[Odonata-l] More on getting people outside

[Chris Hill]

>
>  I think even people in the country aren't as oriented toward  
> nature as they used to be, and I assume country kids are captured  
> by the TV and computer much of the time just like city kids. Your  
> idea of micro-nature is a good one, but I think it would still have  
> to be augmented with macro-nature in any ways possible.

Hi Dennis,

One point about country vs. city.  I don't know the source, but a  
good friend (and naturalist) quoted me a study he'd read one time  
that suggested that professionals in "natural history" came  
disproportionately not from rural upbringing, nor from urban, but  
from the suburbs.  That idea has stuck with me for some reason, and  
without doing a controlled study, it does seem to me to have some  
truth.  The vast majority of the serious birders and such that I know  
(but not all!) came from the 'burbs.  Not an unbiased sample, since  
I'm from the suburbs myself, but I don't choose my birding partners  
on that basis!

Hunting and fishing are probably more a part of rural upbringing  
still than anywhere else (although as a suburban kid I and my friends  
took up bowhunting, so who knows?), but there must be some  
compensatory factor that steers suburban kids towards serious  
interest in nature.

The anecdotes I have read this week on odonata-L are consistent with  
what the burbs of my childhood were like - nature close enough to  
walk to, and I did walk or bike all over from a pretty young age.  I  
caught the birding bug bigtime at age 9, walking along the shore of  
Long Island Sound, and by 9 I was certainly traveling several miles  
from home on foot.  Are today's kids much more confined to cars, and  
more "protected" and guided by parents?  Are today's suburbs and  
exurbs farther from nature?  The car culture seems to me like as much  
of a factor as electronics.  I have caught students at my college  
getting in their cars to drive 300 feet to move from the parking lot  
outside one building to a parking lot closer to their next class (as  
I walked pretty much in parallel with them, and about as fast).  The  
irony - it was a biology major heading to ornithology class on a  
spring day with birds singing all around.  Hmmm...

Chris Hill