The Natural Patriot

[Editor’s note: Following is Paul Hawken’s recent commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of Portland. It is so inspiring, so filled with poetry and wisdom, and so dead on the mark that I feel compelled to reproduce the whole thing verbatim. I have admired Paul Hawken since I read the equally inspiring book he co-authored with Amory and Hunter Lovins, “Natural Capitalism” (which I still have not added to the NP Essential Reading list where it belongs). Talk about thinking outside the box. He is a true Natural Patriot. Read this essay, ponder it, print it out to read again every couple of months, and follow his advice.]

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

What a week it’s been. Martin Luther King Day followed immediately by the swearing in of a pathbreaking President of the United States. I would like to write at length about the tide of hope that President Obama’s measured words, and deliberative actions leading up to and following the inauguration, have set in motion.  But for now, I will only pass on this clever and aesthetically pleasing graphical analysis of his inauguration speech, based on this cool software and taken from here. Basically, it simply goes through a text and plots each word therein (excluding “the”, “and”, and the like, evidently) with its size proportional to the number of times it appears in the text. Essentially like the tag clouds you see associated with blogs or Technorati, etc.  So here, my fellow Americans, is the analysis of President Obama’s inauguration speech:

In comparison, here is the analysis of President Bush’s second inaugural speech in January 2005:

The inaugural speeches of Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Lincoln can be found here. I will leave it to the pundits (for now at last) to make the detailed comparisons. Naturally, I was intrigued by the idea of trying this out myself. So just for grins, I cranked the Natural Patriot’s first post through the grinder and here is what it produced:

Not terribly surprising given that the first post was essentially a definition. And here is the analysis of my own reflection on the upcoming Obama inauguration:

Lots of opportunities for fun and mischief here . . .

It’s as predictable as the seasons — every year, when I hear the excerpts from Martin Luther King’s historic speech on the radio at this time of year, it brings tears to my eyes.  I just watched the speech on CNN again and this year was no exception.

But today the words come across in a whole new light.  It still seems, indeed, like a dream that a mere 46 years after Dr. King’s sublime speech (a period of time that seems shorter and shorter as I get older), the hugely diverse, cantankerous, politically divided, myopic, maddening, yet inspiring population of this country have come together to elect an African-American President of the United States.  A mere four decades after black people in this country could be routinely denied entrance to a hotel or restaurant or even a bathroom with no explanation and noone much noticing, a black man is moving into the Oval Office of the White House. And freedom is, at last, ringing from every hill and mole-hill in Mississippi.

Even these months after the election, it seems surreal — a dream — that this could happen.  It seemed inconceivable even 3 or 4 years ago that this could happen at this stage in history.  Yet here we are.

Martin Luther King’s dream, a dream that he gave his life for, brought this country through a dangerous and tumultuous period in our history, with remarkably little bloodshed. It made possible, in no small part, what we will witness at the historic inauguration tomorrow, a mere four decades later.  Much has been said about this literally world-changing event, and there is undoubtedly much more to be said.

But it occurs to me that there is a larger lesson here for Natural Patriotism. It is about, if I might blatantly steal the phrase, “the audacity of hope”. Four decades ago it seemed impossible that black children could one day hold hands with white children in America, much less grow up to be President.  It has come to pass. We faced the seemingly impossible challenge of getting past the bitter, divisive history of four centuries of slavery and brutality to forge a nation of unity from diversity.  Though we have a way to go, it has come to pass. The American way of life was built, in significant part, on exploitation of African-American people.  Yet we are leaving that behind. The American people rose to the challenge.

Now we face the seemingly impossible challenge of another fundamental transformation. The American way of life (and increasingly that of most other countries in the world) is similarly built on exploitation of Nature. This, similarly, is a situation that the nation cannot ultimately survive. It seems, similarly, impossible to move beyond. But perhaps the most important lesson of the momentous transition we are now witnessing is this: Yes, we can.

We can reach the mountain.  We will not all make it, and the going will be difficult, but we can get there.  We can find a way to live happily on this earth, the only home we will ever have, into the distant future.  We can move beyond an economy based on fossil fuel and extravagant consumption and extravagant waste.  We can move beyond the ignorance and hostility to an idea whose time has come. Yes, we can.

As in 1963, we know where we have to go, and we even know how to get there.  The challenge is locking arms together and making the long difficult trek. We have the ideas, we have the know-how, and we are at long last beginning to see the political will.

