 Sir David with schoolchildren aiding the Big Butterfly Count |
City-dwellers are now so “divorced from nature” the only wild animals they are likely to see is a rat or a pigeon, according to Sir David Attenborough. The veteran presenter, who has introduced viewers to some of the most spectacular wildlife in the world through his television programmes, said most people are unlikely to see animals in the wild.
“Worldwide we are estranged from nature,” he said. “Over half of the world’s population is now urbanised which means that more than one person in two is to some degree cut off from the natural world. There will be some people who do not see a wild creature from one day to the next – unless it is a rat or a pigeon – and they aren’t wild…”
The natural world is around us all the time in our houses and gardens. And it is not just a question of standing back and looking at it in a passive way it is about getting involved in an active way and that transforms your attitude.”
Sir David urged people to take part in the Big Butterfly Count, which asks people to count butterflies in their local park, woodland or even the garden for 15 minutes over the next couple of weeks. He said the scheme, now in its second year, is the perfect opportunity for even “townies” to reconnect with nature…
“If my heart is not going to be lifted by a butterfly because they’ve gone my life is going to be much the poorer.”
I recall being at a high school football game in the Texas Oil Patch at twilight. As the powerful lights clattered on to illuminate the contest, insects gathered in clouds around the brightness. I expected next to see swifts and other birds knifing through the schools of flying bugs – but none appeared.
I asked my friend, a True Local – “where are the birds?” He replied, “They’re dead and gone. The hydrocarbons in the air, the fields, every puddle on the ground in the oilfields has killed them”
He said, “Breathe deeply. We call that the smell of money.”
Ahhh… Good ole hippy bull crap meant to scare the city folk. Let’s see, we had a deer in our backyard last night, saw some rabbits in our neighborhood a few days ago, moved a turtle (not roadkill) out of the road last week, had a armadillo eat my dogs food a few weeks ago, and saw some bears on a camping trip a 3 months ago. Also, if all the birds are dead and gone, what the hell are those flying things that keep eating the bird seed from our feeders.
Also, last I checked, almost every single urban area has one or more zoos, aquariums, or reserve.
See, you are only “estranged from nature” if you are a social outcast. If your kids are “estranged from nature”, then you fail as a parent. Go and see the world outside your concrete jungle.
I live just outside the city and have all sorts of wild varmints prowling my property. Got no rats or pigeons that I’ve seen though.
I guess I can see the intention of the note, which has a good cause, but I agree it’s full of bull c.
I don’t live in the outskirts or the middle of nowhere and last week a wild turkey ran in front of my car, deer is always crossing and getting killed on my roads, and woodchucks constatntly risk their lives on the sides. My house’s backyard, a stone throw from Manhattan, is infested with birds who eagerly wait for my grapes to be ripe and leave me nothing, and the worms and stuff that crawls -including garden snakes- on the grass. What are you talking about!
What a nutcase! If people started heading to the wilderness to check out his “good” animals, I bet he would immediately begin spouting drivel about mankind interfering with the natural ways.
Charles Darwin raised pigeons, and the first parts of the “Origin” featured them prominently. I like pigeons. Rats? Well, they sell them in pet stores, don’t they? Fact is, most “inner city” (black slum) kids never get to a zoo or the beach because they are more interested in crack and emulating hoodlum relatives. I once had the misfortune to interview a con in prison and he had the nerve to tell me he was a role model for his young relatives. A punk in jail! Explains the baggy jail pants and the fact that so many “inner city youth” (hoodlums) love to shoot each other. Fine with me.
Hippies are infatuated with the day when we will have to choose between mankind and nature, which I will agree is inevitably coming. I don’t think it will happen in my life time or even my daughter’s lifetime, or even my grandchildren’s lifetime, but it will eventually happen. At the rate mankind is growing, it’s an unavoidable event.
The part that makes hippies disgusting wastes of flesh is that they always choose nature. See, hippies destroy family farms to save 1 inch fish. Hippies make us reliant on 3rd world countries by blocking us from being self reliant. Hippies always choose nature, regardless of the cost of human life. See, it’s not about protecting nature. If that was the case, they would promote safe ways of life. Nope, they block humanity with no option to operate safer and more responsibly.
