{"id":985,"date":"2015-04-02T12:41:03","date_gmt":"2015-04-02T20:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.unbc.ca\/huber\/?p=985"},"modified":"2015-04-02T12:41:03","modified_gmt":"2015-04-02T20:41:03","slug":"of-dictionaries-buttercups-and-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/?p=985","title":{"rendered":"Of dictionaries, buttercups, and time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps it\u2019s because I live in a small city<\/a> that is variegated with forests and that is surrounded for hundreds or thousands of kilometers in each direction with wilderness.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because my own kids are fortunate enough \u2013 in this increasingly technology-cloistered time \u2013 to be able to spend large chunks of time outdoors, often with minimal adult supervision.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because I work at an institution<\/a> whose founding vision was towards the natural world around us; and with immediate colleagues who all spend a great deal of their research time in the outdoors.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because I work in a field where my closest research colleagues nearby and abroad conduct much of their work in forests, fens, and farmyards.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because many of the scientists who have influenced me most \u2013 past and present \u2013 approach their craft with a view to nature in its full and complex glory.<\/p>\n

Just look at my personal<\/a> Twitter community and you will find entomologists, ecologists, zoologists, botanists, microbiologists, paleontologists, archeologists, geologists, astronomers\u2026 and the list goes on. These are all people who \u2013 while much of their work is necessarily indoors \u2013 cannot answer the questions that they ask of nature without also spending time in nature. And these are a partially representative sample of the people who have influenced me.<\/p>\n

So I think that I am often a bit blind to the reality of much of the world where increasing detachment from nature is commonplace. A world where, to quote T.S. Eliot<\/a>, we are all becoming more and more \u201cdistracted from distraction by distraction.\u201d It\u2019s pretty easy, but not excusable, in my situation to forget that the larger culture beyond my family, colleagues, and vocation is changing in ways that bode longterm ill.<\/p>\n

This \u2013 perhaps subconsciously willful or wishful or wistful? \u2013 blindness on my part hit home a month or two ago when I bumped into this article by Robert MacFarlane<\/a> in which he describes and eloquently comments on the removal of a variety of \u201cnature\u201d words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary<\/a>. Some of those words are:<\/p>\n

\u2026acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

New words have taken their place \u2013 words that are corporate-economic, screen-driven, and solitary-making.<\/p>\n

(As an aside, I deeply shudder that \u201ccommittee\u201d is among those replacement words. Please, let children grow up without that abomination infesting them until they\u2019re at least in high school.)<\/p>\n

The reality, of course, is that removal of a few words by a dictionary is not the cause of the problem, it is merely a symptom. Dictionaries change over time, and they change in a way that reflects the culture in which they exist. If new words emerge and come into common usage, they may show up in a dictionary. If words become unused, they may disappear from the pages or at least be marked as archaic. So what do the recent changes to the Oxford Junior Dictionary mean? I think it\u2019s fair to say that it means that school-aged children \u2013 the target audience of this dictionary \u2013 aren\u2019t holding buttercups under chins. They aren\u2019t catching amphibians. They aren\u2019t listening to birds. They aren\u2019t playing games among tangles of willows. They are, instead, being influenced toward corporatized indoor loneliness instead of towards a corporate outdoor solitude.<\/p>\n

This is is not just happening to the younger generation. If each of us were honest with ourselves, I expect that many \u2013 most? all? \u2013 of us would also see a shift in our own behavior in fairly recent years. This shift is happening at a time when the conservation crisis is more dire than ever. I don\u2019t imagine that the co-occurrence of detachment and mounting environmental crisis is merely a coincidence. A detached and consumer-driven culture is by definition concerned with distracted consuming, not mindful conserving. How could rampant consumerism, then, ever contribute to conservation of the uncommodifiable natural world? Why should we expect a commercialized, buy-and-dispose attitude to instill exuberant appreciation of nature in its citizens, young and old?<\/p>\n

As my former Ph.D. supervisor<\/a> often says (I\u2019m paraphrasing here, and he may be quoting someone else, but I\u2019m not aware of who that would be):<\/p>\n

Nature always answers your question, but you need to know what your question is or you will misinterpret the answer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My worry is that most of the people who we rub shoulders with each day are less and less equipped to even recognize that nature is speaking to us, let alone to know how to ask the correct questions. So I, along with others, interpret the unfortunate nature-stripping of the Oxford Junior Dictionary as a bellwether and a challenge. The challenge for those of us who are concerned with conservation is to step beyond our small communities, which are not representative of the rest of society, and to incrementally bring a conservation mindset to our own family, friends, and neighbors.<\/p>\n

Our shifting culture is a reality, and it would be magical thinking to insist that things are going to change anytime soon, or ever. A few in our concerned community have larger megaphones than others, and we need to encourage and help them to get the word out. But nothing beats the influence that each of us has on our immediate community, and it is there where most of us can work effectively.<\/p>\n

If*:<\/p>\n

Persuasiveness \u221d (Closeness of a trusted relationship)(Efficacy of the message)<\/p>\n

then either factor in the equation can work in our favor.<\/p>\n

We should each do our best with efficacy, of course. But we can also take comfort in the fact that however effective our message is, its impact is going to be multiplied by by our relationships. In other words, don\u2019t worry about how loud your megaphone is. Whispering to a close friend still has more impact than shouting in a crowded room of near-strangers.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014
\n*Addendum:<\/p>\n

Time spent in relationship is a factor in the\u00a0development of close trust in a relationship.<\/p>\n

Practice is a factor in increasing the efficacy of a message, and time is a factor in practice.<\/p>\n

So one can argue that time is a factor in persuasiveness. If that is the case, then it behooves us to dispense with looking for insta-fixes and instead buck the culture of the here-and-now for approaches in which we take time deeply into consideration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps it\u2019s because I live in a small city that is variegated with forests and that is surrounded for hundreds or thousands of kilometers in each direction with wilderness. Perhaps it\u2019s because my own kids are fortunate enough \u2013 in this increasingly technology-cloistered time \u2013 to be able to spend large chunks of time outdoors, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Of dictionaries, buttercups, and time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,15,17,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservation","category-natural-history","category-opinion","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huber.opened.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}