These days it can be easy to feel as though mankind has defeated nature. From the second we are born, we maintain never-ending contact with manmade things, the great mother reduced to a few blades of grass growing out of the cracks in the pavement.
???This issue of The Spectrum, and Earth Day as a whole, can seem irrelevant to a person who looks at landscaping as their only source of nature. Why save the scraggly hedges that do little more than collect garbage?
A distant Hubble-telescope image of the earth does not represent the world in which most of us live. We draw our boundaries much smaller. My personal world exists basically between the North and South campuses of UB, but I am not satisfied.
I rarely get a chance to venture anywhere where I can no longer hear the sounds of cars flying by one after another. It is for that very reason that I take every chance I get to escape.
I am not suggesting a complete disconnection with civilization or man-made things. Nor am I advocating getting nude and running headlong into the woods - though I don't discourage that either. What I am saying is, old Mother Nature is lonely, and you should pay her a visit.
Humans have worked at an uncanny speed. The earth has been around for billions of years and within hundreds, humans managed to pour enough cement down that they could forget about the forests.
As a child when I couldn't really understand the need to "pave paradise and put up a parking lot," I thought maybe there was some global initiative to turn every inch of ground into a basketball court.
???I understand the need for more roads and houses, but it is depressing that every time I return to my hometown in Schenectady, N.Y. there is another street where woods used to be; woods that I used to play in.
???As a child, I was constantly running through the trees. Nature just felt like the place to be for a young boy. These days, exploring the outdoors for most people, myself included, would be an expansion of our horizons.
???I think we need that.
???If you throw your plastic bottles in the garbage; if you use eight grocery bags for one gallon of milk; if you drive a Hummer... you certainly need this. People who don't care about the environment don't appreciate how beautiful it can be.
???Every time I go out to enjoy nature I come back feeling pretty good. Maybe it's the cleaner air or the memories of what I used to do as a kid. It is probably both, but more importantly, it is the comforting fact that this serenity still exists; knowing that in this world of smokestacks billowing and buildings growing taller, I can still see what the street I live on used to look like.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