He’s lamenting the concrete jungle life. He’s someone who’s spent his whole life looking at the wonders of nature, and seeing people who don’t see that is going to be saddening to him.
Peoples disconnection from nature is all around us. Kids think the source of food is the supermarket and don’t know what a carrot is. People of course can live in a concrete jungle eating pop tarts, and frozen pizzas, whilst watching CSI and never connect with nature. They can do that. And some people like that. Kind of like institutionalized prisoners, who can’t deal with the outside world.
Surely something important lost.
If you use a zoo as part of your shrug-some answer you have missed the point.
#6 Derek
I’m not sure your directing your angst against ‘hippies’ is appropriate.
“Hippies make us reliant on 3rd world countries by blocking us from being self reliant.”
Err how?
“See, hippies destroy family farms to save 1 inch fish.”
Examples?
Please make sure they are ‘hippies’ not something else…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie
>I bet he would immediately begin spouting drivel about mankind interfering with the natural ways.
Yup. They’ve restricted driving at national parks, moving people around in buses. Forget horseback riding tours unless you are rich enough to own your own horses. In general the national parks are to become enclaves for the rich.
>“They’re dead and gone. The hydrocarbons in the air, the fields, every puddle on the ground in the oilfields has killed them”
He said, “Breathe deeply. We call that the smell of money.”
Ahh the wise old friend of yours. Maybe he should have his own blog.
In Washington DC there are deer on the sides of city streets from time to time. Someone I know watched a deer come out of a wooded park on Massachussetts Avenue NW near American University and frightened some college girls so much they dropped their books and ran. Raccoons and opposums and an occasional skunk as well as squirrels get into peoples attics so much that there are several thriving wildlife removal services in town.
Nature has adapted to man in a way that is underappreciated.
Just saw a couple of deer walk through our neighborhood the other night.
It’s not “hippie bull crap” to notice that there have been major wildlife die offs.
When my dad was a kid, the Puget Sound was teeming with fish. Literally, my grandmother would go tell the kids to go catch dinner… and they would!
When I was a kid, the streams were teeming with frogs. Our pockets were filled with them. Those same streams are empty now.
I know this is anecdotal but there is plenty of science to back it up. (and thousands of anecdotes.)
Phytoplankton have died off by 40%. This is huge. Plankton are the base foot source of the seas — like the grasslands of the prairies.
It’s not “hippie bull crap” to understand that this is a big hairy deal.
>> # 4 jbenson2 said, on July 19th, 2011 at 8:11 am
>> If people started heading to the wilderness to check out his “good” animals, I bet he would immediately begin spouting drivel about mankind interfering with the natural ways.
Or, maybe, more people would understand that the natural world is really important.
I get into the northwest wilderness a lot and hardly anybody is there. While this makes for a better experience, for me personally, it means that a lot of people have no idea what’s out there and why it should be protected.
I’ll meet somebody and sometimes they’ll say, “Wow, isn’t this place great? Nobody knows it’s here.”
My answer is, “Yeah, and nobody will stand-up when a corporation want to strip mine it.”
I live way deep in the one time oil capital of the world and I can assure you there is no shortage of birds or any other wildlife. What a bunch of BS
The ratio of humans to nature is nothing more than an interaction of values, money, cooperation, consequences, and reality.
What more need be said?
Wow, I’m glad I live in Colorado, the rest of this country sounds really fucked up. Forget the parks, out here just find a National Forest access road, and bring your camera.
When it comes time to make that decision, will you attempt to slow and keep humans from being born, or pave over that last natural habitat.
IMO, all humanity should be given a chance to live and survive. Nothing will drive us into exploring space than the need to grow.
Or, we can live in a non-expansive world where couples go underground to have children illegally or the elderly get euthanized because they pose too great a burden on the eco-friendly controlled environment.
Choose… Freedom with burden or control with security. It’s an inevitable crossroad.
>> McCullough said, on July 19th, 2011 at 10:17 am
>> Wow, I’m glad I live in Colorado, the rest of this country sounds really fucked up.
Colorado does seem more engaged with nature than most states I’ve visited.
