Everyone as Conservationist - Enjoy Nature

Alright here's a lighter thought. I want everyone to go onto Google or Bing and search your state. For me, this was searching Wisconsin. And click the Map option.

Wisconsin looks like this:


Wisconsin as seen on Google Maps


A closer look at the southern part of the state so you can see the smaller green places near our the state's urban centers.

If you have your map up, zoom in on your home town, just enough so that you can see about a 90 minute drive radius around your town.

Find the green places: State Parks, Forests, National Wildlife Refuges, Scenic Trails, Nature Conservancy properties etc.

Have you been there?

Aldo Leopold wrote about his concern for modern man being disconnected from nature and wild places, and it would be easy to make the argument that 60 years later and physically attached to our screens, we might be even less connected to nature.

A typical day might go like this: get up in the morning, have coffee, get kids ready for school, commute to work, spend all day at a computer, go home, make dinner, put TV on, put kids in bed, sit on couch texting or social media on our Smartphones, go to bed, start again.

Leopold struggled with two opposing but important ideas. He recognized that urban folks were disconnecting from nature and believed that many of our national parks were too far away from cities (in particular in the East) for the average working person to reconnect with the wild on the weekend. He also had some concerns about our wild places getting over-visited (This totally happens at the really popular parks, where the volume of people and their garbage can be overwhelming.) Leopold was right about both.

He was correct that many of our national parks are far from urban centers, but odds are if you are willing to visit to a county park, a state natural area, a scenic trail, or some other kind of park; you can find opportunities nearby to reconnect with nature. You might even have a favorite place that you like frequent; it might even be one everyone else likes frequent (In Wisconsin this might Devil's Lake, in Illinois this might be Starved Rock), and you might even recognize that maybe your favorite spot is crowding in a way that makes it difficult to escape and reconnect with nature.

So your homework as you are looking at the map is to find a green spot which you haven't visited before and plan a visit.

Find a place where you can enjoy the leaves turning colors, where you can hear the birds, and where you can smell the green.

Nature is vitally important to your health, so much so that doctors are even writing prescriptions for park time for patients. You owe it to yourself to get out there. And maybe in your time out in nature, you'll find that you want to bring part of it home with you, and you'll find something worth saving.