American Scientist

Ecologist Gary Paul Nabhan counts Robert Michael Pyle among those who “have followed in Thoreau’s path to build ever-stronger bridges between ecology and literature.” A lepidopterist as well as an acclaimed author, Pyle founded the Xerxes Society, which focuses on invertebrate conservation. In this passage, which is excerpted from an essay that was first published in Orion in 1982 and is reprinted in Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature, Pyle encourages readers to interact with the natural world and to broaden their idea of nature itself—a concept most Thoreauvian. For our online edition, we've included photos of the Wolf Road Prairie Nature Preserve, which is located in Westchester, Illinois, outside of Chicago, that did not appear our Aug–Sep 2017 print edition. In his essay Pyle mentions Wolf Road Prairie as an example of a natural area that remains accessible to nearby city dwellers.

I grew up on the wrong side of town. From the looks of the neighborhood, one might not have thought so. For me, though, the distinction was not one of class. I was a young butterfly hunter, and the Front Range canyons to the west of Denver are the scene of a butterfly ball, all summer long. But I lived on the prairie side of town, and those canyons might as well have been in Tibet. How I envied a friend who lived in a foothills suburb. He had only to walk out his door to see green hairstreak butterflies on Green Mountain.

I had to take my Rockies when I could get them. Mountain excursions had to be fitted into my father’s fishing trips or family drives. I drooled over the mountain ecology dioramas in the Denver Museum of Natural History and wistfully watched Mount Evans, which loomed ever so far away across the city. Unable to visit the mountains at will, I regarded myself as truly remote from nature.

After a few summers of such frustration, I discovered that the prairie ditches and leftover patches of grassland near my home offered their own attractions. Olympia marble wings, goatweed emperors, and chocolate, eye-spotted, wood nymphs dwelt there, along with other plains butterflies. The nearby Highline Canal infected me with a prairie mystique that I have carried with me ever since. In later teen years when mountain trips became more practical, I would even worry, while in the mountains, about what I was missing back home on the plains.

These early experiences taught me a lesson I have always valued: Remoteness from nature is mostly a state of mind. Of course, some conditions do isolate people from wildlife and natural landscapes. But I believe that almost anyone can get close to nature, given the will, and that everyone will benefit from doing so.

Distance can seem to represent an obstacle, but, as I have shown, separation from major wild areas need not prevent us from communing with nature close to home. It is often just a matter of subtle versus more spectacular rewards. Virtually all kinds of landscapes, urban as well as rural or wild, constitute habitats for some kinds of wildlife. Urban wildlife is becoming a major topic of study and interpretation in many cities, and the townscape is being appreciated for what it is: a complex, if highly disturbed, ecosystem.

Remoteness from nature is mostly a state of mind.

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Some of my most memorable nature rambles have taken place in cities. No park is so manicured as to be without interest, and every urban waterfront holds adventure for the naturalist. Rafts of western grebes and rhinoceros auklets bob among the ships in Seattle’s harbor. All Puget Sound is in the waves that lap against the wharves. Canoeing among the docks reveals an astonishing array of marine creatures that defy the pollution and abrasion of the busy port. Starfish and anemones cling to the pilings, and jellyfish balloon in the wake of the great ferries.

Of course city floras and faunas are impoverished, compared to those of wildlands, and the urban ethos never entirely retreats into the background. But even the settings of the natural world may be found in some towns. From the tallgrass remnant of Wolf Road Prairie in South Chicago to the boreal birchwoods of Moscow’s parks and periphery, the green gestalt of nature makes itself apparent in unlikely places the world over. The unofficial countryside can never replace the real thing, but no city-bound soul is completely cut off from the natural world.

Of all the isolates from nature, it is the time-paupers for whom I have least sympathy. Conservation agencies and groups are full of martyrs who no longer “have time” for the field. If activism, or any other pursuit, becomes so all-consuming that it comes between nature and the naturalist, it isn’t worth it. Not surprisingly, conservationists who make time for nature are far more effective at their work and lives than those who do not. Workaholics in any field always benefit in health and mind by trading an hour at their desks for one out of doors. This is a problem for self-help, and it can be easily overcome.

Inner remoteness from nature is an attitude that is harder to change. The nub of the problem is the same everywhere and for everyone: The world is too much with us. We are too preoccupied to hear nature’s music. During a recent visit to Lake Louise in Banff National Park, I was struck by the sharp differences in visitors’ attitudes. Some were clearly swept away by the scene. But a surprising number scanned the superb lake-and-glacier vista, snapped the obligatory photographs, and then, as their eyes glazed over, resumed conversations about the attributes of their rental cars or about the distance from their room to the ice machine. The only solution for this kind of alienation is consciously to clear the mind and make it ready for natural stimuli. For some, it takes a major spectacle to bring home nature’s reality—a visit to the Serengeti, the Great Barrier Reef, or a monarch butterfly grove. For others, subtler treatment may help: an experience entirely new and fresh to the senses, such as watching for the first time the Sun set over the sea, getting dripping wet with the moss in a rainforest glade, or settling into the hollow of a cottonwood tree in a hailstorm, or stroking a snake, or smelling a flower. The important thing is purposefully to expose oneself to such stimuli.

In most instances, we create our own remoteness from nature. Overcoming isolation from the real world—that of glaciers, petals, feathers—presents a challenge. Barriers must be surmounted, nictitating eyelids opened for good, imagination stoked and fanned. The wonder in all this is that nature is the best cure for all the conditions that keep us apart from her. We need only once to experience nature with any sense at all to know that we never need grow remote from her again.

From Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature, by Robert Michael Pyle. Copyright © 2016 by Oregon State University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.