Where has the whimsy gone?

The result is a world where the new generations don’t care about the natural world to the same extent as older ones because they have no personal or emotional connection to the Earth. Thus, when the fireflies become a critically endangered species, the only people fighting environmental protection groups to include insects in their efforts are the ones who have grown up seeing a night sky illuminated by thousands of bugs.

Modernity is keeping us sheltered both literally and metaphorically. The new era of phones, all-access television and virtual reality encourages a sedentary, home-bound lifestyle. The consistent move to large cities and urban environments encourages local governments to build up the skylines and remove the natural world from the human one, leaving us foreign to the beauties our predecessors and their predecessors experienced. 

Helicopter parents usher future policymakers and lobbyists away from outside, setting up a future where the people voting on environmental legislation simply don’t care whether the nature they never experienced lives or dies. This might seem like an extreme end to the far future, but dozens of species are imminently dying off, like fireflies, and little to no regulation has been attempted to pass. This is not a future problem and it will only become worse with time.

Society — at least the 80% of it that lives in an urban city — for the most part, recognizes that bug equals pest, that equals bad. So, in 30 years, when a California state ballot goes out with a provision for protecting ground beetles, it won’t get enough votes to pass, because no one wants those pests around. Not enough voters will recognize their necessity in pollination and soil turnover. And it has nothing to do with being “bug people”; it is simply due to a lack of going outside.

I’m not particularly arguing for everyone to start touching grass tomorrow, although that may certainly be a constructive activity for anyone. Rather, I hope more people will understand that this new golden era of technology is perhaps the most detrimental to our relationship with nature than to anything else.

Yes, while it is easier to sit and stare at our phones with a nature documentary on than to make an effort to go hiking or travel to a national park, one will ultimately force us to see the true world as it has become due to decades of neglect and prioritization of industrial development.

We don’t solve anything by ignoring society’s issues, especially not when they have the potential to dominate over the whole country. Change starts at the individual level — start going outside, start encouraging your kids to go outside with you, start removing the sheltered lifestyle and take risks. 

We don’t know what we don’t know — but we can find out. All it takes is a little whimsy.

Jackson Sneeringer is a senior at Carlmont High School in Belmont. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.