Even a few years ago, it seemed impossible that we could face the realities that oil is running out, that burning it is cooking our planet, and that our ravenous appetites are literally suicidal.  But we are beginning, after a long darkness, to see light on the horizon.  And I feel that I can allow myself to believe that we will make it.  I have a dream.

A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.

What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.

It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.

But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.

But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.

After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.” 

Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.

What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?

Over the last few weeks, while piddling around the project site (i.e., yard), pulling weeds, attempting to ferret out the invaders from the natives, puzzling over bugs, and pondering where I might site a small pond (and how to sell the idea to my spouse), I’ve had occasion to dust off my venerable Golden Nature Guides, beloved little books of childhood.

For me, there are few physical objects that can conjure the idyllic, big wide world of childhood gone by than these wonderful little gems of natural history. They were frequent companions for me as a youngster and I still take them out with a certain reverence to look through the pages, one for each species, each a marvel of textual and pictorial concision, with a short description of the creature’s habits and natural history, a map of its distribution, and a simple but beautiful painting of it in its characteristic habitat. These books somehow hit on the perfect formula for conveying the beauty and fascination of living things to kids.

And we owe it all to a guy named Herbert S. Zim.

Not exactly a household name. But if you still have a dog-eared copy of one of the dozens of Golden Nature Guides that were eventually published over the decades starting in 1949, you will notice that virtually all of them were written, co-written, or edited by Herbert S. Zim. His curriculum vitae, in brief, from Wikipedia:

“Zim was born 1909 in New York City, but spent his childhood years in southern California. At the age of fourteen he returned to the east, and took his degrees (B.S., M.S., Ph. D.) at Columbia University. Zim wrote or edited more than one hundred scientific books, and in a thirty-year career teaching in the public schools, introduced laboratory instruction into elementary school science. He is best known as the founder, in 1945 (and for twenty-five years, editor in chief) of the Golden Guides, pocket-size introductions for children to such subjects as fossils, zoology, microscopy, rocks and minerals, codes and secret writings, trees, wildflowers, dinosaurs, navigation and more. He was the sole or co-author for many of the books, which were valued for their clarity, accuracy and attractive presentation—helped by the illustrations of his friend, Raymond Perlman.”

Consider the impact that this single unsung man (so unsung, in fact, that the pixelated snapshot above is the only one I could find of him online!) has had on the environmental awareness of an entire generation — perhaps even two or three generations — of American citizens. Who can say how many kids in the 50s and 60s and 70s decided, while browsing through one of these little books, to spend the afternoon outside hunting for caterpillars instead of yielding to the seductive stupor of the cathode ray tube? Who can say how many of today’s alternative energy entrepeneurs and scientists and educators and conservationists caught fire as a result of a spark generated by one of these books? I can’t, but I know one: me.

By way of illustration, three personal anecdotes:

When I was a kid, my family drove cross-country (in a van without air-conditioning that was prone to overheating in the desert and climbed the Rockies at about 18 mph, etc.), from Arlington, Virginia to LA, every three years, where we spent the bulk of three weeks visiting my aunt and her family. When I tell people this they think my parents were crazy. But it was a the adventure of a lifetime and an incomparable learning experience for kids. We saw a lot of the country, did a lot of camping, and my parents occasionally allowed us to visit the cheesy fake Indian trinket shops that were common along the dustier stretches of Route 66 in the olden days. One day when I was probably about seven (this would have been the late 1960s), we were visiting Walnut Canyon, which is somewhere in the southwest, and I convinced my parents to buy me the Golden Nature Guide to Rocks and Minerals. I felt so grown up to have a real book instead of a kid’s book. It was an early watershed moment in my life as a bookworm and naturalist.

Nevertheless, I was not destined to be a geologist. For one thing, rocks are dead. Or so they seemed to me. I found animals much more interesting. Second anecdote: Around the same time, in second grade, I became obsessed with turtles. I take this herpetophilia to be a common, though poorly understood, genetic trait located somewhere on the Y chromosome, since it is so commonly expressed among young boys. This is despite the fact that my white-bread suburban neighborhood turned out, to my dismay, to be nearly devoid of reptiles. I saw maybe two or three box turtles, and no snakes at all, in the wild while I was growing up despite frequent expeditions mounted for that purpose to the local park where I spent much of my youth. But I can remember sitting rapt with the pocket-sized Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, studying the pictures, memorizing what they ate, looking at the ingenious maps that showed purple where the summer (pink) and winter (blue) ranges overlapped. This genetic propensity has in fact been transferred to my son, who latched on to my antique Reptile guide in an uncannily similar way and spent a lot of time with it (it is now bound with duct tape).

