Thought-provoking article, "Nature Deficit Disorder" from the New York Times, March 29, 2012. What do you think?
TUCSON — Your day breaks, your mind aches for something stimulating to match the stirrings of the season. The gate at the urban edge is open, here to the Santa Catalina Mountains, and yet you turn inward, to pixels and particle-board vistas.
Something’s amiss. A third of all American adults — check, it just went up to 35.7 percent — are obese. The French don’t even have a word for fat, Paul Rudnick mused in a mock-Parisian tone in TheNew Yorker last week. “If a woman is obese,” he wrote, “we simply call her American.”
And, of course, our national branding comes with a host of deadly side effects: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, certain kinds of cancer. Medical costs associated with obesity and inactivity are nearly $150 billion a year.
This grim toll is well known. Cripes: maybe surgery is the answer, or a menu of energy drinks and vodka (the Ann Coulter diet?). Count the calories. Lay off the muffins. Atkins one week, Slim-Fast the next. We spend more than $50 billion on the diet-industrial complex and have little to show for it (or too much).
But there is an obvious solution —....Read More
Replies
I am amazed at how many people do just tune out nature. I love listening to the sounds of nature all around me, even when walking from my car to my building on the college campus where I work. At this time of year the cardinals are making their calls to attract mates. I can I imitate the call using my sheep herders whistle often successfully enough to have the bird call back to me. Others around me look at me like I'm crazy,when I tell them what I'm doing, most of them say they never noticed the cardinal who was singing his heart out on a nearby tree.
I think many folks do suffer from nature deficit disorder.
Gail