Nature and Us: The Mid-March View

This weirdly warm March has brought out mixed reactions: some people don’t mind a bit that there’s been very little winter to speak of and are ready to garden; others (I’m in this group) feel there’s something kind of eerie about the missing cold temperatures and snow.  We’re used to a certain rhythm of the seasons — even though for most of us who don’t work the land the weather conditions are more of a backdrop than anything else — and so we’re disoriented by this.

The brown landscape in New England has looked almost embarrassed over these past few months, as if it knows it’s supposed to be covered in white.  Cross-country skis have been sedentary on front stoops.   I heard on the radio recently that the price of milk has been driven down partly because the Northern cows, who apparently often pull back production a bit during the coldest months, have been producing so much.  When winter is not really winter, something’s out of whack.

I haven’t heard analysis of the current stretch of higher than normal temperatures, and maybe we shouldn’t attribute it too quickly to global warming, but there must be a good chance that we can.  And, despite what the skeptics say,  global warming is doing a whole lot more than causing us just to leave our down jackets on the hooks when we’re used to wearing them.

Indeed, according to Bill McKibben’s most recent book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, we have actually already irrevocably changed our home, so we might as well give it a new name.  All is not lost, he argues, but no longer can we talk just about what dire things might happen in the future; they are already happening:  global temperatures up by at least one degree, levels of carbon in the atmosphere leading to dangerous methane gas release on the ground, icecaps melting, seas rising, tropics spreading by degrees of latitude, storms everywhere.

Our friend and my husband’s colleague at the church, Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, has been in the forefront of clergy across the country who are working hard on this issue.  She speaks regularly about it from the pulpit and makes sure that our community is participating in the struggle; we are tuned into the whole “350.org” movement mostly through her efforts.  Given the urgency with which we must grasp that all of “God’s Creation” needs protection, it is all the more disappointing that the voices of denial come so often from the Religious Right.  They apparently see environmentalists and liberals bundled together in a conspiracy to bring down the big industries that provide for our comfortable way of life and maintain the illusion that Mankind deserves to be in charge of Nature because God set things up that way originally and will certain save us if we need a lifeboat.

Then again, it has never been a given that people – religious or otherwise—will feel any particular affinity for Nature.

We have always had the Sierra Club Wilderness Calendar on our kitchen wall, but now our family has a new connection with that venerable environmental organization.   Our son Willie, a college sophomore, has just returned from a winter internship working with a program called “Inner City Outings” in Los Angeles.

This organization founded in San Francisco about 40 years ago –-http://www.sierraclub.org/ico/– operates in 50 urban communities across the country and serves thousands of young people who, in many cases, may get their very first significant brush with the natural world by going on at three-hour hike in a park close to their homes.   Staffed almost completely by volunteer leaders, the organization seeks, simply, to provide greater “access to outdoor experiences for more people.”

Willie tells me that, just as I see very different levels of receptivity to reading in my English classroom, he saw widely different levels of readiness to appreciate Nature among the children he walked with.  Some clearly lit up with the new-ness of it all.  And he sensed that the kids who talked to him about difficult situations at home may have gained some respite from the new surroundings, from learning something about the plants and animals that they saw.   Other kids complained or didn’t seem interested, even said they’d rather be playing on their X-Box.  That’s the way these things generally go.  Since he also went into science classes in different schools to teach kids about local natural history, he got to see how their interest perked up when they learned that Nature wasn’t just something far away, that there were wild creatures living right near them.

In his book called Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, published in 2005, Richard Louv gives credit to Inner City Outings for being one organization trying to stem the tide (more like tsunami?) of young people who have no regular contact with Nature. Technology dominates indoors and too many children — not just urban ones  — rarely  “just go out to play” anymore.  It’s hard to calculate what is lost when fewer kids are running in fields, building forts or finding frogs, but it’s definitely something.  Indeed, it’s been a seismic shift.

A seismic shift and a weirdly warm March – things are not exactly staying the same, are they?