Tossing Mullet

It’s not that we have lost a passion for nature and the environment – it’s the simple fact that we have so seriously altered our modes of interaction. It’s a treat and a highlight of our experiences to see animals in a zoo or aquarium.

If you ask some kids about their appreciation of nature and animals, they may reply in the affirmative. They will regale you with the exciting show on sharks that they watched last night on the Discovery Channel, or about their pet turtle that has this neat plastic island in his little tank. (Wait, I’m sorry we can’t have those anymore – they carry salmonella which they get from our dirty water that is all they have left to swim in)

But I digress – the point is that they have probably never brought home a box turtle found in the woods or dug a big hole to keep ring-neck snakes in. This latter habit found in my youngest son never ceased to torture my poor wife, but she knows I saved her life when I stopped one of the boys from “surprising” her by carrying a rather large snake upstairs where she was working.

The interactions that children have with nature have become dictated by our culture, and unfortunately its gradual disappearance. Even visits to national parks have been declining since 1999 and they were mostly “drive-bys’ even then.

Richard Louv argues in “Last Child in the Woods” published in 2006, that the vast majority of children are suffering from nature deficit disorder – his term, not anyone else’s to my knowledge. The book was recommended to me by the former Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Riley Boykin Smith, who is probably a stereotype of the ardent conservationist and a devoted hunter/gatherer – for Riley to be impressed by the book prompted me to take a look.

I have long argued that the worst thing that we abuse in our “throw away society” is the land itself. It seems to me that we treat beer cans with respect (or at least a lot of us do) because we make an effort to recycle them. But land is squandered, apparently because the quickest and highest return on an investment is the conversion of green space to about anything else, residential, commercial, industrial, or transportation – rather than reuse existing anything!

I attended a Mobile city council meeting several years ago to support the reuse of a recently abandoned commercial building for the proposed west Mobile branch of the public library and wound up sitting behind a row of well-dressed women who were there to espouse the construction of a new library on green space. We engaged in a spirited repartee which I was fated to lose out on by sheer numbers and force of will. In fact, my opposition to the new library began to sound – even to me – as though I had just left a bonfire populated by Nazis or KKK militants busily hurling books into the flames!

While I remained convinced that the group was suffering from a severe “edifice” complex, the full irony didn’t strike me until the new building was completed. I don’t suppose anyone else has noticed, but functionally they aren’t all that different looking! Meanwhile the new building is functional and the old one has been reused, but it’s the principle of the thing after all! We had a chance to make a statement with a public building and the opportunity was thrown away, even if the building wasn’t after all.

But I wandered again – it seems abundantly clear that the lack of real intimacy with any natural condition is going to make successive generations less and less caring about nature. There is probably already a Wii program that simulates a walk in the woods or a hunt for bullfrogs. That is our future nature!! I’m glad my grandson is at least standing up and swinging a bat, or tennis racquet toward the television set – but I can’t quite convince myself that is as healthy for him as his tee ball games.

We will surely squander everything natural if we don’t care more about it than an aluminum beer can!

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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