SOMETHING TO ENCOURAGE THE HEART AND NOURISH THE SOUL

I'm trying to encourage my 2-year-old son not to fear the natural world. For him, the "civilized" environment is scary enough - between sirens, leaf blowers, lawn mowers and automobiles barreling past the raspberries in his yard.

Today we sat on the grass and watched dragonflies feeding on bugs before dusk. All Reed saw were glimpses of wings, circling in and out of view, the pilots of those wings silent and fleet, minding their own needs. My boy's eyes widened in the failing light.

His mama and I hope he'll be at home among the creatures who share his corner of the world - fat worms in the garden soil, gulls screeching and wheeling above the trees, dogs and cats and wild mice, and the osprey who perches on a willow at the park pond.

The "developmental plasticity" in kids is greater than in adults. If Reed delights in the living fragments of his home, his sense of self might expand to encompass other spaces outside town. He might attach emotionally to nature so that part of his identity will stem from non-humans he encounters, whether riding in a kayak, hiking through a forest or waking at dawn to a riot of bird songs. Perhaps we will be lucky enough to instill in Reed a "biophilia," the love of life that E.O. Wilson described as latent in us all - an affiliation that goes beyond puppies and kittens, beyond our own kind. If we succeed, he will not see life in strictly human terms.

Like most of us who grew up in this technological age, Reed will suffer dislocations and losses as natural areas vanish around him. Soundlessly, he will mourn wetlands filled in, woodlots toppled for new homes or the rural grasslands gone to wheat. He might long, in ways he's not aware of, for "interspecies communion," as psychologist Chellis Glendinning terms it.

Someday, he might join lug-soled troops of hikers on our public lands, backpackers "starved for what has been destroyed elsewhere and what their economy is destroying everywhere," as Wendell Berry said.

If Reed learns to know himself and his back yard well enough, care for it deeply enough, respect it as part of his own complex self, then just maybe he won't accept the constant devastation of nature unreflectively, won't see the ecological degradation as inevitable.

This past spring we paddled a stretch of the Little Spokane River near its confluence with the main Spokane River. He lolled his hands in the water below the bow and considered wild irises in bloom.

When a fisherman alarmed three deer, they splashed from the bank and swam across a channel 30 feet away. Reed still talks about them today, having made them part of his essence, almost as if he'd fed upon their flesh. They live in him.

The poet Walt Whitman wrote of his belief that "a child went forth every day, and the first object he look'd upon, that object he became, and that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, or for many years or stretching cycles of years." And so we believe, when we believe that environment surmounts heredity as a shaping force.

It's all so gushingly romantic and naive, I hear some skeptics protest, to raise a child with natural designs in mind.

"He's a human," I hear them say, "and humans are intended to be superior to other species."

Many people believe that we are meant to avail ourselves of creation just as the Book of Genesis enjoins us to do. I hear the echoes of those powerful words: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

Some months ago I asked a class of college students if they viewed us humans as still subject to forces in nature - or are we exempt from natural law, having transcended it? The most brash among them answered that our technology allows us now to vanquish mortal illness, regulate weather and design earthquake-proof offices and homes. The naivete of our species lies not in trusting too much in nature but in placing overmuch faith in the prowess of humankind. It risks collective tragedies to rely on humanist pride.

Last week, the temperature in the 80s, Reed and I traipsed through People's Park on the Spokane City limits to get to Latah Creek. Dodging nude sunbathers, we found an isolated place to splash in the gleaming stream.

Ducklings, swallows and sandpipers paddled and flew. A crayfish scurried, tail first, between Reed's sandaled feet.

American writer Willa Cather wrote, in 1932, "Ties with the earth and the farm animals and growing things ... are never made at all unless they are made early." If we vanquish our fears of nature instead of nature itself, greater mental balance might ensue.

Copyright 1999 Cowles Publishing Company
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