We're all exposed to images of the natural environment all the time.

We see nature photography and wildlife documentaries. We visit natural-history museums to see scientific specimens, and art galleries to ponder paintings depicting the great outdoors.

We might see slides in science class, or taxidermy in a friend's den.

Nola Semczyszyn has been examining how these myriad representations of nature affect our attitudes about and relationship to the environment.

To stimulate discussion about the issues she studies, Semczyszyn, a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, is putting together an exhibit titled "Examining Nature." It opens Saturday in F&M's Phillips Museum of Art.

Semczyszyn said the exhibit will include specimens of fish, spiders and baby mammals fixed in plastic — borrowed from the North Museum — along with depictions of the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, France; mixed-media artwork; and enlargements of microscopic images.

"And we're building a really cool, post-modern cabinet of curiosities," she said.

What won't be in the exhibit, Semczyszyn noted, are long, explanatory labels on the objects.

"Sometimes, you're not giving answers," she said. "The point is the discussion. The point is finding new ways to look at things and experience things.

"Because the gallery exhibit or museum exhibit can be so sensorially moving," she said, "I think that is a way of getting people to ask questions and reconsider" the way that they look at nature and the environment.

Dirk W. Eitzen, professor of film and media studies at F&M, will contribute the film portion of the exhibit.

"He's doing a section called 'Imagining Nature,' " Semczyszyn said, featuring clips "representing the past, present and future of how the human relationship with nature has been narrated through film."

Semczyszyn will speak about the exhibit at a Sept. 20 gallery reception. Other scheduled speakers include Oscar-nominated documentarian and author Chris Palmer, discussing ethical issues in wildlife filmmaking at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 18, in F&M's Adams Auditorium.

Semczyszyn, who is in the second year of a post-doctoral fellowship at F&M, said her field of environmental philosophy examines humans' relationship to nature, and how we come to know and understand the environment.

"My research project is on how our visual representations of the natural world affect how we conceptualize and value the natural world," Semczyszyn said. "I think that our understanding of the natural world is always mediated through the kinds of technologies that we use. I mean, even a pen or paint is a kind of technology.

"I'm also interested in how images get used in teaching," she said. "A lot of the images and specimens that we're bringing together are things that are used by professors here, as part of their research or their pedagogy."

Scientific and artistic images are usually exhibited separately, Semczyszyn noted, in natural-history museums and art galleries. She said "Exhibiting Nature" will display both kinds of images together.

She's looking forward to seeing how visitors react to that mix of genres.

 "What I think is really interesting about museums and galleries, and the process of display, is that you can do one of the things that we are also doing in philosophy, which is just raise questions," she said.

"I think that when we get a richer sort of sense of what nature is, it will help us to understand our attitudes toward it … and work toward resolving some of the problems that we have with the environment and conservation right now. A lot of the environmental and ecological issues are really conceptual."

How the environment is represented can have implications for discussions surrounding issues such as climate change and the keeping of animals in zoos and aquariums, she noted.

Growing up in Canada, Semczyszyn said, she and her twin sister were "incorrigible nurturers of injured wildlife, bringing home every dying squirrel or bird that we found to try to nurse it back to health." They aspired to be dog-sled racers across the Arctic.

Some of that came from the representations of nature to which she was exposed as a child.

"I read a lot of Jack London," she said. "And Pippi Longstocking — she had friends that were animals.

"People have a hard time understanding what our relationship is to nature," Semczyszyn said. "Often, we're detached from it."

But nature, she said, "is also in your living room. It's probably living under your couch."

"Examining Nature" opens Saturday and runs through Oct. 21 in the Curriculum Gallery of Franklin & Marshall's Phillips Museum of Art. A reception and gallery talk are set for 4:45 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20. For more information, call 291-3879 or visit fandm.edu/phillipsmuseum.