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By Root 376 0

glut of hurry has descended, he exhorts us to slow down and take notice, to learn how to watch seeds become trees. This is the kind of book that should be forced on students, probably against their will. When I recall my lizard-watching days I can sympathize with their restlessness, but I also long for all of us to rescue ourselves from the tyranny of impatience. Like cartoon characters, we seem to be running full tilt through the air beyond the edge of the cliff with our minds on something else. In Earth in the Balance, Al Gore poignantly discusses this detached relationship between humans and our earth. He reports that in a 1991 poll that asked the American people for their views about the role we should play in the world, an incredible 93 percent supported a proposal for “the U.S. using its position to get other countries to join together to take action against world environmental problems.” And yet at the same time, he writes, “Almost every poll shows Americans decisively rejecting higher taxes on fossil fuels, even though that proposal is one of the logical first steps in changing our policies in a manner consistent with a more responsible approach to the environment.” Is it possible we just couldn’t sit still long enough to make the connection?

Recently, as I gave a lecture to a college class on writing and environmental activism, a student asked me, “Why can’t we just teach people about this stuff in TV commercials?” The question was both naive and astute. As a nation we will never defer to the endangered spotted owl (let alone declare a National Squirrel Holiday, as Thoreau suggested) until we are much more widely educated. But the things we will have to know—concepts of food chain, habitat, selection pressure and adaptation, and the ways all species depend on others—are complex ideas that just won’t fit into a thirty-second spot. Evolution can’t be explained in a sound bite.

Even well-intentioned educational endeavors like carefully edited nature films, and the easy access to exotic animals offered by zoos, are tailored to our impatience. They lead us to expect nature will be all storm and no lull. It’s a dangerous habit. Natural-history writer Robert Michael Pyle asks: “If we can watch rhinos mating in our living rooms, who’s going to notice the wren in the back yard?”

The real Wild Kingdom is as small and brown as a wren, as tedious as a squirrel turning back the scales of a pine cone to capture its seeds, as quiet as a milkweed seed on the wind—the long, slow stillness between takes. This, I think, is the message in the bottle from Thoreau, the man who noticed a clump of seeds caught in the end of a cow’s whisking tail and wondered enviously what finds were presenting themselves to the laborers picking wool in nearby factories. “I do not see,” he wrote, “but the seeds which are ripened in New England may plant themselves in Pennsylvania. At any rate, I am interested in the fate or success of every such venture which the autumn sends forth.”

What a life it must have been, to seize time for this much wonder. If only we could recover faith in a seed—and in all the other complicated marvels that can’t fit in a sound bite. Then we humans might truly know the glory of knowing our place.

CAREFUL WHAT YOU LET IN THE DOOR

Once in a while I’ve heard people in my profession claim, with the back of a hand thrown across their foreheads, that it’s a curse to be a writer. I am inclined to tell them: Get real. It’s a curse to be one of those people who have to put asphalt on the highway with what looks like the back of a janitor’s broom in the middle of July. I’ve never done that, and I’m deeply happy about it. But I have held about twenty jobs in my life that I might call a curse, including babysitting a pair of twins named Aristotle and Alexander, who had the energy and will of spider monkeys and a language of their own invention; also, scrubbing toilets for people who spoke of me as The Cleaning Lady. (I was barely twenty years old; in no other setting did I get called, at that time, a lady.) If there’s no statute