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    This week's content talked about the ways in which humans view (and abuse) the natural world for our own gains. In Kingsnorth's piece, he argues that humanity views nature as a tool to be wielded and used for our own ends, and says that writers should take up the task of representing nature itself as a character, in order to increase our empathy and raise awareness of the damage we do to it. The     TED Talk with Sinard talks about how forests are very much alive, with the trees being connected in a vast network in which cutting down Mother Trees does irreparable damage to the forest. 

    The launch posts mostly dealt with questions pertaining to how humanity should view nature. One posed questions of whether forests and plant life are inanimate or not. Another asked how we could get rid of the stigma that nature is simply a tool to be taken advantage of, and another still (the most popular one this week) delves into Kingsnorth's question of writing using nature as a character in fiction, instead of simply as a setting. 

    Many of the comments for this post delved into a discussion of craft, and how they personally would implement nature and the environment as a character in a story. Many different ideas were proposed, and a lot of different elements of craft were discussed. Some of these included the best type of narration for capturing the views of nature, the best way to capture feelings of nature, which would perceive differently than we do, and what tense and plot points would best be used to capture the story well. One comment proposed a science fiction scenario where artificial intelligence stands in for nature, seeing as it would theoretically perceive things differently than we do, just like nature would. 

    Overall, the blog featured a lot of great launch posts that brought up really good questions, and an incredibly interesting discussion about how to make nature more prevalent in fiction happened. This week's blog discussions were really awesome, in my opinion!