I have been at UT almost two years now and this is the first time I have ever really ssat down and looked at the pond. I have walked past this place countless times on my way to the West mall, UGL, or the Drag. I even stopped here for about two minutes Monday to take some photography pictures. The ironic part is, my photography project dealt with a "Sense of Place" just like what we are doing now. This is a nice and relaxing place to get away to. I feel like I say that every time we visit a place and write about it, maybe that is why nature appeals to me so much. No matter where I am in nature I feel relaxed, stress free, and happy. The UT biology pond is very unique, compared to what I have seen in my life. It is small yet the perfect spot to escape life's hassles. I love all the stone walls around it. It makes it look a little bit more natural and not so much man-made. However, you can still see that it is man-made because there is a cement ledge all the way around it. That is why the rock wall s make it appear more natural, to me anyways. They hard parts of the cement ledge. Around the pond is a beautiful landscape. There are at least five different species of plants that I can tell, And I am far from being any sort of expert on plants. The diversity of the plants around adds to the uniqueness of the pond. There is one aspect of the pond that i don't like, it breaks my heart to look at it. There is small bits of trash floating around in the water. It makes me sad that people nowadays can be so disrespectful, selfish, and ignorant. Each person feels that their small bit of trash won't amount to much, but what they don't think about is that they are not the only one's doing it. I can't stereotype everyone, but it doesn't take many to ruin it for everyone. Why doin't people care enough to preserve nature in every way that they can? It's almost to the point where you can't go anywhere these days without finding some form of trash, at least a cigarette butt. It's so sad. OK, I'll stop depressing you with all that trash junk. The pond doesn't make me completely sad. It does remind me of a pond I lived by in San Antonio. About 8 years ago, my family and I lived in a neighborhood that had a duck pond next to it. It, of course, was also man-made, but it was a beautiful place to sit and relax. As a young girl, we would play over there for hours. One time my younger brotheracquired a turtle from an abandoned house's green pool. My mother wouldn't let him keep it because we didn't have a good place to keep him. So one day, we all walked to the pond with the turtle. My brother said his goodbye's and released the turtle into the pond. He was a bit sad at first, even though I was happy to see the turtle go free. Every other day or so we would visit that turtle at the pond. Sometimes we could find him in the water, and sometimes we couldn't.I do know that the turtle was a lot happier in the pond than our small plastic pool outback. Turtles weren't the only animals at the pond. There were ducks there also. People in the neighborhood had built small wooden box houses for them to sleep and lay eggs in. We use to chase the ducks into the pond and feed them bread pieces. It was fun. What was really amazing was seeing all the new baby ducklings every year. As the seasons progressed we could watch them grow and learn from the teachings of their parents. I really felt clkose to that pond. One time I went up there, I saw some young kids taking the ducks eggs and smashing them at the parent ducks. It was so sad, I couldn't believe they could do that. they were killing the baby ducklings before they even had a chance.Alice Walker Quotes in "Am I Blue?", "There are those who never once have considered animals' rights: those who have been taught that animals actually want to be used and abused by us,as small children "love" to be frightened, or women "love" to be mutilated or raped"(Slovic 141). People can be evil sometimes. Another quote that I really like but doesn't directly relate to the Biology pond is from Darwin's The Origin of Species, "Man selects only for his own good: Nature for that of the being which she tends"(X341). I like this because it gives me hope for nature. She controls that which she does. Man, however, makes me scared because so does he, with no regard for nature.