May 28, 2012

SandBoxBlogs: Aspen Times "The path back to nature"

Paul Anderson:
"....According to a new book, “2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years,” the trend toward megacities and unbridled resource extraction will make wild places fewer and competition for them greater.

“Don't teach your children to love the wilderness,” concludes author Jorgen Randers. “By teaching children to love the untouched wilderness, you are teaching them to love what will be increasingly hard to find. Much better then to rear a new generation that find peace, calm and satisfaction in the bustling life of the megacity — with never-ending music piped into their ears.”

As dismaying as this sounds, the historic precedent exists. Two centuries ago, few could foresee the end of the frontier, the buffalo, the passenger pigeon. Did I do a disservice by connecting Tait to a deep affection for the natural world?

I console myself by reasoning that the path of humanity is difficult to plot — that forecasts are often wrong. Perhaps this dim prediction will push the culture in the opposite direction. Perhaps love of life, the “biophilia” Tait has learned, will lead us on the path back to our natural heritage.

Author Larry McMurtry at the beginning of “Lonesome Dove” writes: “All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.”

Wild nature should be more than a dream. It's up to us parents to make sure that our children can awaken to natural wonder in the real world...."  (Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetic pursuit and tracking of patterns within the news others make since 2010."

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