Nature Wars IV - last post on this topic

I promise, this is the last post on this topic. It's amazing what a reader can get from one book. Chapter Ten of Jim Sterba's Nature Wars is all about Roadkill. He begins by introducing the reader to Brewster Bartlett whose nickname is Dr. Splat because as a high school teacher looking for a way to use the fledgling Internet and e-mail system to help communicate the findings of a research project, he decided to have his students keep track of the roadkill on the roads around town. Ghoulish you might think but as a high school teacher myself I can appreciate that students especially some of the young guys would think this was a cool project.

I myself heard Bartlett speak at the New Hampshire Environmental Educators spring conference a couple of years ago. As an educator I am amazed to discover how little my students know about the world around them. Very often they are surprised when I tell them about plant life and the food that they eat. "EWWWW, fruit is the ripened ovary of the flower?" "I'm allergic to plant sperm (aka pollen)?"  I get a sense of gratification when they look through the microscope and see the beauty of cells that make up a leaf. Author, Richard Louv, in his book The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, makes an argument for reconnecting our children with the natural world. They spend way too much time indoors. The shame of it is, children don't get to play and explore outdoors often. After school care, living in areas that may not be deemed safe, over scheduled lives, and time spent in front of the TV or computer screen keep kids from experiencing nature.

Much of Sterba's book focused on how disconnected we all have become from Nature. We want to protect it and yet we still carry out behaviors that places the environment at risk mostly through our overwhelming consumption of resources. In the Epilogue, he points out that here in America we have an abundance of natural resources many of which we take for granted. From our abundance we wear blinders that prevent us from realizing how much we spend on repairs to damaged cars (deer and other animal strikes), replacing landscaping or crop damage, the cost of cleaning up playing fields and golf courses (geese feces), and the damage from flooding caused by beaver dams. If we were to find ourselves unable to pay for these repairs we certainly would have to change our world view. In fact I try to remind my students that when we talk about environmentalism we must realize we speak from our own cultural experiences and that for other people around the world their concept of nature is much different from our own. We've saved our own forests here in the US but if we purchase products that result in the damage or deforestation of someone else's land then shame on us. It may be time for us all to take a good look at our role in the ecosystem because we are not separate from it, we are part of the biotic factors that make it up and our possessions and lifestyles create many of the harmful abiotic factors that we all have to live with.