Admittedly, the "good old days" had their problems, but, when I compare my childhood to my young grandchildren's lives, I feel I got the better deal. My average day in grade school was to walk to school and back, change clothes, have a snack, and go out and play until dark. There were either lots of kids to play with who were also outdoors, or wiggling under a fence to the wilderness beyond, often alone. The wilderness I explored was a buffer zone between our housing development and an airforce base. We never got close to where the army housing or planes were. There was just swamp and flowers and small wildlife, and what then seemed like a huge hill to run up and roll down. I'm sure that was where I began to develop my lifelong love of nature.
My grandchildren are driven to school and back. Playmates come over by pre-arrangement with parental supervision. Their homes and backyards are their playgrounds, unless mom drives them somewhere else for an activity. There is little, if any, exploration on their own in untamed nature.
My generation was lucky in another way. I've always loved the sea. In my lifetime, I've swum in oceans and lakes all over the world. But today I only go to the ocean to admire its beauty and vastness from the shore. Even if the water looks okay, I know that human pollution has now made it uninhabitable even for fish. I volunteer in a hospital for wild seals and sea lions and have no illusions about what humans have done to their home -- the ocean. Tonight we docents at the marine mammal center attended a continuing education training. The word of the evening was ACIDIFICATION -- how the carbon dioxide of the world's emissions is ending up in the oceans. And the results are being recognized in the scientific world as disastrous.
So, perhaps my grandchildren and their children will never be able to see salmon coming back to spawn, miraculously-colored corals in the seas, find truly amazing living worlds within a small tidepool, or be able to experience one of my most memorable experiences ever -- spending the afternoon in a lagoon in Baja California surrounded by mammoth gray whales who actually wanted to interact with us. They may never be able to see the majesty of blue, blue glaciers as I've been able to get close to.
I was an environmentalist before I even knew there was a word for it. I spent endless hours worrying over the environment, until one day intuition told me that it was humans who would eventually disappear because of their own ineptitude and/or unwillingness to coexist with nature, but nature would regenerate and survive.
And so I have calmed down about the human destruction of nature, but have become more concerned about all that my grandchildren, and their children will miss.
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I remember going off to board the school bus every morning with my dog in tow... just like all the other kids in the neighborhood. We would bid our dogs adieu and climb on the bus. When we returned several hours later, my dog was always there waiting for me, and we would walk home together. It seemed as natural as can be. I never thought about it until my mother mentioned it one day. She said that the dog would ask to be let out just in time to meet me at the bus stop. Nothing strange about that except he never did this on weekends - even if I had been outside playing all day. We always wondered if it was the dog's finer sense of hearing and/or smell ... or if he actually remembered if he had seen me off or not that day ... Another canine mystery ...
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