Welcome to Issue 5

Here is the place, my lord; good my lord, enter,
The tyranny of the open night's too rough
For nature to endure.
—Kent, as Caius, to Lear in William Shakespeare's King Lear, 3.4.1

Greetings,

This installment of the magazine is somewhat tardy, but I hope that fact does not prevent patient readers from finding its essays cause for asking what is natural.

What is natural?

Another one of those big, abstract questions easily shrugged off for the day, and then the week, and before long piling up with other "important" questions into a seemingly insurmountable heap of laundry that starts to stench subtly in the corner of the room at the same time you find fewer and fewer clean clothes to wear to work.

I began writing this introduction outside, at peace, within earshot of waves lapping at the shore, children's joyful shrieks on a playfield, airplanes droning overhead, and birds singing beneath a summery deciduous canopy. While a county park may not meet everyone's definition of nature, I was assuredly outside my own private environs and inhabiting, for the moment, a space shared by life and light and air. A few weeks ago, however, I had made a note to myself to use the following detail in some way because it seemed to speak volumes about how unnatural my, and perhaps your, modern world can be: I didn't know it was cold outside until I opened the window. The climate control inside my building was such that I had no idea of the outside temperature. With the windows shut, I was safely ensconced in my own little homeostatic world, seemingly cut off from the discomforting variability of the weather and the persistent stimulation of nature. (Though, of course, I was not really cut off except mentally—playing the civilized game of pretend that creates the semi-shared platform of our society where all manner of things amazing are casually deemed natural but nature herself.)

Another real detail—the kind novelists dream of making up, though I swear to you it happened to me—forced me back inside. Picture me, sitting cross-legged on a picnic table and pecking at my laptop, under some trees, overlooking Lake Michigan. Though ants and other insects approach me and my computer, they are easily swiped away. When suddenly, my arm gets wet and something has splashed onto my laptop like rain. But it's sunny. There is no rain. Did a bird poop on me? I look up. I see nothing. Did someone, unseen, squirt water on me? I look around. I see nothing. The small splash on my laptop appears slightly amber. I wipe it off with a leaf. It has splashed on my hat, on my arm, on my shirt, on my shorts—laundry I just washed last night now soiled by a mystery liquid. Suddenly, I hear a rustling high above. And I realize what has happened. I have been peed on by a squirrel.

This is the kind of thing that drives one indoors, away from nature. It's the kind of thing humans have built fires and roofs and roadways for over thousands of years, culminating in something resembling our sprawling civilization. It's why HVAC is big business and why my fifth grade social studies teacher, Ms. Giuliani, imparted on us the "three As"—air conditioning, automobiles, and aqueducts. These three technologies opened up the hot, harsh American southwest to colonization and development. Without them, the land would have been too hot, too harsh, and too dry for the kind of lifestyles enjoyed by millions of Americans today. I believe applying this kind of thinking is not just an American tradition, but one of all humans wielding technology. We seek to control and contain the world in ways that we hope will make us more comfortable. But as the power of our innovation has increased in its capacity to recreate environments to suit immediate human desires, where does that leave whatever is natural? And, are we intelligent and willing enough to approach the natural world more sensitively, with an appreciation for more than our own immediate comfort?

Contemplating the nature of the natural naturally (pardon me) raises such issues, posing an ethical challenge at the same time it opens a philosophical discussion. In this issue, each contributor touches on both the ethical challenge and ponders something of our human nature.

Luke Balsavich draws on a lifelong love affair with snakes, frogs, and other herps—plus a little inspiration from the likes of Aldo Leopold and Richard Dawkins—to introduce us to the innocence of two American children in "To Save the Whales." Charles and Jennifer could be any of us or any of our children. Charles delights in the outdoors his father reveled in, and Jennifer empathizes with the plight of whales and manatees though she has never seen the ocean. Their parents provide perspective for our noble youngsters. Charles' dad is a living reminder that the "wild" his son appreciates is a far cry from the "wild" he knew as a child. Jennifer's mother encourages her to actualize her hope by joining with the collective efforts of others. The stories of Charles and Jennifer provide an entryway into Balsavich's discussion of why we seem innately curious about nature. To have the best chance to save entire natural habitats, Balsavich suggests we focus our natural fascination—which may be an adaptive trait that has served humans throughout time—onto species sensitive to the onset of environmental degradation. Species like amphibians. Placed in a precarious position by human activities, amphibians are canaries in the coalmines that comprise our biosphere, but in the past two decades, approximately 160 species have gone extinct. Balsavich provides the reader with links to learn more about amphibians and what some are doing to help them.

