MONTHLY LETTER

A Knowledge of Nature

People today are flocking to the outdoors ingreater numbers than ever. Yet many comeunprepared to find the adventure whichnature holds. An appreciation of naturallife is a continuing source of interest andenjoyment. It may also provide a bulwarkagainst the threatened destruction ofmankind...

[] In The Mammals of Canada, the Canadiangovernment’s compendious official publication onthat subject, there is an entry under the headingof ~Primates". Apes in Canada? No, but one familyof the primate order does inhabit this country:Hominids, or men. The author, A. W. F. Banfield,tells us that all primates require long maternalcare and are gregarious, highly vocal, and omnivo-rous. Man is set apart from others of this generaltype by his ~great manual dexterity, a sophisti-cated degree of intercommunication by means ofspeech, and the power of reason", Dr. Banfieldadds.

This affords a refreshing, although incomplete,perspective on the status of the human race in theworld -- as just one kind of creature living amongcountless others. It also points to a philosophicalapproach for individual human beings concernedabout the survival of a life support system whichdoes not belong to us alone. Obviously the scopeof the work did not permit Dr. Banfield to go intothe details of the characteristics which givehumans their unique place in the global schemeof things. These include man’s use of mechanicsand chemistry, which accounts for his astonishingmobility. Humans may carry their own environ-ment with them wherever they go.

This portable environment permits man toinvade the habitats of the rest of the earth’screatures. So far in history such invasions have

been destructive to other living things; a centuryago, for example, huge herds of buffalo still rovedthe Canadian plains. Short of the outright exter-mination of other species, man has ravaged theirenvironment. Salmon once swam in the Seine, theRhine, the Thames and the Hudson. Wild turkeysand puma once lived in southern Ontario. Thatmighty warrior of the wilds, the wolverine, onceranged throughout Canada, with the exception ofpart of the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland.

In his incessant thrusting for more living spaceand his obsession with his own perceived welfare,man ousted these and all sorts of other wildlifefrom the homes nature had provided for them.People gave little thought to the possibility ofsharing the land. They wanted it all and they gotit; and in the process they created their ownwastelands. Amid the confines of the cities therearose concrete jungles more dangerous to life andlimb than the natural kind.

Lately, however, the human invasion of thenatural world has grown more peaceful. In an in-creasing number of national parks and other suchpreserves, the rest of creation is offered at least ashare of nature’s wealth. The interrelationshipsbetween human and other life forms have at lastbecome widely recognised. We no longer labourunder what Oliver Wendell Holmes called ~thedelusion that human life is under all circum-stances to be preferred to vegetable existence."

It has finally dawned on us that we cannot persistin devastating the conditions of life for wild thingswithout to some extent devastating the conditionsof life for ourselves.

Most educated people now know that man mustcease behaving like a bull in a china shop. As aresult, greater public consideration is being givento the environmental consequences of human acts.But apart from that, there is a growing recognitionof man’s deep-seated need for nature. In the longrun, this may be the salvation of us all.

Among the faculties which the human speciespossesses and others do not is something calledthe spirit. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as the"animating or vital principle of man; intelligent orimmaterial part of man; soul". Call it what youwill, it is there; and the human spirit needs beautyand tranquillity as the human body needs foodand water. People deprived of spiritual sustenanceare subject to emotional distress, and are prone toharm themselves by attempting to satisfy theemptiness they feel by reaching for placebos suchas drugs.

The spiritually undernourished are usuallyfound in cities. In North America today, most ofus are obliged for economic reasons to live in largeconcentrations of population whether we like it ornot. The more we cram ourselves into urbansurroundings, the more we need a lifeline to theoutdoors to find the satisfaction that comes ofbeing rounded human beings. We need fresh air --not so much for our bodies as for our minds.

It is heartening to observe that--in NorthAmerica, at least -- more and more urban dwellersare now responding to this spiritual requirement.Every summer the roads fill up with cars carryingtents and canoes on their roof racks and haulinghouse or boat trailers, self-propelled "campers"and the like. Young people tramping the land withpacks on their backs are to be found in the mostout-of-the-way places. Add to these the greatnumbers of urban dwellers who go to summercottages and other country retreats, and it allamounts to a mass movement back to nature. It isperhaps the healthiest social development, bothphysically and psychologically, in many years.