Anecdote three: One of the standard operating procedures of the cross-country trips was that, periodically, we would take a rest stop and every kid (of which there were ultimately six, though we never made the trip as a complete group) got to choose a magazine or coloring book or something to keep them quiet for 6 or 8 minutes after we hit the road again. On this trip, I think I was about ten and, instead of getting the standard Mad magazine or puzzles or comic book, I chose the Golden Nature Guide to Birds. Paging though that book as we droned along the highway, through southern Canada if I remember correctly, was the first time I actually noticed that birds (and other animals) had distinguishing marks that could be used to identify them. Perhaps the first tentative roots of my later interest in taxonomy.

It appears that I’m not the only one with such fond memories. Evidently the original versions of the Guides have recently become “collectible“. Many have since been reprinted, albeit without the engaging covers of old, and are available from St. Martin’s Press.

Now then: I was appalled to read, as I was surfing the web in search of intel on Dr. Zim, that the famous PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame had disparaged the gentleman’s name — simply because as a lad PZ lost a library copy of Zim’s Golden Guide to Mammals and got into deep doo-doo with the librarian. Even today, these decades later, the Golden Guides have traumatic associations for him.

Note to PZ: Dude, Herb didn’t lose your book — you did! Suck it up.

So I am here to clear the man’s name. Let us lift a glass to the late great Herbert S. Zim, pioneer of biophilia and Natural Patriot: we salute you.

[Editor’s note: This just in — and in time for Earth Day (barely). I reprint below an extract from the new, second edition of Richard Louv’s classic and inspirational book, Last Child in the Woods.  The new edition is expanded and contains more practical suggestions (here are a few more), as described below. I intend to use them since this week is my son’s “TV turn-off week” (this also includes computers) suggested by his school. I sure had a lot of fun with dirt when I was a young’un.]

BEYOND NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER
It’s Time to Turn Consciousness into Action
By Richard Louv
Author of Last Child in The Woods

Got dirt? “In South Carolina, a truckload of dirt is the same price as a video game!” reports Norman McGee, a father in that state who bought a small pickup-load of dirt for his daughter and friends.

McGee is turning consciousness into action. So is Liz Baird, who keeps a “wonder bowl” available for her children.

When Baird was a little girl she would fill her pockets with natural wonders — acorns, rocks, mushrooms. “My Mom got tired of washing clothes and finding these treasures in the bottom of the washer or disintegrated through the dryer,” Liz recalls. “So she came up with “Liz’s Wonder Bowl”, and the idea was that I could empty my pockets into the bowl. I could still enjoy my treasures, and try to find out what things were, and not cause trouble with the laundry.”

McGee and Baird are among the thousands of parents who have joined — and are leading — an international children and nature movement. Sometimes known as Leave No Child Inside, the effort is bringing together people from all walks of life, who are creating grassroots regional campaigns, state and national legislation, and changes in their own families to help children become happier, healthier and smarter.

An emerging body of scientific knowledge links nature time to longer attention spans, better cognitive functioning, reduction of stress, and strengthened family bonds. What better way to enhance parent-child attachment than to walk in the woods together, disengaging from distracting electronics, advertising, and peer pressure?

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at Centers for Disease Control, recently describes the clear benefits of nature experiences to healthy child development, and to adult well-being.

“In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine,” he says. He believes that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Of course, there is still much we need to learn, such as what kinds of nature contact are most beneficial to health, how much contact is needed and how to measure that, and what groups of people benefit most. But we know enough to act.”

If you’re a parent who missed out on nature as a child, now’s your chance. Indeed, all the gifts of nature that come to children also come to the good adult who introduces a child to nature.

Young people are acting, too, by becoming natural leaders in the movement. For example, a seven-year-old girl in Virginia rounded up her friends and enrolled them in her own Girls Gone Wild in Nature Club. Together they organize backyard campouts and bug hunts.