In my own essay, "A homily on human nature," I raise questions about what is or should be natural, suggesting that whether to locate humans within the category is perpetually problematic. I further suggest that, to put it bluntly, "our" technology is domesticating us much as we domesticated plants and animals. Following that assertion, the question I'm left with is what psychological alternatives remain to us humans (at least the technologically "plugged-in" among us) if our relationship with technology continues to dominate more and more aspects of our social culture? Are we co-evolving along technological lines? Are our historical and biological strategies for relating to one another, and for finding or creating meaning, resilient enough in the face of new patterns of connecting made not only possible but culturally compulsory by our evolving technology?

Taking a less abstract and likely more accessible approach to the question is Brandon Lorenz in "The Art of the Natural." Informed by years as a newspaper reporter and now a magazine editor, Lorenz points out that if everyone agreed on what was natural there would be no news business. These days, he's refined his ability to identify "greenwash"—when products are misleadingly labeled or advertised as being environmentally friendly or more natural than they really are. Greenwash has piggybacked on the skyrocketing cultural appeal of the green movement, because "nature" sells. But in his essay, he turns inward, considering his evolving perception of what was natural, or normal, throughout his life. Lorenz presents a candid reflection on some of his personal transformations—from adolescence to adulthood, from overweight to in shape, from in the closet to openly gay. "I would like to think I'm unique, but I'm not sure that's the case. I'm more than likely just another journalist full of self-doubt with an untidy personal life," Lorenz bravely writes. "One of the biggest lessons I have learned over the last few years is to stop viewing The Art of the Natural as a Venn Diagram that I'm left outside of."

Finally, while not an essay drafted for this magazine, I want to provide you with a link to Will Allen's "A Good Food Manifesto for America," in which Milwaukee's own urban agricultural advocate (with literal and figurative superman stature) lays out a case for reorienting our food production system (surely relevant to the topic of the natural). The Growing Power leader depicts a silent crisis not dramatized by breadlines or food shortages but rather an insidious malnutrition hitting the poorest most: "And this is coming to haunt us in health care and social costs. No, we are not suddenly starving to death; we are slowly but surely malnourishing ourselves to death," Allen writes. To face this crisis, Allen, recently profiled in the New York Times, proposes the creation of a national public-private partnership, the Centers for Urban Agriculture, to be a Milwaukee-based "do tank" rather than a "think tank." Comparing the seed money estimated necessary to the billions injected into Recovery Act infrastructure projects, he calls on Congress to provide $63 million over two years to a newly formed CUA, which he argues would provide long-lasting social, economic, and health benefits. "It simply had not occurred to anyone that immediate and lasting job creation was plausible in a field such as community-based agriculture," Allen writes. What else has simply not occurred to us because of our perception of the way things are?

Air conditioning, aqueducts, and automobiles. I find myself thinking about my fifth-grade social studies textbook and how straightforward some things were made to seem. Funny how the tide has turned. Our vision for the future seems to have shifted from grandiose outward expansion (space-age skylines with glittering towers and not a farm in sight) to cultivating local resources more wisely (with farms counterintuitively as cornerstones within cities). If this even qualifies as a shared vision yet, I don't know. But if it is, perhaps it's simply the result of there not being any more physical natural frontiers on the surface of the planet to reach or breach. Perhaps we must inevitably turn inward, to our technology, to "our" land, and to each other.

I wonder if one day our descendants will stumble outside on the planet that once we thought was ours, rub their eyes in the light and wind, and point around them at the spaces surviving whatever physical remnants of our culture still stand then as the antiquated marvels of the Roman aqueducts stand among our own cities today. I wonder if they will say to one another knowingly before returning inside, "This used to be nature."

