How does the environment figure into your daily life? Marlene Broemer, a poet and a professor, has embraced nature in her daily life since she was a child in the far north of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She believes that our relationship with nature is an integral part of being human. Her travels to the arctic areas in Finland and Siberia impressed on her how communities living in these wilderness areas depend on nature to survive. This was a real wilderness existence, which she compares to her experience of living off the grid in the wilds of Northern California.