Age and the environment

In this week’s content, Bill McKibben and Emma Morris give conflicting views on the current-day environment. Though McKibben’s is far more realistic with his views on human activity ruining the left-alone nature, Morris gives a fascinating TED talk on the idea that we kill our curiosity with nature and work so hard to essentially ‘fake’ the nature we see at national parks. Not only that, but she said that nature has simply changed by definition instead of it being in danger or destroyed. 

One point in her talk really struck a chord with me:

“You can’t climb the trees; you can’t fish the fish; you can’t make a campfire out in the middle of nowhere; you can’t take home the pine cones. … for a child’s point of view, this is the worst nature ever.”

She also said in the talk that as adults we simply like to walk a hike just to take in a view for maybe 10 minutes or so, then call it quits. We don’t examine the soil; we don’t touch the bark of trees foreign to us. It’s simply a quick look, then it’s behind us.

As a child, I remember playing outside often. Pretending the catalpa trees were living fantasy fortresses with my pretend stick-weapons at the roots, which were my barracks. I also remember finding woolly worms and earthworms naturally crawling on the ground and on branches and creating habitats for them in jars and watching them for hours before letting them go again. My family also found a wild turtle and kept it for quite some time. I even brought it to a kindergarten class and watched as it stalked after a classmate, who retreated in fear of my beast that’s not even a half of a foot tall.

I haven’t thought of these memories for many years. I've almost forgotten them.

Another point that I’d like to make is that Morris makes an excellent contrast between nature that we often see within walking distance of our homes and nature that we often think is rare, exotic and beautiful that is ‘fake.’ We would love to see places like Glacier National Park or Yellowstone, but we often ignore the small creeks, the garden in the backyard or even the The White River here in Muncie.

I have a few questions for you guys. I know that there is only one requested on assignment, but feel free to choose one to answer, or more:

1.    How has our creativity and curiosity with nature changed within ourselves when getting older? How does this feel? And what forms of writing topics can come from this in writing about the environment?

2.    What are certain qualities that make nature valuable to us? Within the Ted Talk, Morris mentions a survey that said roughly 60% responded with not having nature around them, yet data proves them wrong. What are the different values that we hold in nature that actually make it worth a visit no matter the location?