Michael Timm
July 14, 2009


P.S. I am altering the stated topics of the upcoming issues, returning to the "question" format of the first four issues. I reserve the right to change even these, but here they are.

Fall 2009: What is our purpose and how do we know it?
Winter 2009: What is happiness and how do we get it?
Spring 2010: What is democracy really and is it really a good idea?

The Art of the Natural

By Brandon Lorenz

"You're not gay, are you?"

In seven years as a journalist I've discovered that asking questions for a living has given me the ability to evade them when asked by others.

Unfortunately, that question was asked of me during my first three months as a professional journalist. I would have expected it from one of the cops I covered, but not a fellow reporter and the person who was informally assigned to be my professional mentor.

"No."

"That's good, otherwise it means there'd be something wrong with you," says my coworker, who is in her early 40s and clutches the few curves she has left. The curves combine with blonde hair and Texas twang to make her moderately exotic in rural Wisconsin.

My coworker found this a perfectly natural question to ask while standing in the middle of our tiny newsroom. Moreover, she found it a perfectly natural question to shout across the newsroom.

I was of course lying—the only time I've had to directly lie about the issue. I'd not yet come out to anyone, including myself, and this was hardly the time or place to start.

It's been nearly seven years since that day and I can remember exactly where in the newsroom I was standing, the rumpled blue shirt I was wearing, and how my face burned when she asked me the question.

I consider it a reminder that just because one becomes an adult doesn't mean one will leave behind the gawky self-consciousness and sense of not-quite-belonging that so often comes with adolescence.

What is natural?

As a magazine editor, I've spent the last four years exploring that question on somewhat technical grounds by writing about energy, buildings, and real estate.

And so as a specialist of sorts I'm quite qualified to answer that question. Today, every company wants to prove its products are green. The words vary (natural, green, sustainable, healthy) but the meaning is the same: Buy this because it won't hurt the planet.

Unfortunately such claims are rarely true.

The shaving cream in my bathroom, for example, has a green label on the back proclaiming the can's "ECO INFO." The label consists of a giant recycle logo encircling the word "steel." Next to that, the label states "No CFCs."

Unfortunately this happy iconography is designed to hide that the can wasn't produced with recycled steel. Virgin steel requires three times more energy to produce than recycled steel. And CFCs—which deplete the ozone layer—have been banned in aerosol cans for decades.

What is natural?

As a former newspaper reporter I spent the first few years of my career chronicling behavior that at least one other person considered natural, if only for a few brief moments. As an observer of human behavior, the range of activities that people think can pass for natural never ceases to amuse me.

There was a police chief who was accused of taking alcohol and guns from the department's evidence locker, and the college president who was raking in large raises while freezing faculty pay, to name two examples.

Clearly if a universal definition of natural existed there would be no news business. Watching the tug of war that inevitably occurs when people try to define "natural" always intrigued me. In this case I'm considering the word natural as a placeholder for the word normal, as people sometimes use it.

I've spent time over the last few years moonlighting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, covering local government in Waukesha County. Every few weeks the residents (and sometimes local officials) I ran into during meetings would complain about the newspaper's "liberal bias."

Nearly as often but on a curiously delayed cycle, friends or acquaintances who found out I wrote for the newspaper complained they had stopped reading the paper because it was "too conservative."

Clearly then, without getting too postmodernist, natural must be like some sort of landscape that shifts depending upon where one is standing. That's hardly breaking news. So how about we shift positions and consider just what is natural from another point of view.

Even though I've spent a few years working in a business predicated on there not being a universally-adopted definition of natural, I've been looking outward for an answer when perhaps I should be looking inward.

I have no illusions what my coworker meant when she asked me that question seven years ago. It was not a question at all, but an accusation: You're different.

I didn't need her to point it out to me. I thought about it daily. And here we come to the heart of the matter because for years I've looked around and felt like the crowd discovered The Art of the Natural long ago like some sort of oasis in the desert, and has been hiding it from me ever since.

As a child, I had a recurring thought that eventually, my family would no longer be around, and when that happened, I'd be alone. Forming my own family was something I knew would never happen.