In Mississippi, teenager Josh Morrison founded Geeks in the Woods for his friends and fellow geeks everywhere. He defines “geek” as a “gaming environmentally educated kid,” and says he and his friends are “tired of being labeled” tech addicts ” can have their PlayStations and their outdoor time too: “We could be the generation that makes a U-turn back to . . . a balance between virtual reality and what sustains all life . . . nature.”

FIVE ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE TODAY

1. Go for a family walk when the moon is full. There’s a whole new set of animals, sights and sounds out there. Listen to animals calling. Owls and bats are looking for prey. Watch for things glowing, like worms and fungus on trees. And look up at the stars.

2. Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there. Identify them with the help of a field guide. Return to this universe once a month, lift the board and discover who’s new.

3. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature. Then help them find their own: leaves beneath a backyard willow, the bend of a creek, the meadow in the woods. Let it become their intimate connection with the natural world.

4. Revive old traditions. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. Go crawdadding — tie a piece of liver or bacon to a string, drop it into a creek or pond, wait until a crawdad tugs.

5. Invent your own nature game. One mother’s suggestion: “We help our kids pay attention during longer hikes by playing “find ten critters” — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, and other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.”

Adapted from LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS by Richard Louv, copyright 2008. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

In our families and our communities, it’s time to take action. That’s why the new, expanded 2008 edition of “Last Child in the Woods” contains a “Field Guide” with 100 Actions that families and communities can take, along with discussion questions, a report on the movement, and other resources for parents, educators, conservationists, business people and community leaders.

For more information, see the Second Edition of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder“. To help build the movement, please join the Children & Nature Network.

Richard Louv, recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal (and an honorary Natural Patriot!), is the author of seven books. The chairman of the Children & Nature Network, he is also honorary co-chair of the National Forum on Children and Nature.

[Editor’s note: Few have employed the Spanish language so masterfully as Pablo Neruda.  I’ve often felt that an important incentive to improve my own rudimentary Spanish would be the ability to read and appreciate Neruda’s poetry in his native tongue.  For now, alas, I have to be satisfied with the translation of by Alastair Reid, who has been called “Neruda’s most talented and imaginitive English translator”.  This is from Neruda’s poetic autobiography, written in his elder years as he reminisced down his long and eventful life from his remote home on the coast of Chile.  As winter winds down here in Virginia, and I can already see in the woods the subtle wash of red maple buds, I’m waiting for the earth too.]

Oh tierra, esperame
(Oh, Earth, Wait for Me)

Pablo Neruda
from “Isla Negra“

Return me, oh sun,
to my country destiny,
rain of the ancient woods.
Bring me back its aroma, and the swords
falling from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river margins,
the smell of the larch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded remoteness
of the towering araucaria.

Earth, give me back your pristine gifts,
towers of silence which rose from
the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I haven’t been,
to learn to return from such depths
that among all natural things
I may live or not live.  I don’t mind
being one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone that the river bears away.

[The photo below shows Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, Chile]

 

        

199 years ago on this day, the 12th of February 1809, a child was born in the town of Shropshire in the West English midlands, and grew up to change the world. 

Charles Darwin spent a unique life studying nature, with the 19th century gentleman’s enviable leisure to pursue his subject with a concentration and material wherewithal never before possible, and which will certainly never be seen again.  He lived and worked, as it were, at the ephemeral gateway between an old world on which large swaths of territory remained in an essentially primeval state — some of which he was the first European to see during his seminal voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle — and a new one beginning to yield to the industrial revolution spreading rapidly over its surface.

Darwin is of course most famous for the revolutionary idea that grew out of his uniquely comprehensive experience with the earth’s inhabitants: evolution by natural selection. The idea was revolutionary because, for the first time in history, it provided a mechanistic explanation for how living organisms develop the characteristics that suit them so astoundingly to their environment, an explanation based on simple and well understood physical and biological processes (indeed, so simple that his colleague and defender Thomas Henry Huxley observed after reading the Origin, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”).  And because the explanation fit such a motley range of previously inexplicable observations.  One of the types of observations that were unified by his theory was the strange similarities in structure among wildly different kinds of animals, such as whales, mice, and bats — all of which share a basic anatomical structure.  The reason of course is that they are descendents of a common ancestor, whose parts have become modified, as Darwin would say, to different ends.  We are all, in a very literal sense, family. 

For the first time, the natural world made sense. 

