 Wendell Berry’s 1964 poem “The Wild” captures the poignant beauty of nature breaking through a world increasingly indifferent to its presence. Offering a stark contrast between a wasted city lot and the colorful flight of warblers and tanagers, Berry calls his reader to embrace the necessary beauty of the wild, receiving as a gift to modern man “its remembrance of what is.” We have never been more in need of such a gift.
Current research reveals startling statistics suggesting disconnection, depression, and a loss of exposure to and experience of the natural world—a series of terms not unrelated. Social media touts community at the expense of in-person relationships. Technological progress spins at a frenetic pace. And a main component of human life we know to combat these ills is strikingly absent for many. Children—and perhaps their parents—have traded the forest for screen time, nature writing for animé, the classics for the latest dystopian sci-fi binge. As a result, we’ve lost even the language to name and notice the natural world. Losing More Than Language British author and scholar Robert Macfarlane sounded the alarm on this phenomenon in his 2017 article in The Guardian entitled “Badger or Bulbasaur—have children lost touch with nature?” In his insightful book, Landmarks, Macfarlane notes the loss of nature literacy among children and contemporary society’s seeming indifference, as evidenced by the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s “culling of words concerning nature.” He suggests that “the substitutions made in the dictionary—the natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live.” In other words, the loss of language is indicative of a loss of experience. Indeed, he is not the first to note the significant connection between language and reality. . . . Comments are closed.
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