I went though college overweight and with terrible acne, a pair of developments that didn't completely destroy my social life, but did prepare me for embarrassment when my coworker started questioning me seven years ago in the newsroom. I was embarrassed on two levels.

There was of course embarrassment about feeling forced to lie. My normal defense in those days was simply not to talk much about myself in social situations—especially with new people. What I had learned after college was that if you ask a certain level of polite but shallow questions, you can usually deflect the flow of conversation away from anything personal that would be troublesome. But reporters can see through that trick eventually.

But the second and deeper embarrassment was lying about a world I had not yet been invited into, because I had passively let my weight become a barrier. Even though I knew I was gay by then, I hadn't yet taken even the slightest action in recognition of that fact.

Shortly after my coworker's question, I began a more serious exploration for what I considered The Art of the Natural. I moved away from home to take a job in a new newsroom. I went on a diet and in the year that followed lost 100 pounds. And I decided to try the whole dating thing.

Along the way, it became clear that taking the steps toward The Art of the Natural was going to be just as awkward an experience as all those years spent in silent self-denial.

I returned home after losing the weight to aunts and uncles who no longer recognized me. The person I sat near in high school during lunch for three years no longer recognized me when I returned for a wedding. My parents—after years of hinting that I should lose weight—complained that I was "too thin."

Reaching for what felt natural meant losing what had been for years familiar.

Douglas Coupland wrote that loneliness is the most universal human emotion. I think uniqueness is the same way—everyone thinks they are unique. Even the boys dancing at the bar in their bright Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts and flawless hair—the boys who make going out feel like a weekly costume parade—even those boys like to think they are unique.

I would like to think I'm unique, but I'm not sure that's the case. I'm more than likely just another journalist full of self-doubt with an untidy personal life.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned over the last few years is to stop viewing The Art of the Natural as a Venn Diagram that I'm left outside of. The path I'm on today has just as much awkwardness as the one I left seven years ago after my coworker's question. But it is at least my path.

The other lesson I've learned since that is that I need to keep asking myself "What is natural?"

Too often it seems, life's little assumptions go unchallenged and soon life's little routines assume an importance all their own. I've not yet come up with any satisfactory answers to the question. But if, for example, I'm going to end up one of those boring suburbanites scorned in Revolutionary Road, it will at least not be by accident.

So I ask you:

What is natural?

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Brandon Lorenz is senior editor at Building Operating Management magazine. As a freelancer, his work has appeared in a variety of newspapers, Web sites, and magazines. He lives in Bay View.

A homily on human nature

By Michael Timm

To ask what is natural supposes two avenues of inquiry: What is the way things actually are? What is the way things are supposed to be?

Tension arises because ideas conflict about the nature and content of the natural, especially if related to the second question. Is it something that once was, independently of and prior to the appearance of and observation by human beings? Or does it include humans and our behaviors and their impacts? If so, does it include all actualized behaviors or only a subset of those possible? And if it includes a significantly large set of possibilities, does such inclusion negate the value of the natural as a term? Does it become meaningless?

Is it always a politically loaded term, a lever to and from power? We seem inclined to accept arguments based on a degree of naturalness. Regardless of the content of such arguments, does this inclination reveal something real or important about us or the natural? Perhaps a vestigial connectedness with any or all "environments"—a sense that we belong within some larger structure, whether wild or godly, sacred or profane, so long as we recognize a sort of firmament of not-ourselves by which we can measure our own existence.

What about the role of technology—not to mention culture—in what is or is not, should or should not be, natural? Is technology necessarily not natural—counter-natural? There's a feeling I have, which I sense others share and which is not terribly unique or profound but nonetheless relevant: that we humans have not evolved for the world in which we create ourselves. This is the world in which I type at my laptop computer, the world where every other bar patron is playing with their iPhone, taking pictures of themselves or their spouse, where we drive our bodies across cities in metal boxes through concrete alleys, and spend our evenings staring at bright blue undulating screens that soothe by presenting images of people where actual people might instead agitate us from the shared technocultural dream.

I feel, more and more, that we are not only excluding native animals and plants and ecosystems from their historical patterns, but also increasingly excluding ourselves from our own natural cultural environments.