But you are not immune to wildlife die offs.
http://tinyurl.com/3tgoyks
It’s not bullsht, its perspective. Sure there are lots of us living in less urbanized areas with lots of animals running around. There are lots of us who don’t. I live in a smallish town just north of sacramento. If you get on the roads outside of town much you can see all kinds of birds and roadkill. If you go out camping and fishing you will see lots of other critters But FACT: 20 years ago if you left a porch light on in the summer you had multitudes in the hundreds of insects gathered around. Frogs would show up regularly to feed on them and if you went for a walk in the evening you saw lots of toads. If you walked the edges of town you saw lizards and snakes all the time. For many years now I’ve been noticing how little life is out there now. Bullfrogs, tree frogs and toads are RARE people. Not gone but rare. No bugs to speak of gather around the lights at night. Still plenty of skunks running around… Point is, if you’ve been around for enough years, you can’t miss the difference. We live in a pretty damned sterile world anymore. Again, depends a lot on where you live.
I see plenty of wildlife. Large hornets and wasps, attempting to make a home or nest in our sun baked lawn. Small birds, picking at the few bugs they can find. Crows flying is mobs of six, looking for weaken rodents to dine on. And bread scraps people leave out for the smaller birds. Pigeons, that some local fancier, who moved here last year, can’t live without. So those things are always about and easily spooked into flight. Very annoying, and they make a mess! And then there’s the dog lovers, who moved in up the road from us, but walk there poopie pets thru our neighborhood. And don’t always PICK UP. And they seems to like doing it were our mail box is. I don’t hate dogs. Just everyone else’s, who comes by to relieve themselves wherever I step.
We take the given as the normal:
Used to be 100x fish on the Grand Banks. Now there is 10x. When it goes up to 11x people are happy the fish are “surging back”–10% more. But you used to be able to fish with a hand net, walk across their backs they were so thick.
Deer, raccoons, skunks==do well with human trash and lack of top predators. They speak to how ill our environment is, not how healthy.
Like everything else, can we avoid a crash from numbers that grow too high? I don’t think so. Will we see it, or our kiddies, or grandkiddies? Possible it could go farther—but cycles do exactly that: cycle. Up and down. Like the housing bubble==nothing goes up forever.
Thats the way it goes.
I had the pleasure of spending some time with Sir David Attenborough some years ago (before the ‘sir’ was tacked to the front of his name). He was one of the nicest people I’ve met. Hes also absolutely correct about the ‘wildlife’ most people see these days.
I’m lucky enough to live in a small town in a rural/bushland area, and even here with a population of under 10,000 the only common wildlife I ever see much of are the introduced species that live off our urban refuse like sparrows, starlings and stray cats.
When I was growing up in Melbourne some 35 years ago we didn’t exactly have kangaroos bounding down the streets (despite what Americans might think), but I remember seeing more wildlife in the middle of that city than I now am seeing out in ‘the sticks’.
You have to really move away from towns all together to get an idea of what animals we have displaced with our McHouses and public parkland so devoid of any real life they should be called deserts.
#19. Interesting list, but Bald Eagles are thick in this area. I have one nesting about 20 yds from my house.
And grizzly bears I prefer to see from the comfort of a fast car.
#5 Racist much.
#9 You don’t have to be rich to own a horse, they aren’t worth what they used to be. You do have to be to keep one cause they cost a freaking fortune to maintain.
Tui birds, sparrows, blackbirds, mynahs, song thrushes, starlings, wild ducks, native fantails and riflemen, rosella parrots, pidgeons and ring necked doves. In my front yard. A Sunday drive in the country reveals hawks, pheasants, partridges, quails, wild turkeys, lost chickens and the odd escaped emu in such numbers they are a road hazard. This is not Texas, but I imagine something like Texas used to be.
“the only wild animals they are likely to see is a rat or a pigeon.”
But that only applies to straight folk.
In the gay world you’ll find bears, wolves, otters, pigs, silver foxes and (gym) bunnies among other critters.
And here I am removing a rattle snake from my back porch. Good thing I have watch this evening with my rifle looking for the local mountain lion seen a little too close to the school.
I got racoons in my neighborhood 20 min from manhattan. They knida freak me out. I saw two of them running into a neighbors back yard over the weekend and it wasn’t even dark.
#27 Straight folk might also catch glimpses of pumas and (in recently built affluent suburbs), wasps.