It’s Earth Day, as you know, and in honor of that I’d like to highlight a database we have that is focused on environmental issues. Then, I’ll tell you a story and ask for your stories in return. Just go with it, it’s gonna be fun!
Through the library you have access to Environmental Studies: Gale in Context. You can find it on our Articles, Journals, and Databases page. This database is focused on providing resources for topics related to environmental studies, including includes things like legislation, animals, geographical features, ways in which humans interact with nature, and so much more.
Searching for a specific topic will bring you to a results page with links organized into categories by type. Academic Journals, Magazines, Case Studies, Images, Videos, Audio, News, Reference, Statistics, and more!
The results will have listed under them the date of publication, word count, resource type, and lexile score. The red box with dots in the above example indicates the content level of that resource (peer-reviewed articles tend to have high content levels). You can filter your results by any of those facets.
And of course, it has handy ‘cite’ button so citations can be generated easily in MLA or APA formats.
NOW, your reward for reading about our database is a storytime! (Don’t continue reading if you’re easily grossed out.)
My brother, Chris, has spent the last four Summers as a raft guide in West Virginia. He spends a lot of time out in nature and on the river. You know that river water smell? He smells like that a lot. (Love you, Chris!)
Raft guides generally get to the area where you put the rafts into the river before customers so they can blow up the rafts and get things ready. One day, after readying the raft, he was just waiting for the bus full of adventurers to arrive and holding his whistle in his mouth.
He felt leave the whistle and and land on his tongue. It moved. It started crawling around behind his teeth.
He took the whistle out of his mouth but he could still feel creepy crawling behind his lips. He spat once, twice, and right before the third time he felt a pinch on the inside of his bottom lip. Desperate, he spat the bite-y bug out on the ground and then peered down at it.
It was a spider. Type unknown. It started moving away only to stop in its tracks. Then, without any interference, its legs curled up and it died. Just like that.
My brother started to move away but before he did the spider’s abdomen exploded. Tiny spider guts splurting out. A worm slowly emerged from the spider, wriggling onto the dirt behind the spider and only to coil up and die itself.
In a kitchen, in another state, I once found myself with a spider in my mouth as well. I’d left a glass of water on the counter for a few hours. Upon returning I picked it up and started drinking it without looking closely at it first. I felt something in my mouth, tiny little legs, and immediately opened my mouth and let the water fall back into the glass. I saw the spider and, I’m not too proud to say, screamed.
The moral of the story, such that there is one, is that whether you are an outdoor person (my brother) or an indoor person (me) you may still end up with a spider in your mouth. Don’t worry, you’ll probably survive.
Your turn! Send me (bippleyc@durhamtech.edu) or the library (library@durhamtech.edu) your most fun/strangest/grossest encounter with nature! It doesn’t have to be bugs. If we get enough stories we will share them in another blog post. We can’t really tell stories around a bonfire right now, but we can still share our stories with each other!
