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Spring
1999
[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SPRING 1999.]
Seeing,
Learning, Loving
What
we see or touch or hear or smell has a power that few words
can match. This issue is about such experiences and their
people.
Dr.
Michael Miller peers through a microscope at animals too
small for the unaided eye — and falls in love with dirt.
Ten
year-old Adam Ralph discovers
a strange hawk moth on a pile of leaves at his Vernon Hills
home and starts a great little adventure. And a covey of
veteran birders share the magic of spring migration that
inspired the dedication of thousands of conservationists,
and inspires them still.
Perhaps
you'll agree that with nature, as with people, we learn
first to love individuals, to marvel at the song of one
yellow warbler, the glimmering beauty of a dragonfly, the
hue of a wild hyacinth. We learn to love what's close to
us, what we encounter at an impressionable age or under
inspiring circumstances.
How
much more difficult it is, how much more challenging, to
learn to love whole landscapes. If we know that the fungi
and microorganisms of the soil are crucial to all the other
species of our region, and if we start to see their faces
by learning their secrets, can we learn to love them? Or
whole forests? Or mankind? Yet this is precisely the challenge
we face, here in Chicago Wilderness, and everywhere on the
shrinking Earth. To save the particular local loved nature,
we will need to think bigger, love larger, and understand
connections.
In
local, familiar nature, we mourn the death of a specific
tree, lost to an infestation of Asian beetles, lost to disease
or a wind storm. We mourn the disappearance of Kentucky
warblers from an oak woods under restoration. We mourn the
prairie orchids and butterflies and Franklin's ground squirrels
that once inhabited a plot of land that we have come to
know.
These
losses are sad, it is true. But unless we learn to love
whole habitats — the complex web of entire prairies and woods
and marshes and even the unseen but vital life of the soil — then
we will no longer have individuals to love either. This,
then, is the paradoxical lesson of Chicago Wilderness: if
we want to have splendid individual butterflies and bees
and bluebirds in the future, we will have to learn to love — and
care for — whole communities. And these communities include
us.
Seeing,
learning, and loving.
Debra
Shore may be reached at editor@chicagowildernessmag.org.
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