What is the natural state of man—humankind?

If we humans evolved to value family and clan structures because of both the stability and flexibility these provided both individual members and family groups, then what of our modern technologized culture in which digital networks and atomizing technologies divide and conquer vestigial instinct and recreate our humanity as bits of democratized network relations? Is this unnatural? Is it a natural phase of human evolution? Should it be the way? Is it simply another way we are proving our adaptability and the flexibility of our innate human tendencies for curiosity and tinkering and self-improvement? Or is it a turn around a corner toward something inhuman, a reprogramming of our consciousness, a new exclusive playing field for socialization of technological elites? Is it an extension of our clannish tendencies or an abandonment of them? And, if the latter, should we worry?

And for those who might argue that clannish tendencies were not all that great to start with, perhaps it ought to be argued that they at least provided the framework through which individuals could survive long enough to persevere and overcome and discover more of oneself—self-determination. If we no longer participate in small-scale social clan structures, and instead are subsumed into larger more diffuse and decentralized social networks, does the same opportunity for individual/minority/outlier/deviant exist? Faced with the almost infinite connectivity through technology, are we paradoxically more isolated than ever, staring into that vast and almost-empty white room peopled only by specs of personae? Does, then, the minority or the deviant become exacerbated by this artificial isolation rather than strive for some form of integration with the social whole or reformation of it? And, in those other vast white rooms peopled and popular, the homes of eager echoing majorities, do we only become heads of cattle, swarming according to the ass-ends of cattle in our view, those swarming after ass-ends of cattle in their heads' views? (This is how humans made a killing, literally, of herd animals, because geography ensures there are always cliffs somewhere.) Who would guide us across this new digital geography? And where will we go?

When I see a deer in the vacant lot behind the Cudahy McDonald's, just looking at me on my bike on the asphalt K-Mart parking lot as I simply stare back, as not 100 feet away motorists obliviously order their Big Macs and fries at the drive-thru, I whisper "Hello, Beautiful," and think first that it's incredible how humans have altered the landscape so that there is a deer behind this urban McDonald's. But as I stare longer and the deer trots on, toward the foliage by the railroad tracks behind K-Mart adjacent to the McDonald's, I think more about how our human-created landscapes intended for humans have affected us. The deer has found its little corner of nature among the undeveloped land, and no matter how much we shortsightedly constrict environmental corridors with encroaching development, plants and animals—admittedly not all of them, but almost certainly some of them—will find a way and a place to survive. They'll adapt or they'll perish in our places. But what about us? We've adapted to what are in many ways self-hostile environments. Cities support high population densities with relative peace, all things considered, but also spew carcinogens, prop up commercialized medicine, feed upon industrialized agriculture, and inject artificial time structures into human life. The electric light, the indoor toilet, the washing machine, the automobile, the clock, the computer, the cheeseburger—these are all marvelous inventions and we take them for granted such that they populate the environments we find natural for ourselves.

But just as our domestication of plants and animals benefited increasingly dense and specialized human populations, the plants and animals benefited from the bargain—getting humans to devote time and energy to tend and care for their survival needs and assisting and accelerating in reproduction of their relatives to the exclusion of would-be competitors. Our technology is domesticating us in similar fashion. We are caught in a bargain like the domestication bargain, only operating across different scales of our experience. No longer is our physical labor alone domesticated—our social relations and psychological health, once and perhaps naturally catered to by fulfilling clan obligations, are also domesticated by the very technologies and legal and social structures we believe we've developed to enhance our lives.

This technological domestication may or may not be natural, but it gives me, at least, pause. Sometimes much more than pause. That deer behind McDonald's—a coyote shot and killed by local police—a dead beaver on the sidewalk—a frog smashed on my parking lot—these are all examples of organisms which discovered themselves suddenly in an alien environment, not always actively hostile, but most often indifferent to their needs and thus harsh for life. The parking lot seems to me a perfect example and metaphor for one scale, the macroscale, of our denaturing of the planet—developing monocultures of substance that serve particular, explicit human desires at the expense of an arguably natural and almost unfathomable complexity that operates in many ecosystems and depends upon at least some degree of interlocking and counterbalancing plurality. Parking lots are the domestication of rock. And like Hegel's master, who is equally a slave to his master/slave relationship as the slave is to him, humans are enslaved by their asphalt/auto relationship. Potholes demand attention. Cars demand repair. New developments demand parking spaces. And on and on, this is part of a cycle of defending and recreating normalcy that seems natural to our modern world.