In hiw own words, “As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”

Of course, Darwin’s materialistic explanation of life’s diversity crashed headlong into the Biblical story of creation that had reigned since the beginning of time, with implications so fundamental and far-reaching that the anthropologist Ashley Montague aptly observed:”Next to the Bible, no work has been quite as influential, in virtually every aspect of human thought, as The Origin of Species.”  The reverberations continue to this day, as is clear from reading the newspaper in almost any given week. Darwin is arguably the superlative example in human history of the power of a scientific idea to change the world.

One of the wonderful things about Darwin is that his works are completely accessible to the moderately educated layperson.  Even with the slightly stilted prose of the mid-19th century, his writing has an engaging quality, and his account of the Beagle voyage in particular has real drama and some ripping yarns (told, of course, with Darwin’s characteristic modesty) — danger, despair, the thrill of discovery, you name it. You can begin with The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online (He even has this stuff in podcasts — who knew?) 

But what is perhaps less widely appreciated about Darwin, and what I admire most about him, is that he was a consummate naturalist.  After literally overturning the philosophical foundations of human thought with the Origin, Darwin did not go off to play golf or spend his life on a celebrity tour.  He spent decades in the tedious and methodical tasks of minute dissection and description of the world’s barnacles (yes, barnacles), eventually producing a masterwork that still stands as the seminal, classic foundation of knowledge on this group of animals. Clearly, it was a labor of love.

So let’s raise a glass, virtually speaking, to the gentle naturalist who figured it all out.

Dear friends, colleagues, family members, sparring partners, lost souls, and passers-by,

I am proud to say that, as of this day, the Natural Patriot has survived its first perilous year in this world (I’m referring to the blog, not myself.  I of course also survived the year but that’s probably less newsworthy). As is true of most species, the early days and months are the most dangerous stage of life history, and a newborn blog, all dewy and wide-eyed, emerging tentatively from the womb or wherever it emerges from to find its way in the world, is no exception.  There are apprehension, missteps, risk of starvation, fear of predators, fear of exposure. And of course the constant siren song of tossing it all in (”Why on earth am I spending my non-existent free time doing this?”). 

The vast majority of young animals, alas, don’t survive their first year, and I gather that the same is true of blogs, though I can’t locate the stats at the moment. Somehow we muddled through.  Makes me want to stand up and belt out an Aretha Franklin song — but that would surely kill my visitor stats so I’ll spare you.

So, in lieu of actually writing something new and compelling and worthwhile, I hope that you, gentle reader, will grant me the indulgence just this once (or perhaps once a year, if we beat the odds and survive another) of a retrospective exhibit.  Here then are some of the posts I am most fond of (Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!):

It all started with The Nature of Patriotism, an idea that I think is underappreciated but key to living a long and harmonious life as a global society.

I don’t want this to be just another partisan blog (though my colors undoubtedly show through).  Which is why I remain intrigued — and heartened — by the question: Is purple the new green?

Natural patriotism, like anything worthwhile, is not easy.  Which is why it is worth pondering The nature of natural, and its implications.

Holding that thought, it may be that long-term sustainability requires an evolution in our approach to our relationship with nature, namely one of Reconciliation ecology.  

But with all the other problems we face, Can we afford to save the world? Well, can we afford not to?  Addressing this most important question of the new millennium requires that we focus on The real economy.  

The root of Natural Patriotism is the intuitive understanding that the natural world is essential to our physical and spiritual life. Every once in a while, I slow down long enough to remember my Ocean soul and realize this. And now, even the scientific approach supports the idea that, to be melodramatic, Biodiversity is a secret to inner peace.

How to share that love?  The most inspirational and hopeful message I’ve read comes from Richard Louv, a true Natural Patriot.

Lest there be misunderstanding, a harmonious relationship with nature is not only an issue of esthetics or even spirituality, it is critical to our material well-being: Trees save lives.  Again, saving both trees and lives will require hard choices, which in turn requires recognizing that Economic growth is the opiate of the people.

So there you have it.  Sorry I can’t throw a wild birthday party — I’ve learned a surprising amount of HTML and other arcane geekana in the last year, but haven’t yet figured out how to do that online.  But if you happen to feel inspired about a birthday gift, there’s no need to send cash, baked goods, or expensive merchandise (although I will surely not turn them down).  Instead, it would warm the cockles of the Natural Patriot’s heart if you simply tell a friend about the site (something good, I mean), subscribe by RSS if you haven’t already, and . . .

