CHAPTER 24CHAPTER 24It’s difficult to imagine being busy and enchanted
at the same time. Enchantment invites us to pause
and be arrested by whatever is before us. Instead
of doing something, something is done to us....
We stumble across a roaring, resplendent water-
fall in the middle of a quiet forest, and we
become profoundly entranced.
—THOMAS MOORE,
The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life
A ditch somewhere—or a creek, meadow,
woodlot, or marsh. . . . These are places
of initiation, where the borders between
ourselves and other creatures break down,
where the earth gets under our nails
and a sense of place gets under our skin.
—ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE,
The Thunder Tree
In the Age of Affluenza, American culture came indoors, in quest of ever-greater convenience. Imagine Janet Jones talking to her neighbor. “We don’t ever have to be hot again,” she confides as the air conditioning installer pulls into the driveway. Right behind him is a vanload of junipers, vincas, and a birdbath, to fill the space where the vegetable garden used to be. As she pads slipper-footed across a carpet of Kentucky bluegrass, Janet looks over her shoulder and adds, “Since we don’t cook much anymore, why have a garden?”
In the last decade, the aphorism “Stop and smell the roses” sank to a more cynical “Wake up and smell the coffee.” We didn’t have time for nature anymore. We learned to just ignore the damn roses—let the landscaper take care of them.
This chapter challenges a widespread, if unconscious, belief that if you make enough money, you don’t need to know anything about nature or have contact with it. Conversely, we suggest that the stronger your bond with nature, the less money you’ll need, or want, to make. If kicking affluenza is your goal, proven natural remedies may be the way to go.
Thirty-four percent of Americans polled in 2003 ranked shopping as their favorite activity, while only 17 percent preferred being in nature. The Las Vegas Strip is ranked the number-one “scenic drive” in the country. One fourth grader, asked if he preferred to play indoors or outdoors, replies, “Indoors, ‘cause that’s where the electrical outlets are.” Another child pokes a stick at a dead beetle, commenting to her friend that the insect’s batteries must have run out. On a field trip to trace the source of their drinking water, inner-city New York middle-school kids are spooked by the cool, starry darkness and crescendo of silence in the Catskills.
“I thought potatoes grew on trees,” one college student confided as Dave recently helped her plant a garden in her backyard. “I guess I need to know more about where my food comes from.” Naturalists urge us to reintroduce ourselves to the real world by becoming familiar with our own backyards and county open spaces. This will help answer a question that lingers in the back of our minds: Where exactly are we?
Can you identify a few key species that live in your region and the natural events that take place there?
One after another, services that used to be provided free by nature have been packaged and put on the market. Take bottled water, home-delivered in five-gallon bottles, or tanning salons, where creatures of the great indoors bask in simulated sunlight. Human contact with nature has become a contract with nature. Even oxygen is for sale. But many educators and thinkers refer to an “extinction of experience” that accompanies our pullback from nature. Like a washed-out sprig of parsley on a dinner plate, the community park is often biologically bland—and sometimes not secure from crime. The only way some know nature is by mentally crunching images of it on TV, like popcorn.
But television can’t communicate a multidimensional, sensuous, interactive reality. It shows only the visual realm—and that through the tunnel of a lens. We’re not actually there to smell nature, and touch it, and feel the breeze. Besides, television nature is often scripted nature—as fake as a paper ficus. Spliced together from hundreds of nonsequential hours of tape, a typical nature program filmed in Africa zooms in on a majestic lion, relentlessly on the prowl for wildebeests, jackals, and gazelles. The reality is, lions are as lazy as your housecat, sometimes sleeping twenty hours a day. Even so, footage of two lions mating is predictably followed by “cubs, tumbling out after a two- or three-minute gestation, full of play. The timeless predatory cycle repeats. . . Z’1
In The Age of Missing Information, quoted above, Bill McKibben compares and contrasts the information contained in a daylong hike in upstate New York with the information content of a hundred cable TV stations, on the same day. He took a few months to watch every single taped program and observed a vast virtual wasteland that hawked a commercial mind-set. Writes McKibben, “We believe that we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been an information ‘revolution.’. . . Yet vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach.” In one hundred hours of programming, he found very little to enrich his life.
On McKibben’s daylong hike, however, all kinds of things were happening. Seven vultures leisurely circled directly above —so close he could count their feathers. “It was nearly unbearable—almost erotic—this feeling of being watched,” he writes. “At moments I felt small and vulnerable, like prey.” Still, he knew the day’s encounters with vultures, water striders, and thrushes would never be Spielberg material. “I had not been gored, chased, or even roared at. I had failed to tranquilize anything with a dart; no creature had inflated stupendous air sacs in a curious and ancient mating ritual.”2 Yet his real-world experiences made him feel actively, rather than passively, alive.