Yet, having sought out nature, many peopleseem to be somewhat at a loss when they find it.Their education has not equipped them to appre-ciate the world of interest that is all around themoutdoors. Severed from their television and stereosets (although some, indeed, carry these imple-ments with them) they tend to find life in the lapof nature rather boring. It is anything but- asthey would find out if they brought along a fewreadily-available and inexpensive nature guidebooks to consult.

A boy can identify every car,but not the trees and flowers

It reflects badly on the order of priorities inour society that a schoolboy can tell you the brandnames of all the cars on the road but cannotidentify any but the most familiar trees and wild-flowers. This is because, generally speaking, theeducational system of North America is squeezedindoors to a degree which stifles young minds.Few schools take advantage of the vast classroomof the outdoors to teach the things that reallymatter -- the basics of life on a threatened planet.Children study insect larvae and tadpoles in papercups inside a classroom instead of having theirknowledge filled out by examining the complexenvironment in which these creatures actuallylive.

This is a pity, because a child is normallynature’s most avid student. Every parent knowsthe propensity of small children to bring homecaterpillars, grasshoppers, toads and other smallliving things. But parents rarely encourage thisinstinctive attraction by imparting a knowledge ofnature to their children. Too often, the interest ofchildren in the natural world is diverted by theexample of their elders into a concentration on theinanimate objects that money will buy.

’~To speak truly, few adult persons can seenature," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. "The sunilluminates only the eye of the man, but shinesinto the eye and the heart .of the child." Childrenshould be led to explore the manifold mysteries ofnatural life while their curiosity is still blooming.A child thus prepared may grow into Emerson’sideal nature lover: "He whose inward and outwardsenses are truly adjusted to each other, who hasretained the spirit of infancy even into the era ofadulthood."

This surely is the fundamental reason forpeople of all ages to learn something of nature: tokeep their minds fresh by feeding their sense ofwonder. There are wonderful things all around us,if only we could see. What may be commonplaceto one man may be a living miracle to another.In his 1939 book Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoinede Saint-Exup~ry told of how he had talked tosome Bedouin chieftains on their return to theNorth African desert from a tour of France. Saint-Exup~ry expected them to be full of admiration forthe achievements of civilization they had witness-ed. But, he said, they evinced a ~’freezing indif-ference" to the Eiffel Tower, the steamships, thelocomotives. "What they thought admirable wasnot a locomotive, but a tree. When you think ofit, a tree does possess a perfection that a locomotivedoes not know."

Nature’s mysteries are partof its endless fascination

Coming from a land which offers easy access toa rich variety of natural settings, Canadians inparticular tend to take the wonders of nature forgranted. For example, the most common tree of theCanadian Shield, the black spruce, is a marvel ofendurance in the struggle for survival in the wilds.Everything around this unimposing tree seems toconspire towards its extinction. Squirrels clip offits cones; spruce grouse eat the seeds it scatters;matted caribou moss prevents the seeds it doesmanage to spread from penetrating the soil. Highwinds often blow it up from its shallow roots; yetit will grow on practically bare rock and on thefringes of the tundra. If a black spruce canpropagate itself no other way, its life force istransmitted through its lower branches. When anold tree falls over, the branches send roots into thesoil to become new trees in their own right.

As familiar an animal as a porcupine is a trulyintriguing phenomenon. The porcupine is a typi-cally tropical rodent from South America whichhas somehow managed to adapt itself to conditionsas far north as the Arctic tree line. Perhaps itsforeign origin is what makes it so formidable. Agrown porcupine carries up to 30,000 quills withwhich to repel its predators. The painful shock ofreceiving a dose of these quills causes an animalthat touches it to recoil, allowing the porcupinetime to waddle safely away.

Unlikely as it seems, the porcupine is a killer.The quills can spell slow death to the most power-ful timber wolf or the cleverest fox by dooming itto die of starvation because it is unable to eat,or by working their way into its brain. It is saidthat only one Canadian animal can kill a porcupinewith impunity. This is the big member of theweasel family called the fisher, which has devel-oped the knack of flipping porcupines over on theirbacks and attacking the unprotected underside.