Sign in below with a comment! (just hello is fine)

Thanks, as always, for your support!

Right, I promised something about pumpkin pie, or at least some fare less likely to produce indigestion than the end of the world as we know it (although the conversation during the Thanksgiving holiday with the extended family did, perhaps inevitably, ultimately turn in that direction).

As we all know (or think we know) from grade-school history, the official First Thanksgiving was observed by the English pilgrims, with their Wampanoag neighbors, at Plymouth colony in 1621, for the general purpose of giving their heartfelt thanks that, somewhat aganst the odds, a small fraction of their number had survived the starvation, disease, horrible accidents, and hostile attacks to which colonists of previously unknown but already populated lands in those rustic days were prone at all times.

Of course, giving thanks for surviving another year with enough crops to face the winter has been a cause for celebration since the beginning of time and in probably all cultures, including those of many of the North American Indians, as well as the Spanish and English adventurers, soldiers, and would-be settlers that found their way to this continent in the early days. So it’s not surprising that some argument has arisen about who observed the first “official” Thanksgiving on American soil (implicitly meaning the first one involving Europeans). Partisans from my neck o’ the woods (including our Governor) have been making noise for some time that settlers in Virginia had a Thanksgiving feast even earlier. 

“Historians have also recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America, including British colonists in Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. At this site near the Charles River in December of 1619, a group of British settlers led by Captain John Woodlief knelt in prayer and pledged ‘Thanksgiving’ to God for their healthy arrival after a long voyage across the Atlantic. This event has been acknowledged by some scholars and writers as the official first Thanksgiving among European settlers on record.”

This year, even President Bush himself visited the Berkley Plantation site of this earlier Thanksgiving event and took the opportunty to fan the flames of North-South rivalry over the issue (perhaps trying to win back some cred with the southern voters lost to his party’s downward spiral in recent years). 

Be all that as it may, my interest here is not in the minutiae of who was first, but on how this holiday illustrates our American (and of course, everyone’s throughout the world) intimate dependence on the bounty of Nature. As Edward Winslow wrote in A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in 1621:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakersof our plenty.”

Moreover:

“People tend to think of English food as bland, but, in fact, the pilgrims used many spices, including cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, and dried fruit, in sauces for meats . . . Since the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians had no refrigeration in the seventeenth century, they tended to dry a lot of their foods to preserve them. They dried Indian corn, hams, fish, and herbs.”

There’s a reason for this — the spices over which great wars were waged, fortunes were made and lost, and nations rose and fell in the Old World, served not only the familiar purpose of making food tasty, but also of making it safer, particularly meat.  In general, what we know as spices are the defensive chemical weapons that plants produce to battle the insects, microbes, and other enemies constantly trying to make a meal of them.  When chosen carefully and used in moderation, these chemicals not only taste good but fulfill the same antimicrobial role for us that they did for the plants that fashioned them.  It is not coincidence that strong spices are much more common in the cuisine of more tropical countries where meat spolis quickly than in, say, Norway.  And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the spices most commonly used in cooking are those that have broad antimicrobial effectiveness. 

Interestingly, the menu at that first Thanksgiving almost certainly did not include corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, ham, or even cranberries, all of which are considered staples of the feast in various parts of the USA today.  Instead, the table was likely laden with Cod, Eel, Clams, Lobster, and even perhaps . . . eagle.

Which brings me, circuitously, to how history has treated the noble creature that has come to serve as the symbol of Thanksgiving, but which some believe might have had a more illustrious career as our nation’s symbol. Alas, here we encounter another appealing but apocryphal piece of Americana.  That great polymath scientist, inventor, keen observer of Nature (like many of the other Founding Fathers) and wit Ben Franklin did indeed extoll the turkey’s virtues relative to those of the bald eagle. But contrary to legend, this did not produce a debate about which of these birds should become the national symbol.  The truth appears more prosaic — ol’ Ben discussed this idea only privately in a letter to his daughter:

“For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

“With all this Injustice, he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District. He is therefore by no means a proper Emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America who have driven all the King birds from our Country . . .

“I am on this account not displeased that the Figure [the eagle adorning the recently adopted Great Seal of the USA] is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”

The rest, as they say, is history.