On a behavioral/psychological scale, social networking internet applications are domesticating human relationships along digital lines. Humans become enslaved by the satisfaction of connection, while digital connections are predicated upon the atomization/democratization of self into re-presented avatar. Our online behavior is restricted by the format and we play along, morphing and compressing given names into a user name of fewer characters, a sort of bifurcated shorthand self divided. Our avatar, using the term loosely here to mean any online identity, is packaged and marketed for effect within specific but always potentially infinite arenas and ruthlessly subject to the rules governing those spaces. There's no allowance for ultimate psychological satisfaction because identities expressed are endlessly open to fundamental criticism or undermining by users who are not discriminated by any real or earned and demonstrated social hierarchy (witness any unmoderated blog comment section where some immovable object is repeatedly hammered by an unstoppable force). Our identities are just "out there." We caricaturize ourselves in such digital environments, but the caricature becomes more and more real the more time we spend using it. In a network, unlike within a clan, anybody's comments are deemed valid unless a discriminating mind edits or moderates participation (or until a majority cadre of users attacks and subdues the minority voice); and unlike in real space, no proof is required to urge the acceptance of an argument. And so ideas good and bad can be perpetuated virally and without empathy regardless of their utility or value or real-world direct social consequence (such as recipient body language). We are alienating self from self, but we can't turn away because we smell limitless freedom for expression and exploration.

This is something Felicia Day's web series The Guild has tapped into to use for comedic effect, but it seems meaningful to me on several levels: it understands and appreciates but also mocks the intrinsic appeal of, in this case, online gaming communities; it takes humans whose relationships have previously existed only through the internet and examines how they interact in real space; it showcases that even in cyberspace, clan structures (the guild) are resilient, valuable, self-regulating, compelling, and in concert with human capacities; it shows how the absence of physical proximity and observation of body language and psychoemotional context affects communication strategies among the "guildies" when they talk to each other on their headsets (to all of each other at once rather than to just one person in a two-way, real-world conversation).

The flattened frog on my parking lot didn't have a choice about its environment; its species did not create, at least not on a massive scale, the particular environment it was born into. Our species, however, is the predominant earthshaper. And each individual human is also able to shape his or her consciousness, perhaps not fully or easily, but immediately and directly. We have a choice about what kind of world we create to be natural—at least for ourselves. What kind of landscape will we make? Will we rush unreflectively and headlong into an environment as indifferent to our human needs and capacities as the asphalt was to the frog? Is there a more natural alternative?

While we may lament habitat loss for deer and frogs and beavers and all manner of wild things, I wonder also about us. What parcels of undeveloped psychological ground can we turn to at the end of the day when email and voicemail and day-calendars and fast food and web surfing and late-night television—hollow surrogates for clan relations that would perhaps satisfy our ancestors 10,000 or 5,000 years ago—have crowded out one's day? Have we gone from living in one cave to another? Are we restricting ourselves to fertile cracks in the asphalt or vacant lots behind the McDonald's of the mind?

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Michael Timm is a freelance writer. He has written and is seeking representation for a novel, The Philosopher of Milwaukee. He has been assistant editor of the Bay View Compass newspaper in Milwaukee since 2005. His writing has also appeared in the Alliance for Children & Families Magazine, Ripon Magazine, Riverwest Currents, Shepherd Express, and Wisconsin Trails Magazine. He earned his B.A. at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., in 2004 studying both anthropology and English. His totem animal is the platypus.

To Save the Whales

By Luke Balsavich

Charles
Charles was so excited. He was about to embark on another great adventure. His father had been bringing him to Wisconsin every summer since he could remember, and he was at last going to return to what he knew to be “God’s Country.” His father had shared stories of his own childhood in the very same area, and Charles felt a sense of pride having the same summer haunts at the lakes, streams, and woods his father had enjoyed.

