The Ongoing Adventures Of Sabrina & Scooter

Steve in 1954, holding young eastern cottontail (Sauble Beach, Ontario, Canada)

I was born in 1953, in Ontario, Canada. Growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, a lot of my spare time was reading field guides, climbing trees, slogging through ponds, walking through forests - I was constantly connecting, passively and actively, with the natural world. It was where I found solace, a sense of wonder, spiritual and emotional fulfillment. Erich Fromm coined the term “biophila” in the early 60’s - I was perhaps 10 years old at the time. Basically, it means a love of life and of all living things.

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had parents who appreciated the natural world. It was they who fostered and nurtured my passion for, and spiritual connection to, and respect for the plants and creatures that are part of us all. Without their support, my experiences with nature, as a child, would not have shone as brightly as they did.

Being a child who preferred to be in a forest than anywhere else was still fairly unusual in the day, and I knew of only a few other kids who shared my passion with nature. Regardless, most young persons I knew were far less likely to be afraid of bugs and spiders, or mucking about in swamps, than my children’s acquaintances when they were growing up.

Sadly, at some point in the 1970’s, the meme was lost.

Today’s urban and suburban children have held, for the most part, a very tenuous connection to nature at best. Some sociologists have tagged this phenomena as “biophobia” - a general, all-encompassing fear of life and of non-human living things. Children living in rural settings and small towns may fare sightly better on the “nature connection scale”, but this statement can easily be challenged. Various elements are to blame - electronic technologies, the ubiquitous and cocooning automobile, the rampant urbanization of society, and the failure of parents to engage their kids (and/or allow their children to be engaged) in the experience the natural world on their own terms.

More ramblings later…