of humans and nature in an amusing, though often frustrating, chaotic experience. Most of our customers at the zipline act as though they've never seen a tree before, much less a wild animal. While their strange behavior in nature is amusing, I am sad to see some of these effects of urbanization as it takes over rapidly and extensively. The tourists I work with commonly either misunderstand nature or are completely ignorant of it. Not only are the children pathetically uninformed about plants and animals, their parents are often equally devoid of knowledge. I don't expect them to be able to identify species of Virginia flora and fauna, however, their ignorance is much wider and leads to them abusing nature. We even have a large number of tourists assume that the wild deer are pets belonging to the resort that we put in cages at night. We have sadly witnessed a large number of animals, often fawns, die as a result of tourist interference with the wildlife and their homes. This beautiful, former sanctuary of life has become a crowded resort full of harmful human interference.