A choice: Squirrels or the internet? - Keith Roulston editorial

Two items recently struck me when I read about them on the internet. In one, Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee celebrated the birth of his twin granddaughters, hoping they would grow to enjoy watching the squirrels outside their window. In the other story, a teenager spent six hours a day using her phone to keep up with the world.

 

Modern technology is wonderful in helping us stay on top of what is happening in the world, but it can also block us from seeing the wonder of the world around us, like the squirrels in our yard or the birds in the trees.

 

We can mark the generations through the improvements in communications. Two hundred years ago, the first newspapers gave us a view of the world beyond what we could personally see. Then came the telegraph and telephone expanding the parameters of the speed that news could travel from remote areas to our homes.

 

Radio increased the speed and my grandparents could actually listen to the raucous blustering of Adolf Hitler in Germany, as well as watch his histrionics in newsreels at their local movie theatre.

 

The establishment of television and the development of the atom bomb both happened in the 1940s and as homes got television, we also got news about the latest tensions between our allies and the Communists in Russia, Eastern Europe and China.

 

By the 1960s and 1970s, television brought to our homes visual evidence of the horrors of the war between Communists and non-Communists in Vietnam and the thousands of Americans who were dying.

 

After that war ended with a capitulation to the Communists, the development of modern communications, including the first home computers, then the growing power and declining expense of these changed the way we live. We got used to the internet and what it could serve up. The Blackberry opened the world of the telephone to more than just voice communications.

 

I remember going to a newspaper convention around about 2009 and having an early-adopter demonstrate the wonders of the first iPhone. Little did we, or he, realize that what he held in his hand would threaten how we earned our livings in the newspaper business in the next decade, as more and more innovators would adapt more and more programs for cell-phones, turning some people, like the girl I mentioned, into addicts.

 

Meanwhile, outside our windows, life pretty much stayed the same. Generation after generation of squirrels hunted nuts and raised their young, ignorant about how much changed inside the walls of houses and apartments. Birds built nests and hunted for food for their chicks. Oh, there were changes: coyotes re-established themselves in southern Ontario and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry reintroduced wild turkeys, to incredible success.

 

But, while human lives changed dramatically, natural lives barely changed. And increasingly, as more and more people live urban lives and fewer and fewer grow up on the farm, they miss out on nature’s wonders.

 

And so for Marcus Gee and his grandchildren, I hope they can grow up to appreciate and watch the wonders outside their windows and not just what’s on their computer screens or electronic phones.

 

While we adult humans have, unlike wild animals, benefitted enormously in comfort inside our houses and the world we have built in cities, we have also changed the world in which we live. As I write this, outside my window there is barely any snow on the ground. This is a problem for all those who operate ski resorts which still aren’t fully functioning, to the disappointment of those who like to ski or snowboard.

 

We have changed the climate with our modern lifestyles. Those who worry about the climate warn we must change, but those who live in urban areas find it hard to adapt. They like their trips to the shopping mall. They enjoy travel to warm destinations in winter and interesting locations elsewhere in warmer months. Sure, they may agree climate change is a problem, but they don’t want to make serious changes in their lifestyles and, instead, hope someone will invent ways to let them still live a modern life, but at less dramatic cost to the environment.

 

I wonder what lives Marcus Gee’s young granddaughters, and other children their age will lead. Will they live ever more sheltered from the world lived in by those black squirrels and other residents of nature? Will those wild animals go extinct because the world changes so much?

 

The world is at a point of crisis. What if we don’t change and we create a world where humans can’t exist?