The Tragic Loss of “Wilderness” in our Lives
“Human beings over the course of their evolution have had frequent contact with a wide variety of wild animals and plant species and ecosystem structures. These were and are intricately bound up in what and how human beings are. Such contact generates specific types of responses in people that have been a part of human experience since our species began. As the number of wild animals, plants, and healthy ecosystems are depleted - as local ecosystems become homogenized - children have less and less occasion to come into contact with them. (In those instances where children could have access to wild ecosystems they often spend the majority of their time in school or watching television, and as a result have little time for interacting with the ecosystems around them). There is then no activating factor to generate Biophilia [a love for and bonding with nature]. Though children do often have contact with domesticated house pets, house plants, and the lawns surrounding their houses, this is not the same thing. If you have ever had the opportunity to look into a wolf’s or coyote’s eyes, even in a zoo, it is immediately apparent that they are significantly different in nature from dogs.
A two-thousand-year-old tree or an ecosystem filled with a tumultuous, complex riot of interacting plant species feels markedly different from a lone sapling, surrounded by the grass planted in the front yard of a new housing development, or the Norfolk pine in the corner of the kitchen. The green orderly lawns surrounding children’s homes do not bear any relationship to the up and down uneven landscapes filled with giant, craggy outcroppings of the immeasurably ancient stones of Earth that wild landscapes often possess.”
…Steven Harrod Buhner, 2002 - The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth, p. 65.