Like his father, Charles loved animals. His home in the suburbs sported little in the area of wildlife, though he did enjoy catching the crawdads in the drainage ditches near his elementary school, and the European Starlings that nested at the church pavilion. He most particularly loved reptiles and amphibians. He was mystified and awed by these resultants of natural selection (though he did not realize it at the time) and projected himself into these creatures, personifying them.

He loved nature, though he lacked understanding of the many processes involved and the existence of life outside humanity, occurring in the absence of understanding, ingenuity, or sentience.

Like all humans, Charles was a curious creature. And like so many others, he was completely captivated by the natural world. Charles' trip was wonderful as it had always been. He did not realize any of the significant differences to the area that had occurred since his father’s childhood.

His father, however, grieved a little more with every visit to his home state. His son would never walk in the field that he as a boy played in: the need for parking had again overcome the need for prairie. Charles would never hear a Northern Leopard Frog around the ponds in the countryside… they seemed to have disappeared completely from the area. These days, the sound of the road, lawn mowers, and air-conditioning units seemed to mute the birdsong in so many places he had once considered wild. He still took his boy out to the wildlife areas though, and this was the wilderness that Charles came to know and love.

Jennifer
Jennifer lived in Kansas, and had never seen the ocean.

Like Charles, she also had a particular love for nature. After a couple of book reports on marine life during second-grade English, her zeal led her to start a "save the whales" campaign, which she supplemented with a "save the manatees" campaign. She thought it was wrong to do nothing when creatures are threatened with extinction. However, she was utterly perplexed at what to do about saving these creatures.

One evening, young Jennifer asked her mother, “What can I do? It’s just me? Can one person make a difference?”

Her mother wiped the tears glistening on her cheek and replied, “It is simple. You alone can do nothing. You must appeal to others to achieve these goals.” Both of her parents were impressed with her affection, and encouraged her to collect funds to donate to conservation groups.

While Jennifer neither saved the whales nor manatees, she was able to raise some money to send to conservation groups and her efforts did make a difference. Most notable is that this attachment she formed to these marine mammals led her to pursue biology, and further her knowledge about the many threats facing our natural world.

What about us?
Her love of these creatures she hadn’t even seen is incredible, but not really surprising, is it? What caused her to have a passion for these creatures? And how can we so easily relate to her? Why do we, like Charles and Jennifer, feel compelled to know about nature, and most particularly, animals?

It seems that our interests in knowledge and understanding of function define us as humans. We seek rationality in everything, and attempt to discern meaning (even sometimes when there is none) in whatever we behold. We are keen observers of cause and effect, and derive pleasure through our apprehension. Other creatures without these characteristics present us with fascination. We see function but not understanding: elaborate systems in play with no tangible designer. We sometimes project agency where there is none. It has been suggested that these characteristics have provided humans with an evolutionary advantage: to seek agency in all situations could have provided early humans with necessary advantages to avoid formidable predators. By studying nature, we note that life is a constant struggle for all members. There is neither mercy nor hate nor love, where all is chance and whatever is best suited to it triumphs.

Charles, Jennifer, and a few billion other people attempt to connect with nature in one way or another. This seems to be true of people worldwide, although there are many different ways we do this. Whether it’s a camping trip to the boreal forest, a hiking trip in the redwoods, a float trip down the Illinois River, or going on a walkabout in Australia, people attempt to connect with nature. Our understanding of nature often dictates the level and kind of involvement.

Kids seem particularly prone to developing a zeal for nature, even if their parents do not show interest themselves. This suggests perhaps a genetic predisposition for such interest. A common picture at the zoo: 25 kids at the big cat exhibit completely captivated as a tiger paces lazily in its enclosure. The parents see the cat and are momentarily amazed, but the kids are floored. The entire group gasps as one as the big cat yawns, showing an array of huge white teeth. Most kids could spend all day at the zoo.

