Another Rationale for the Book
The best (only?) way to get a basic (if rudimentary) working knowledge of the ecological processes operating in your neighborhood is to live there a very long time while keeping your eyes open, and supplement with extra bits and pieces your parents and grandparents have picked up during their lives in the same place. If that sounds like a tall order (or even absurdly improbable), it wasn’t always. In fact, that was pretty much the way things worked, even here in California, until very recently; and fortunately, it is still the way things work in some parts of the world even today.
What was once common knowledge about how the natural world operates and who were the players on the local scene has in the space of a few generations deteriorated into a new Dark Age of ignorance—even as we modern cybernauts are congratulating ourselves on how much MORE we know than our forebears. I have no doubt that the average small-town 10-year-old in 1920 knew volumes more about the local flora and fauna than the average college-educated 40 year old in 1990.
The recent trend has been accelerating toward disconnection with the “real” world and inevitably, increasing ignorance about it. We have come almost overnight to the point where most of us get way more of our “knowledge” and even our “experience” (if you could call it that) from screens (TV, movie, computer) than we do from the real, three-plus-dimension world right outside the window.
To be fair, for many of us, there is precious little remaining outside out windows that could be called “natural”, but no matter how deadly bleak the (sub)urban environment you may live in, nobody in California is very far away from not one but many different kinds of “natural” landscapes.
Even the nature programs on TV do little to remedy the situation or to connect you with your nearest “wild” neighbors. Growing up on only this limited fare, a kid might think that the only animals out there are in Africa or the ocean and all of them are big enough to eat you. As for plants, fungi, worms, rocks . . . what are they? In any case, the TV experience is as far removed from the real thing as you can get—the “real” experience you are getting from this is the experience of sitting on a soft couch in an air-conditioned house, looking at a little rectangle with flickering colored lights; it has nothing to do with experiencing “nature” at all.
And don’t imagine that you can remedy the situation by taking a course or reading a book (even this one) or talking to an “expert”. Least of all, don’t trust your own assumptions (a lot of truths are counter-intuitive) or the “pop-wisdom” of the moment, most of which is drawn from other peoples’ assumptions and propagated endlessly through word of mouth and media.
The intent and purpose of this book is to set out some starting points and tips and shortcuts for any of you who expect to have some (hopefully positive) interaction with the natural world, mostly things that a little direct experience would have given you long ago if you’d had the exposure . . . or hadn’t had the exposure to politically correct (or other) misinformation. If you already have ideas, keep an open mind to new, unfamiliar ones, even if they sound a little iconoclastic at first. The only real teacher is Nature—our job (and our greatest joy) is to spend our lives sitting at her feet, listening.
The real world is __________’s best-kept secret. The rewards are great, and they increase exponentially as your frame of reference expands!
