Nature and Technology

When I was five years old, my dad, fearing I would get lost in the golf course and nature preserves that made up my backyard, pressed a compass and an area map to my hand and told me to familiarize myself with my surroundings. With nothing better to do (and dreading the alternative of being locked in my house all day with nothing but mindless cartoons), I set off through those paths and thickets, finding my way around the trees and shrubs, differentiating my landmarks by the type of trees in that area or by the unique assortment of pockmarked rocks.

It was nothing impressive, being the queen of my little vacant golf course-and-forest domain, but it was something. With that knowledge, I began to find my way around my neighborhood subdivision, swapping rocks and trees for neat, wide, concrete sidewalks and steeped-roofed houses.

Knowledge of nature was something innate, something that could only be truly learned through firsthand, visceral experience. And yet, sometime between then and now, I had lost it.

When I was about to back out of the garage the other day and reached out to turn on my GPS, I paused for a moment. Looking down my driveway, I realized that I had used my phone’s GPS every single day in the past four days—and that without it, I would be utterly lost. Hit with a sense of nostalgia and wanting to be able to navigate my way to Skokie as easily as I had navigated my neighborhood growing up, I began to realize that in that the ability to navigate myself around nature, once a predominant part of my childhood, was now one step removed from my life—and that technology had somehow filled that gap.

Does technology remove us from nature? I’m not sure. On one hand, technology helps us map places, categorize wildlife, and see gorgeous natural settings that would have been nearly impossible to see without the help of a camera and the internet. But on the other hand, I realize that in our quest to use technology to figure out nature, we’ve removed ourselves from it. This TIME article emphasizes naturalists’ fears that the middle-aged ecologists—the ones trained before the advent of technology—were perhaps the last generation to fully and truly experience themselves in wildlife—and not just in the technological knowledge of it. As wildlifers spend more time analyzing nature in front of a computer and less time actually in nature, it might diminish their true familiarity with their field.

Technology helps us know nature and our surroundings. But I fear that in our quest to know and not to experience, we are taking nature away from ourselves.