Valuing Nature

Through many of my formative years my parents were part of a CSA that required its members to spend a certain amount of time in the fields working for their share. While I strongly detested the fresh chard and other products of my parent’s hard work, I detested tagging along to the farm even more. The parents of my childhood best friends were also contributing members in this CSA. This meant our stay at home mothers would put on their work clothes maybe once or twice a week throughout the summer and force us all into the Volvo to carpool out into the country. The farm, in my memory, was hell on earth. It was always hot and intensely boring. As our parents, usually mothers, weeded and watered, the kids tended to get a little “Lord of the Flies” on each other. There was rarely a work day that went by that someone didn’t end up in tears with an incredible number of burrs in their hair. One summer when I was about eleven had been particularly unbearable. Maybe it was hotter than most years or we had just grown tired of each other sooner, but those farm days were becoming brutal. Our mothers had grown so tired of us and our complaints they encouraged/forced us to go out and explore.

We had previously been forbidden to wander beyond the confines of the barn or the fields they happened to be working in. This new license to explore meant we could venture into the woods that abut the fields. After having spent a summer hanging out in an overheated barn or in the fields bothering our parents, this felt like a dream. And the woods did not disappoint. We found an oasis, an area where a beautiful creek ran through the woods. We climbed trees, waded in the water, and built forts of fallen branches. We spotted a few deer, a multitude of insects, and an alarming number of snakes. The place seemed entirely private and untouched. Having grown up in a densely populated urban neighborhood, our interactions with the ‘wild’ were limited. What we found entirely changed our opinions of all that nature had to offer. The magic of that spot is something we, my friends and our respective siblings, still discuss when we all make the obligatory Thanksgiving migration back to our hometown. This experience in nature really began my love of the natural world. It is something I value and hope that we can conserve into the future. Unfortunately, there are many who do not share this value of preservation of the natural world and instead look to what we can take from nature or how it can be manipulated to suit our needs. I think changing this viewpoint and valuing nature for what it is instead of what it can offer is a large obstacle.