In the closing sentences of The Age of Missing Information, McKibben reminds us of the virtual canyon we’ve put between ourselves and the natural world:
On Now You’re Cooking, a lady is making pigs-in-a-blanket with a Super Snacker. “We have a pact in our house—the first one up plugs in the Super Snacker.”
And on the pond, the duck is just swimming back and forth, his chest pushing out a wedge of ripples that catch the early rays of the sun.
As McKibben and many others point out, when we lose touch with the origins, habits, and needs of our earthly housemates, we lose our biological sense of balance. As psychologist Chellis Glendinning writes, “We become homeless, alienated from the only home we will ever have.”3
In an evolutionary sense, we risk losing the living scaffold that supports our biological sack of tricks. (For instance, without a healthy universe of decomposers, we’d all be knee-deep in dinosaur bodies.) And we lose a way of knowing what’s right. Ecologist Aldo Leopold believed that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”4 But let’s face it: most of our daily activities and standard operating procedures walk all over Leopold’s law. We don’t have a clue about the biotic community, or what it needs.
Educator David Sobel terms our separation from nature “ecophobia"—a symptom characterized by an inability to smell, plant, or even acknowledge the roses. “Ecophobia is a fear of oil spills, rain forest destruction, whale hunting, and Lyme disease. In fact it’s a fear of just being outside,” Sobel explains. A fear of microbes, lightning, spiders, and dirt. Sobel’s first aid for ecophobia emphasizes hands-on contact with nature. “Wet sneakers and muddy clothes are prerequisites for understanding the water cycle,” he says.5 In the book Beyond Ecophobia, he describes the magic of overcoming “timesickness” and regaining a more natural pace.
I went canoeing with my six-year-old son Eli and his friend Julian. The plan was to canoe a two-mile stretch of the Ashuelot River, an hour’s paddle in adult time. Instead, we dawdled along for four or five hours. We netted golf balls off the bottom of the river from the upstream golf course. We watched fish and bugs in both the shallows and depths of the river. We stopped at the mouth of a tributary stream for a picnic and went for a long adventure through a maze of marshy streams. Following beaver trails led to balance-walking on fallen trees to get across marshy spots without getting our feet wet. We looked at spring flowers, tried to catch a snake, got lost and found. How fine it was to move at a meandery, child’s pace!6
One summer night, twenty years ago, Dave’s family was abruptly wrenched from sleep by an eerie, piercing sound that cut through the night like a Bowie knife. All four family members jerked upright in their beds, as lights went on in cabins throughout the little rural valley. At 4 a.m., Dave’s kids stood shaky-legged on the couch, peering out into the darkness. They hoped to catch a glimpse of the mountain lions that had just faced off in the front yard. This was a primordial experience, connecting them with the fear and the wonder that humans have known throughout our evolution. They felt lucky to have the experience—though none of them slept for the rest of that night. Now, fast-forward twelve years or so to a rocky ledge overlooking Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo mountain range. Dave’s son, Colin, calls attention to the skeletal remains of an animal feast. As they study an antelope skeleton lying on the ledge, Colin imagines out loud, “A mountain lion dragged the antelope up here to eat it.” He likes the idea of a real-world museum exhibit, and he likes the detective work, too.
But Dave was in a different place in his life cycle. Reaching down to the antelope skeleton, he cracked the skull away from the neck, to have a trophy from the hike. The sound of neck vertebrae cracking was one of the most abrupt, jarring sounds he’d ever heard—right up there with the front yard face-off of years before. In fact, Dave was so alarmed he replaced the skull near its rightful place. Although Colin soon forgave the impulsive action, the two spent a few hours that afternoon debating the acquired trait of having nature versus the more unconditional being in nature.
Spoiled by the pace and panorama of TV nature, we’re usually looking for the big event, the spectacle. But more often than adults, kids become absorbed in the small details of nature. “Where did you go?” asks the parent. “Out.” “What did you do?” “Oh, nothing,” answers the kid, but he’s got a vivid image in his head that says otherwise: perhaps a nearly intact robin’s eggshell, partially hidden under a bright red maple leaf.
Wilderness leader Robert Greenway has spent many years on the trail and has allowed the child in himself to remain active. He tries to bring out that trait in others, too, with tangible results. Comments from more than a thousand wilderness-trip participants (both adult and child) indicate that nature is indeed working its magic:
90 percent described an increased sense of aliveness, well-being, and energy;
77 percent described a major life change upon return (in personal relationships, employment, housing, or life-style);
60 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women stated that a major goal of the trip was to conquer fear, challenge themselves, and expand limits;
90 percent broke an addiction such as nicotine, chocolate, and pop;
57 percent of the women and 27 percent of the men stated that a major goal of the trip was to “come home” to nature;
76 percent of all respondents reported dramatic changes in quantity, vividness, and context of dreams after seventy-two hours in the wilderness.7
We know intuitively that nature is beneficial, even if we become estranged from it. Patients recover more quickly when they have beautiful green views to look at. At the Way Station in Maryland, the suicide rate of emotionally and mentally challenged residents dropped dramatically when a sunny new brick and natural-wood building became their new home. Natural light and plants provided by windows and skylights seemed to calm and reassure them.
