Virtual is nice, but real is much nicer
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Add This
Article Rating
The word “sustainability” is very much in play these days, especially on college campuses across the country.
This past summer, for example, Carlisle’s Dickinson College launched an initiative to become “a leader in environmental and sustainability education” and just last month received a three-year $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of a program in environmental studies.
The premise underlying this renewed national interest in sustainability is that we have failed to appreciate the fragility of natural resources — and thus have dangerously misused them.
Now comes an alarming new study showing just how quickly and how far we have drifted from nature, how difficult a challenge these “sustainabililty” efforts face — and suggesting that one of the chief culprits for this unwise disconnect resides in our living rooms and on our desktops.
The study, published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates a “fundamental and pervasive decline in nature recreation.” Specifically, Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois and Patricia Zaradic of Bryn Mawr College found that, since 1981, there has been an 18 to 25 percent drop in the number of people engaging in various outdoor activities at national and state parks and other public lands.
Fishing is down. Visits to national parks are down. Hiking on the Appalachian Trail is down. Camping, a bellwether activity, is down.
And this “general and fundamental shift away from people’s participation in nature-based recreation” poses a very serious problem for environmental educators:
“Declining nature participation has crucial implications for current conservation efforts,” Pergams and Zaradic write. “We think it is probable that any major decline in the value placed on natural areas and experiences will greatly reduce the value people place on biodiversity conservation. Accordingly, it becomes less likely that attempts to raise public awareness of the current biodiversity crisis will succeed.”
That argument makes sense. If people don’t make a place in their lives for nature, they will have little appreciation of its value and little passion for protecting it.
Pergams and Zaradic also believe they have identified a major contributor to this turn away from the outdoors.
They call it “videophilia” — literally, the love of video. So much imagery is now available to us on television and over the Internet that we are no longer required to grab a backpack and hiking boots and hit a remote trail in order to enjoy a mountain vista or thrill at the sight of a moose.
“Virtual nature, defined as nature experienced vicariously through electronic means...appears to directly compete with time previously allocated to more beneficial, direct contact with the outdoors,” Pergams and Zaradic wrote in a previous study.
They note that the turn away from nature coincided almost exactly with the beginning and rise of the computer age.
Children are the most vulnerable to this substitution of images for reality. How excited can kids be about standing under a giant redwood when they can surf up spectacular photos of them without ever leaving their rooms? In the pre-video age, people could only read about the wonders of nature, or hear about them, or perhaps look at a few clumsy snapshots. You really had to go see for yourself. But with sophisticated technology, you are virtually there. No effort required.
Pergams and Zaradic point to another interesting wrinkle on this argument. Some nature videos depict wild animals or wild environments in a way that scares kids. They don’t want to be eaten by those hungry jackals or stranded in that parched desert. Or, as Pergams told Science Daily, “It seems likely that sensationalized virtual views of nature make real visits to nature less appealing and so further reduce direct experiences.”
Of course, televisions and computers distract us in all kinds of ways. “Videophilia” involves shows, games and amusements that have nothing to do with nature but keep us inside on the couch rather than outside in a rowboat. But the easy availability of nature-by-pixel makes matters even worse.
And kids aren’t the only ones with their eyes glued to the screen and their butts glued to a soft chair. Grownups as just as likely to prefer watching someone else catch a fish or climb a mountain than do it themselves.
In the paper published this week, Pergams and Zaradic acknowledge that other factors may be at play in the decline of nature-based recreation, but they see “videophilia” as a “root cause.”
As Pergams said in an interview with nature.org, “At this point, however, (videophilia) is by far the best hypothesis we know of.”
Interestingly, Pergams and Zaradic found similar declines in outdoor activities in Japan, a country with an equally strong fascination for technology. They saw evidence of the same thing in Spain.
The contest between the real and the virtual has reached into our lives in many ways — but in few cases is so much at stake. Nature isn’t just a show for our delight and amusement. Our lives depend on it.
For that reason, we would do well to heed Zaradic’s warning that “today’s children — tomorrow’s parents — face the prospect of a culture devoid of contact with the evolutionary driver and life-support system that is our natural world.”
And that is simply not a sustainable condition.
——
Rich Lewis’ e-mail address is: rlcolumn@comcast.net
