I have been told that my generation was one of the last to grow up playing outdoors. That technology would be the new playground and your friends are online not right in your neighborhood. While this change could be slowed by parents that emphasize playing outdoors, the movement to the indoors would still not be completely stopped. Experiencing the environment is how appreciation and respect for it comes about, therefore if people are not exposed to nature they will not care to conserve it.

Growing up, my friends and I would play “house” in one of our backyards, pretending to be a family, and making “dinners” out of smooshed leaves and berries we found, building outdoor forts, and picking flowers to weave crowns with. On weekends my siblings and I would look forward to playing night games with the neighborhood kids—waiting for it to become dark before going door to door to round up our recruits. Playing in my own backyard was just the beginning of my relationship with nature.

We were taken to Turtle Lake at my grandparent’s cabin each summer where my siblings and I would dig for our own worms to then fish for our own dinners. We caught frogs and fireflies; awed at the stars that we forgot could be so bright outside the cities. Our parents took us boating and water skiing. We played on beaches, collected sea shells, cracked clams for pearls, and buried each other in sand. We were brought to the Mississippi river where our other grandparents had a camping RV and we would fish on the shore and under the bridge nearby. We swam against currents and we ran down sand hills to jump into the water at top speed. Nature was our play place.

This is simply not true for younger generations. Between my years babysitting and watching my younger cousins, it seems that more kids today know how to use a tablet than those who have ever climbed a tree. Even my younger siblings, who grew up being exposed to nature with me, who shared an appreciation of nature, found it hard to keep playing night games or find friends who had ever been camping once they got to be in middle school. Those who appreciated nature were outnumbered by those who did not understand the wonder and awe it can bring, so the outnumbered did what the other kids knew—played indoors.

I did not realize how important this connection with nature was to me until it became more of a luxury than a regular way of living. The older I got it seemed that connecting with nature was something you could do if you had extra time or were on a vacation. Nature needed an excuse all of the sudden because school and jobs took precedence now. My friends in middle and early high school did not seem to understand how much I looked forward to each camping trip, there was a connection I was familiar with that they knew nothing about, and it was not a feeling I could simply explain—it had to be felt.

Despite not deeply knowing this feeling, people still seem to crave a relationship with nature. This is why people want to vacation in beautiful places, get a hotel room or office with a view, and put exotic fish tanks in their houses. The solution to feeling confined in office cubicles is to bring in small plants or put up calendars and screen savers of beautiful scenery in the environment to give a sense of escape to something more peaceful. These are just echoes of a thirst we no longer acknowledge.

Some deep part of us craves to be in touch with nature at some level—peace of mind and a sense of being a part of something bigger than ourselves is not only humbling but satisfies some desire we have to connect with the wild. This longing for an environmental connection, this innate craving is not just a psychological but a physiological one. Cabin fever will make us go crazy if we feel cooped up in a house or space too long, hinting that some part of us needs to be physically free, feeling no relief until we step outside

We decided along the way that instead of working with nature we wanted to dominate it, tame it and control it. We put industrial and political ambitions before nature, something which can only have been agreed upon with a severe case of short-sightedness. We decided that nature was too unpredictable and dangerous, too much of a threat so we began the task of taming it, as if it were our right to decide nature’s fate. That these animals and plants and ecosystems that had changed and perfected themselves over thousands of years were of no importance in comparison to our desire for convenience, safety and money.

We stopped “the wild” from being wild by taking over the land and closing in forests between our suburbs and cities and by domesticating animals to the point that they would die without us. We were so scared of nature’s raw power that we wanted to control it for security of food and resources as well as a reduction of personal threat, but in dominating our nature we left our ecosystems in a depleted and weak state, posing a larger threat than nature ever did—life without nature’s aid. Somewhere along the line people forgot that although we can be scared of the power of nature, that same power is our source of living. Draining our own power source for greed or fear is going to leave us with nothing to draw from at all. We get our power from nature and what it provides and allows us to do. We have done something no other species has done—worked outside of and beyond the ecosystem.

Every plant and animal has had to find its place, its niche, in an environment in order to thrive in coexistence with the rest of the equation of that particular ecosystem. Each would become a part of a cycle, or circle of life, where there was some sort of balance maintained. Humans, however, broke the cycle and threw off that balance, wanting to use ecosystems for our own advance instead of finding our place in the ecosystem, not allowing other species to thrive alongside us.

We hurt ourselves by doing this, not seeing that sustaining nature means to sustain our own quality of life. By over exploiting nature we are left with things like the Dust Bowl, floods after trees are cleared in a forest, and pollution of our own drinking water. Maybe the value of nature was forgotten as we became more detached from a direct relationship with it. Maybe the value of nature was forgotten when humans became the greedy ones in the environment’s own tragedy of the commons. Maybe we thought nature was too strong to be truly hurt by us, and once we realized it was in fact hurting, we had already built our infrastructure, travel methods, and economy around its exploitation. This is something that can only be battled by rearranged priorities, putting sustainability first.

People loved the land when they felt connected to the land, tended to it, played in it as kids, camped or came face to face with its intrinsic value. Humans knew how to live off of it, felt the beauty and awe of the wild instead of just seeing the echoes. That’s when people want to protect nature, only when they know this appreciation and importance of nature firsthand. Sustainability is not a priority for those who do not understand a connection with nature, therefore not seeing the weight of what our domination of the wild truly entails. Nature does not care about our economy or convenient travel, it does not live by these rules we have created, but it cannot contest.

It’s the people who played outside, as adults or children that speak out about environmental injustice, to be that voice for a shift of priorities. It’s the people who see their local lakes degrade over time with pollution, not able to consume the fish they catch without concern of ingesting dangerous amounts of mercury. It’s the people who have seen their nearby forests cut down for urban growth, driving out animals that become road kill before finding a new home. It’s the people who see native plant varieties overtaken by invasive species, hurting the whole ecosystem by putting the local plant and animal life in jeopardy.

These people see the environmental consequences, but are often silenced with a simple “it’s not that bad” or “what are we supposed to do” or “maybe this is evolution, things die out sometimes”. These effects, however, could only be evolution if we were working within the ecosystem—but we live in spite of it, giving nothing back to the cycle. By not feeding into the circle of life—we cut the circle, and if we are where the process comes to a dead end, where the circle of life turns linear—than we are at the end of that line. We become the end of life, and the end of the natural process altogether.

In my exposure to nature I have grown to see the importance of conservation. The environment is our power source that we need to feel a connection to in order to want to defend. I have been told that my generation was one of the last to grow up playing outdoors, and maybe that is the gravest mistake of them all.

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