People like Greenway urge us to “come to our senses.” By literally smelling, touching, and tasting nature, we begin to clear out some of the rubble in our heads. Says Greenway, “On a wilderness trip, it seems to take about four days for people to start dreaming nature dreams rather than ‘busy’ or ‘urban’ dreams. This recurring pattern suggests to me that our culture is only four days deep.”8 In contrast, John McPhee has called the history of life on earth “deep time.” For example, without the ferns, algae, and protozoa of sixty-five million years ago (only yesterday as measured in deep time), we wouldn’t be so preoccupied with petroleum.
When we experience nature with our own noses, skin, lungs, and reptilian brains, we feel silly about the stress of obsessive projects and timelines. Self-importance begins to melt into something larger. We see that we’re integral members of the Biosphere Club, and it feels great! Rather than perceiving ourselves as simply human-paycheck-house-car, we finally understand who and where we are. We see that in reality, we’re human-soil-grains-fruits-microbes-trees-oxygen-herbivores-fish-salt marshes, and on and on and on! We begin to question the logic and the ethic of parting out nature like a used-up car.
A few years ago, Lana Porter began to come to her senses. The garden she works in Golden, Colorado, is far more than a lush, reclaimed vacant lot—it’s a biological extension of her self, and a way of life. “I eat very well out of this garden, just about all year round,” she says, “and the organic produce gives me energy to grow more produce and get more energy. It’s a cycle of health that has cut my expenses in half. My grocery bills are lower, my health bills are lower, I don’t need to pay for exercise, and my transportation costs are lower because I don’t have to travel so much to amuse myself.”9
Asked what she likes best about her personal Garden of Eden, Porter replies, “I like what it does for my head. Sometimes, when I’m watering a healthy crop, or planting seeds, or cultivating between rows, I’m not thinking anything at all—a radical switch from my previous life as an overworked computer programmer. People tell me I should take care of my crops more efficiently—with irrigation systems on timers, designer fertilizers, and pesticides—so I could spend less time out here. But that way of growing disconnects the grower from the garden. The whole point is to spend more time with the plants, taking care of things, and less time trying to reshape myself to fit the changing whims of the world.”
Like Porter, many other Americans perceive the difference between natural complexity and oversimplified science. Between a juicy, tasty peach that confers health and a pulpy, worthless peach grown in poor soil. Suddenly attuned to the frequency of natural law, they see with new eyes that many of our civilization’s customs are counterproductive because they’re not grounded in biological reality. Just as laying land fallow is a tenet of the Old Testament, optimizing solar income to prevent global warming should be one of the tenets of the Age of Ecology. But it seems that we won’t protect backyard, bioregion, or planet unless we feel connected.
Nature is not “out there”; it’s everywhere. Finding out how well the timber was grown that went into your backyard fence is nature. Knowing if the ingredients in a cake mix are biologically compatible with human nutrition is nature. Walking to the store and stopping to ask your neighbor what kind of perennial flowers he’s planting— that’s nature, too.
For aquatic biologist and University of Wisconsin professor Calvin DeWitt, the Garden of Eden is a freshwater marsh that’s just beyond his backyard. He knows the marsh so well that he can identify its birds by their calls alone. Standing knee-deep in it, in waders, DeWitt traces the marsh’s many cycles and life events. “When the stalk of the cattail here drops down to the marsh, it’s converted again into soil, and in the structure of that soil grow all sorts of organisms which these geese feed on and the great herons that live here feed on,” he exclaims. “It’s things like this that really excite me, because they instill such a sense of awe and wonder. And I think that awe and wonder are really the things we’re missing today.” DeWitt examines a dragonfly preening on a cattail stalk, then reflects, “This aquatic ecosystem is eleven thousand years old. It’s been doing all this for eleven millennia— without any human intervention.”10
“As you stand for a while, things begin to unfold if you are quiet enough to watch and listen. After a full day, you’re still not fulfilled—there’s so much to learn here. You’re not tired either—you tend to be exhilarated from the experience.” DeWitt steps up on the bank of the marsh, water dripping from his waders. “Perhaps most curiously—in our consumptive society—you come home with your wallet just as full as when you left, and you’ve gotten all this pleasure, education, understanding, peace—for not a single penny.”
