Day 7 of 7: Challenge on Nature Photography.

Eagles, Amery, Wisconsin – 1973

For the past six days I have shared my appreciation of nature with you. For my final day in this nature photography challenge I’m going to share a personal story about how I developed that appreciation and my concerns that today’s generation doesn’t share that love of nature. I’ll bend the rules of the challenge a bit. I said at the beginning that I was more interested in writing stories than showing my pics. So I’m not going to show a photo of nature but instead going to show an old blurry photo of my mate Dan York and me and our parents which I did not even take but which means a lot to me.

When I was a boy growing up in California, my dad would tell stories about how he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. He would show me his badges and his old scout manuals and tell stories about his adventures in Sea Scouts and how that led him to become a deep sea diver and explorer of the ocean. I was so impressed and wanted to be just like my dad. Dad and Mom enrolled me in Cub Scouts as soon as I was old enough and soon I had my first outdoor adventure in Yosemite National Park. Dad and I then moved to Alaska where I enrolled in the local Cub Scouts and learned all kinds of outdoor skills.

By the time I was 10, I moved to Wisconsin and got a new dad who was equally supportive of my involvement in Scouts. I didn’t have any friends but joined the local Webelos Scout group where I met my life-time friend Dan York.

For the next seven years Dan and I lived and breathed Scouts and the outdoors. Scouts gave us the opportunity to learn how to live in the outdoors and enjoy nature. It gave us reason to get off our butts and away from our television sets and get outside. We learned skills in canoeing, hiking, knife and axe handling, swimming, lifesaving, first aid, knot tying, cooking, nature and even basket weaving. When summer came we seemed to spend more time living in a tent than in our beds. In 1973 when we were both still 15, Dan and I attained Scout’s highest rank – the Eagle Scout. By the time we were 16 we were experts in scoutcraft and spent two summers as counsellors at a scout camp in northern Wisconsin.

Those early days in Scouts helped instil in me a lifelong passion for the outdoors and nature and I recognise now as I did then that the best thing I did as a boy and young man was to become involved in Scouts.

Scouts alone though didn’t instil in me an appreciation for the environment. Dan and I spent our formative years riding the wave of the Earth Movement. I can still remember the first Earth Day in April of 1970; my sixth grade class at Amery Elementary participated. The founder of Earth Day and one of the US’s greatest environmentalists, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, was from a town a mere eight miles away so how could we miss it. We rode the environmental movement throughout the 1970s as it gained steam and it helped teach us how to live while creating a minimal impact on our planet.

But then came the 1980s and a new generation who seemed to have other priorities in life. Gaylord Nelson lost his bid for re-election in 1980 and Ronald Reagan pledged to reverse much of President Jimmy Carter’s environmental agenda. I didn’t like the direction the country was taking so I joined the Peace Corps and left the country and helped the Costa Ricans who were just starting a new wave of interest in protecting the environment.

Just as my father had done, I tried to instil an interest in Scouts and nature in my son, Joseph. As soon as he was old enough I enrolled him in Joey Scouts – the Aussie version of Cub Scouts. For a year or so, Joseph and I had some good times joining the Scouts on camping trips and he was beginning to learn some of those scoutcraft skills which I have used throughout my life. But the call of nature no longer seemed to be as loud as it was for those of my generation or my father’s. Joseph felt lonely in Scouts as none of his school mates showed any interest in communing with nature. Scouting eventually had to compete with all of the other activities that kids get involved with these days and Scouts lost out.

All was not lost as when Joseph entered high school he immediately joined his school’s Exploration Society and learned to camp, rock climb, spelunk and mountain bike and just appreciate being out in wild places. The sad part of it was that often Joe was on the receiving end of some teasing about his interest in nature and adventure. It just doesn’t seem ‘cool’ these days to be interested in such things and it certainly seems that today’s youth would much rather seek out a new app for their smartphone than to go searching for an elusive pasque flower or climb a mountain.

I do however see a new wave of interest in nature and the environment as displayed by world leaders in the recent COP21 conference. It’s enlightening to see that there are those, like President Obama, who do appreciate that if we don’t act now our children will have to resort to historical images when the next Seven Days of Nature Photography Challenge comes around.