Thursday 12 August 2010

You can only love what you know

It’s August, the holiday season, when many of us will be taking trips to the coast and spending time next to the oceans. Many of us will even go “rockpooling” or fishing with a small net. The oceans are a source of fascination for many of us, harbouring strange and colourful animals. I am amazed at how early this fascination can begin. My two daughters, aged 3, now regularly demand to look at the “shark book” or the “fish book” and both will sit either side of me and identify “hammerhead shark” “leopard shark” or “blue shark”. They are particularly fascinated by the shark’s large teeth and that sharks are a bit scary and might eat you, which of course happens very rarely (even more rarely nowadays that we have decimated many shark populations). Their capacity to absorb information is a constant source of surprise to me. They are also identifying eels, stingrays, corals, sea anemones and sea horses. Of course, it helps when your dad is a marine biologist.

Several things occur to me when the girls are displaying proto-marine biologist behaviour. The first is what will the oceans look like when they are my age or older. Unfortunately, at the present rate of degradation, the oceans will be a poor place even compared to today. Many corals reefs will be gone completely. Those remaining will be under severe stress and probably a mix of coral and algal species, a shadow of the reefs my wife and I dived on when I was younger. Wild-caught fish will be a rare and expensive luxury. Many more stocks will be gone with some projections suggesting that all the major fish stocks targeted today will have collapsed by 2050. Dead zones will have spread, as will the toxic red tides that poison everything they come into contact with. It’s a pretty depressing picture and it is the future generations that will suffer from our carelessness.

The other thing that occurs to me is that young children have an innate fascination with the natural world. I guess mine are very lucky in that they are privileged to live in a comfortable house, they have plenty to eat and have parents that are interested in their welfare. This fascination is stimulated by the fact that mum and dad will answer all their questions on what animals they see and so on and they will take an active interest in what they are looking at and doing (snails are particularly popular, being examined for many minutes while they come out of their shells, as are butterflies, which are pursued around the garden, and froglets). It is great that such young people are so interested in the world they live in, which begs a further question. Why is it that so many people seem to lose interest in the world they live in when they get older? This of course is not a simple question. Life for many of us is fast-paced and stressful. Getting a few minutes to consider our place in the world and how to live in it is difficult. We’re bombarded by a huge advertising (brain-washing) machine to attempt to attain a lifestyle lived by the “rich and famous”. This happens to such an extent that many of us will buy luxuries that we cannot afford even to the detriment of basic requirements for life, such as nutritious food. Amazing.

There are many people (I am no exception), organisations, and even the governments calling for changes in our lifestyles, to live a life of lower consumption of resources, and pointing to various aspects of the degradation and destruction of the natural world. Many people now simply switch off when the next environmental doom story is put before them in the media. This is because these events do not affecting them directly but moreover, I am convinced in many cases it is because they have ceased caring. Perhaps we are targeting the wrong people or more correctly the wrong generation of people. Education about the importance of the Earth in supporting life, including human life, and the role which plants, animals and ecosystems have in maintaining the Earth system must begin at the earliest age. Only then will people grow up with enough passion about the environment that they actually care about the way in which they live. As the saying goes, you can only love and care for what you know about. It was how I got interested in the oceans. Spending hours on a small beach in Ireland and time out fishing with my grandfather and uncles and even, dare I say it, sitting in front of the TV with interested parents watching the “World About Us”, “Jaques Cousteau” and “Life on Earth”.


2 comments:

  1. Alex,

    The are too busy eating fast food, watching Jersey Shore or looking at their stock portfolio to care. I have raised my children to care but most of their friends have conserviative parents (GOP) thus our family is "wierd liberal tree huggers". Well, being able to say, " I told you so" when the Earth burns will not be a victory in 30 years. Keep up the good fight but I am afraid we are vastly outnumbered.

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  2. Dr. Rogers

    What would you suggest would be the method to get people to understand how to grasp the severity of this situation and to change course? I see the threat not so much as a major threat to me , 53 here, but more to the threats that my children will face in the coming years. I have pushed my family, as best as I can, to adopt methods of lessening our impact, (now with solar panels on my house), but it still seems like too little too late. I have worked in the public on other issues in the past, during the 70's & 80's on nuclear weapons proliferation, but I see that in this new report, the threat strikes me as being a greater threat to humankind's, as well as many other species, continued existence in the long term. And I know well how difficult it was to get the public to understand that threat so many years ago, and yet that threat still has not been removed.

    In the US Congress we still have individuals like the Sen. from Oklahoma, who deny the threat we face and actively work against the ability of people to get information out. Working in a library, I always put books out that have information on the topic and see very few people take them out. It is always disheartening to see that reality even in a state here in the USA, (Connecticut), that prides itself on a degree of awareness on these issues. I see the information as critical, but few share my concern.

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