It is understandable to think that those early humans that developed a strong understanding of nature would flourish (so long as they did not try to pet a lion as a child). Someone with an interest and curiosity toward nature would be more likely to domesticate animals for human use, cultivate crops, and avoid predation than someone without an interest or curiosity. This is true on a societal level as well as on an individual level, and is true today. The more we know about snakes, for instance, the less people will succumb to snakebite. On a societal level, we have kept venomous animals, studied their toxins, and developed antivenins for many species. Because of these undertakings, the United States has an incredibly low mortality rate for venomous snakebite: approximately 8,000 people are bitten each year, and approximately 12 people die. The more we know, the better equipped we are to handle situations. It is that simple… Curiosity and interest in nature would undoubtedly lead to evolutionary advantage.

Understanding Environments
Most people would agree that the extinction of a species is a grievous, irreparable loss to the world. One could go so far to say that most people would consider knowingly facilitating such a situation to be utterly reprehensible, even criminal. Simply contemplating the disappearance of a species touches us in a very real way, and knowing that our actions can destroy other species is a major force in driving environmental movements.

It is easy to believe that in seeking to prevent the end of an entire species (projecting humanity on other life), we are in some way preserving ourselves. We have taken significant measures to protect many species, and it is often the interest in one species that creates protection for entire habitats (Endangered Species Act is a good example of this). We protect something we take interest in (in many cases a species), and the habitat is also protected.

A significant problem with implementing environmental conservation in this way is that the bullet has often left the barrel of the gun before we rally to take action. By the time we note a decline in species x (plant or animal), what else has happened? The same is also true of various systems humans have created. By the time you hear, for instance, piston noise emanating from the engine of your car, you are already in trouble (or your car is at least). The more ignorant of the system we are, the further the development of the problem before it is noted and addressed. Some people do not understand the importance of changing the oil on the vehicle. Through neglect with something so simple, the timing chains, gears, and pistons can prematurely wear, eventually causing engine failure. The more you learn about a car, the better you are able to diagnose issues before you are stuck on the side of the road. Still, some things happen without warning, and when they do, parts need to be replaced or repaired. Nearly everyone who drives cars has been, at one time or another, on the side of the road waiting for a tow. Unfortunately, we understand nature less than we understand cars, and nature does not have replacement parts…

It is common knowledge in the area of ecology that some species are more susceptible to environmental degradation than others. Problems manifesting in these species often reflect serious environmental issues in their respective biological communities. When we see problems with these indicator species, the bullet may not yet have left the barrel. As we see these problems, it is imperative that we react if we are to hope for success in environmental preservation. Even then, there is still a good chance damage will be irreparable.

Amphibians are long known to represent the health of their habitats due to their sensitivity to change. They are generally unique in that their life cycle requires aquatic, terrestrial, and often arboreal lifestyles. Their skin is permeable and allows easy passage of many pathogens, and many species are extremely susceptible to pollutants. Many species are poor dispersers, very limited in movement by geographical constraints. It should then be very worrisome to know that roughly 160 species are believed to have gone extinct in the past two decades, with hundreds more under serious threat of extinction. Their disappearances mark not only a substantial loss of biodiversity in our natural systems, but also are a sign that their biological communities are changing and a manifestation of our ineptness in the area of conservation.

Since it is already evident that people have an innate curiosity and interest toward nature, I think it important to steer that interest toward these indicator species, whose preservation will likely aid in the preservation of so many others. Amphibians seem a good choice for such a movement, since they occur throughout most of the world and their disappearances are so conspicuous. By cultivating interest in these creatures, we might lead ourselves to better environmental conservation practices. Who knows…getting kids interested in frogs just might be what we need to save the whales.

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While Charles and Jennifer are fictitious characters, their stories are not unique. My intention in using them is to present backgrounds that most readers could relate to. I am providing a list of references for the reader’s convenience with information about and opportunities for involvement relating to amphibians. Thanks for reading.

Amphibian Resources:
treewalkers.org
amphibianark.org
amphibiancare.com

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Luke Balsavich has had an interest in herpetology since childhood. He lives in Madison, Wis. with his wife Jamie, two dogs, and some 70 or so frogs, lizards, and snakes. Any questions regarding this article or frogs in general can be addressed to lrbalsavich [at] gmail [dot] com.