Nature On Screen

Is the Internet our means of experiencing nature? Two pretty good writers – Carol Kaesuk Yoon and Diane Ackerman – say yes, and they say it’s time for us old and middle-aged fogeys to face reality.

Writing about kids and nature in the Science section of last Tuesday’s Times, Yoon seemed to be responding specifically to our Connecticut State of the Birds 2012 report, “Where Is the Next Generation of Conservationists Coming From?” (The fact that she lives in Washington State hints that she probably wasn’t.)

Here, in italics, is an excerpt from “Nature Follows a Path of Pixels Into Children’s Hearts”…

The inanities of the Internet may be exactly what save us all, at least as far as getting the next generation to love and cherish the living world. …

It’s beyond natural to seek out and treasure, to believe in, the landscapes and familiarities of your youth. That instinctive melancholia for what was, for places seen, rhythms experienced, has probably been downright adaptive for countless generations as humans found their way to places they could indeed survive and thrive.

But its modern remnants — each generation of newly middle-aged parents certain that life as they knew it is the only way to proceed sensibly and well to adulthood — do not quite fit, most especially when it comes to loving the living world.

I encountered life playing in the woods of a Boston suburb. My mother did it farming on the island of Oahu. My father did it roaming the frozen wasteland of northernmost Korea. My own children are doing it laughing at tarsiers on the Web. It may help to remember that Darwin and his peers did it by shooting and killing everything they saw. And through most of the millenniums of human history, children connected with the living world by living directly in it.
Things change.

Would it be great if children today all got outside, romping through that three-dimensional living thing we know as nature? Sure! Are they going to? I don’t know. But I do know that in today’s child’s play — which often unfolds on the screen — there is more than the misery and isolation that most midlifers profess to see (as they click and point). There is hope and beauty in it too.

If the Internet is unavoidable and ubiquitous — and it is — then nature is following right along with it, shining out through screens everywhere. Young people are knowledgeable about organisms in a global way we could never have been as children. They may not often wander the local patch of forest — we won’t let them most of the time anyway — but they wander the natural world through the Internet.

It might be easier and more comfortable for all of us to stick our salt-and-peppered heads in the sand, fondling our burnished memories of rotary-dial phones, typewriters and card catalogs, but then we’d miss it all.

Ackerman talks about adults and kids. Her essay is titled, “Nature: Now Showing on TV.” She described watching Great Blue Herons via a live feed from Sapsucker Woods, in Ithaca, N.Y.:

This is how we mainly experience nature now — it comes to us, not the other way around — on a small, flat, glowing screen. …

Gradually, we may grow used to shallower and shallower experiences of nature. For example, on YouTube I just glimpsed several icebergs rolling in Antarctica — minus the grandeur of size, sounds, colors, waves and panorama. …

Still, few people will travel to such remote landscapes — or Sapsucker Woods, for that matter — and technology supplies a shortcut. It also helps to satisfy a longing so essential to our well-being that we feel compelled to tune in, and we find it hypnotic.
The more we exile ourselves from nature, the more we crave its miracle waters.

But what if, through novelty and convenience, digital nature replaces biological nature? Studies show that we’ll suffer. Richard Louv writes of widespread “nature-deficit disorder” among children who mainly play indoors — something new in the history of humankind. He sees it leading to attention problems, obesity, depression and lack of creativity.

Ideally, we won’t sacrifice one for the other. We’ll play outside and visit parks and wilds on foot, and also enjoy technological nature, as a mental seasoning, turning to it for what it does best: illuminate all the hidden and mysterious facets of nature we can’t experience or fathom on our own.

–Tom Andersen, director of communications and community outreach