10/16/2025
The answer is not to discourage nature contact by posting a societal Keep Off the Grass! Sign. Nor do the solutions reside in better use of screen savers or more picnics under a collection of mobile phone towers dressed up as pine trees. As Dr Robert Michael Pyle says, “What is the extinction of a condor or an albatross to a child who has never known a wren? Shallow contact with nature leads to shallow solutions for conservation.” A century and a half earlier, in 1848, Henry David Thoreau said it a different way: “Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature – daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it – rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!” From Your Brain On Nature...
