{"id":8778,"date":"2015-03-15T19:00:30","date_gmt":"2015-03-15T23:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=8778"},"modified":"2015-03-21T18:04:44","modified_gmt":"2015-03-21T22:04:44","slug":"extinction-of-experience-does-it-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2015\/03\/15\/extinction-of-experience-does-it-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Extinction of Experience: Does it Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Right after I graduated from Cornell, I took off for the North Cascades wilderness. First as a student and later an instructor for the\u00a0National Outdoor Leadership School<\/a>, I spent summers in Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, ice climbing out of crevasses, backpacking through Pacific Northwest old growth forests, and scaling ancient volcanoes. For me, this was true wilderness.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The author rappelling into a crevasse in the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area. Courtesy of Marianne Krasny.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In my early 30s, I moved back to Ithaca, NY. Initially, I did not appreciate the rural upstate NY landscape\u2014compared to the North Cascades, the wild spaces were tame and pockmarked with ugly houses. Years later, I have come to find solace in nearby nature. This time of year, I gaze up at ice-veiled waterfalls and ski along frozen creeks. Still, compared to the North Cascades, these are but slivers of nature among neighborhoods. At night, they are bathed in city light. Have I become victim to \u201cextinction of experience?\u201d<\/p>\n

The lepidopterist Robert Pyle<\/a> first introduced the term \u201cextinction of experience\u201d in 1975, writing:<\/p>\n

“As cities and metastasizing suburbs forsake their natural diversity, and their citizens grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat. This breeds apathy toward environmental concerns and, inevitably, further degradation of the common habitat\u2026.So it goes, on and on, the extinction of experience sucking the life from the land, the intimacy from our connections… people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ecopsychologist Peter Kahn<\/a> describes a similar phenomenon, which he calls \u201cenvironmental generational amnesia.\u201d As each generation\u2019s experience of \u201cwildness\u201d is diminished\u2014as areas of intact wilderness are carved into smaller patches and eventually yards, and as children no longer gaze at stars in the night sky\u2014humanity\u2019s wildness \u201cbaseline\u201d shifts. Although Kahn recognizes vacant lots as places to experience \u201cwildness\u201d in cities, he, similar to Tim Beatley<\/a> in describing the nature pyramid<\/a>, argues:<\/p>\n

“Domestic, everyday, local nature\u2026 is \u2026 only half of what we need to flourish, as individuals and as a species. The other half that we need to keep alive\u2014in our experiences and in our language\u2014is the importance of wildness, of places that are large in scope, self-organizing, and unbounded, and autonomous and self-regulating systems, and of interactions that can be grand and awe inspiring and also frightening and difficult.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For many living in cities, Kahn\u2019s wildness\u2014\u201cthe other half that we need to keep alive\u201d\u2014is unattainable. Are city dwellers simply out of luck\u2014not able to flourish?<\/p>\n

For me, the opportunity to traverse glaciers, summit peaks, and hear the trilling<\/a> of the Swainson\u2019s thrush reverberate amongst towering old-growth, was a peak experience\u2014it enabled me to flourish. But 20 years after I left the Pacific Northwest to come back east, I had another experience that has also enabled me to flourish\u2014this time in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.<\/p>\n

\"Gallery<\/a>
A Hmong community gardener brings her planting and cultural traditions to a city in the US. Photo: Mark Whitmore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like my North Cascades experience, my Lower East Side experience was a nature experience\u2014but it was embedded in human culture. It was my first visit to a community garden. There I saw older Bangladeshi immigrants who had transplanted their intercropping traditions\u2014amaranth, pigeon peas, flowering coriander and marigolds\u2014to raised beds in New York City. For me, the cultural aspects of this experience were more powerful than\u2014yet still connected to\u2014nature. The immigrants were creating a sense of community through connecting to nature\u2014creating civic ecology<\/a> practices to support people and nature. A community garden is not Tim Beatley\u2019s idea of recreating unplanned ecological spaces in cities. Rather, community gardens represent the emergence of unplanned cultural spaces that connect to nature\u2014in ways that enable the spirit to flourish.<\/p>\n

Here is my dilemma. I know that even if my children were to go on a mountaineering expedition in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, their experience of wildness would be different than mine. They would experience human impacts\u2014glaciers retreating, species invading\u2014of which I was unaware. Although some may claim that my children\u2019s experience would simply be different, to me, it would be diminished. But does this matter?<\/p>\n

If our concern with extinction of experience is related to health, as Beatley\u2019s nature pyramid suggests, then I am less worried. I believe that urban places, perhaps especially the chaotic, self-organized places represented by community gardens and civic ecology practices more broadly, create new experiences that enable us to flourish.<\/p>\n

But if our concern, like Pyle\u2019s, is about what we will want to conserve, then we may need to embrace an urban reality. People in the future may work passionately to save a different kind of nature in cities\u2014one that celebrates human\u2019s caring for nature and communities. And whose acts of caring offer their own richness of experience.<\/p>\n

Marianne Krasny<\/strong>
\nIthaca<\/p>\n

On The Nature of Cities<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Right after I graduated from Cornell, I took off for the North Cascades wilderness. First as a student and later an instructor for the\u00a0National Outdoor Leadership School, I spent summers in Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, ice climbing out of crevasses, backpacking through Pacific Northwest old growth forests, and scaling ancient volcanoes. For me, this was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":8803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[300,273,298],"tags":[43,55,34,38],"coauthors":[216],"class_list":["post-8778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay-art-and-awareness","category-essay","category-essay-people-and-communitites","tag-awareness","tag-conservation","tag-experiencing-nature","tag-gardens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8778"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=8778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}