Why one creature alone should be able to do this,no one knows -- but such mysteries are part of theendless fascination of nature. It is impossible foran intelligent person not to stand in awe of itsmysterious logic, which goes far beyond humanken. A flight of wild geese is a study in aerody-namics. The leader of the ~’V" formation breakstrail through the air, and each bird thereaftergains ~lift" from the updraft created by the wingaction of the one in front of it. Being the leaderis not easy, and that is why you will see thebirds change the lead position periodically, as if bypre-arrangement. It all works so smoothly thatspectators rarely stop to ponder what a remarkablesystem it is.

Nature is full of secrets to tantalize the in-quiring mind. Many creatures specialize in de-ception. That beautiful copper-coloured butterflymay be what is known as a monarch- but thenagain it may not. The caterpillars of the monarchfeed on milkweed plants. As adults they contain apoison from the milkweed which kills predatorssuch as birds, frogs and bats. Most predators havelearned not to touch a monarch. So non-poisonousbutterflies like the viceroy "mimic" its appearanceto frighten their own predators away.

The little things of life areas interesting as the big ones

In the natural world, things are often not as theyappear. If one sees a couple of squirrels scurryingabout, it looks as if they are merely frolicking.But there could be a story behind it. Squirrelshave a streak of larceny and steal from oneanother’s food stores. When one squirrel chases

another up and down a tree, there is a goodchance that the pursuer has caught the pursuedburglarizing his stock of groceries, and is goingafter him with blood in his eye. It is usually asharmless as an animated cartoon, however. Theburglar is seldom caught.

The little things in nature are every bit asinteresting as the bigger ones. A tiny dragonflynymph in a puddle will gorge itself at a rate ofa thousand insect eggs an hour. It is a model ofspeed and efficiency, employing jet propulsion todart about after its quarry. The nymph drawswater through a vent in its tail, then expels it toshoot forward. At the same time it unlimbers asinister-looking hinged device with pinchers at theend to grasp its prey and stuff it into its mouth.

Man may only expand his placein creation at his own risk

Assuming that it survives the attentions of itsmany predators, the nymph will grow up to becomethe scourge of flies and mosquitos. A dragonflyis a superbly-equipped hunter, hovering like ahelicopter on its double wings and gobbling up allthe smaller flying insects that come within reach ofits long grasping "arms". It has a straightforwarddigestive tract which enables it to eat fantasticnumbers of other insects. One is reported to havebeen found with more than a hundred mosquitosin its mouth.

Nature, then, holds few dull moments for thosewho get to know it. For 26 months in the mid-1840s a man named Henry David Thoreau lived onthe edge of a New England pond. He was aneducated man in conventional terms, but heremarked of Harvard University, where he hadstudied, that it "taught all the branches but noneof the roots". His real education, he felt, came fromthe time he spent at the pond studying nature.

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"I went to the woods," he explained, "because Iwished to live deliberately, to front only theessential facts of life, and to see if I could notlearn what it had to teach, and not, when I cameto die, discover that I had not lived."

He learned a great deal, which he passed on toposterity in his masterpiece, Walden: or, Life in theWoods. The surprising thing about Walden Pondwas that it was only two miles from the centre ofthe town of Concord, Massachussetts. Thoreau feltno need to go to the unexplored wilderness to findthe lessons in life which nature has to teach.Within earshot of the church bells of Concord,there was nothing very exotic. His food for thoughtcame from considering the ways of worms andwater bugs, of squirrels and chickadees. He filledseveral pages of his book with his observations ofa battle between two types of ants.

Walden was Thoreau’s theatre, his art gallery,his classroom. It held his interest constantly; yet,if he had not worked at gaining a knowledge ofhis natural neighbours, he might have hated theplace. If he had not turned over the occasional logto see what was underneath, or not known onebird from another, he would never have furtheredhis understanding of the human condition. As itwas, he came away knowing the great secret oflife on earth, that it is one and indivisible. Inthe "restless, nervous, bustling, trivial NineteenthCentury" in which he lived, he showed a rareawareness of the fact that man could only expandhis place in creation at his own risk.

That century has now been succeeded by anotherin which human transgressions against thenatural order have been pushed close to the pointof self-destruction. It has become a plain matterof survival for man to learn the limitations ofhis role in the world. We cannot all be Thoreaus;but there should be a little of the Thoreau in allof us if we are to make the earth safe for cominggenerations. People who know about nature knowabout the thread that connects all living matter.And they know, too, just how delicate and irrepa-rable that thread can be.

©THE ROYAL BANK OF CANADA 1978/PRINTED IN CANADA