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Proyecto Visión 21

Connecting with nature has become an artificial experience

A well-known institution based in Denver and specialized in early-childhood education will soon offer a workshop for teachers, to train them in new techniques and strategies for promote a better contract between children and nature.

I have two questions related to that workshop. First, are we so disconnected from nature that teachers need to attend a seminar to learn how to reestablish that connection? Second, what are we really talking about when we talk about “nature”?

I think the first question should be answer with “Yes.” I remember that when I was a child –at a time technologically closer to the Flintstones than to post-modernity– connecting with nature was something as simple as going to the backyard.

In my backyard at a suburb west of Buenos Aires there were orange, apple, and lemon trees, and a huge tree ideal for climbing. There were also some animals, including dogs, cats, and birds. Only some of those animals were ours, since many of them belonged to our neighbors.

In that environment, I frequently met some “surprises” from nature, including large spiders, locusts, toads, and some other insects and small animals I couldn’t decide if I should destroying them or respect them, or both.

Only less than half a century later and living in a different place, the backyard of my current home is so well maintained that there not even mosquitoes during the summer, due to the strict guidelines of the local homeowners association.

In other words, my backyard and my front-yard are artificial environments. They look natural, but they are not, because they have been carefully designed (before I bought the house) to appear to be natural.

For that reason, I think that when we talk about “nature,” paradoxically we are talking about “artificial nature,” that is, an artificial environment created by us to look natural.

Think, for example, about the modern zoos, Teachers are instructed to take their young students to the zoo so they little kids can see animals in their “natural environment.” As far as I know, penguins, camels, giraffes, and polar bears do not live in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. So, there is nothing “natural” in seeing them at a zoo.

The same can be said about the “tropical jungle” at a local botanic garden or about a butterfly exhibition at another “scientific” institution. In all those cases, you are invited to enter an artificially created environment that looks “natural.”

In other words, we are so far removed from nature that we accept as positive even the illusion of being close to nature. And that same illusion is then repeated at a much larger scale when you visit a “natural park,” as if we could corral nature and force it (her?) to model for us.

I know very well we can’t return to the past. But perhaps we can ask some questions about the future. For example: if we are so removed from nature somebody needs to teach how to reconnect, what else we may have also forgotten about ourselves?

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