Words + Images

For most of my professional life, I have worked for environmental organizations where staff often ponder questions like what does it mean to connect children (especially urban youth) to nature (especially in the big city)?  I find myself reflecting on my childhood in a small Virginia city where people kept a chicken or two in their backyards.  One neighbor even illegally kept a goat.  I write often about being able to see the Blue Ridge Mountains from my back porch.  In a yard the size of postage stamp, my younger brother and I discovered bright blue bird’s eggs in a nest near our house, a monarch chrysalis under our backporch, and garter snakes burrowed in the ground near the dog’s water dish.  I never visited a national park in my youth but I certainly felt connected to nature.  I now live in a metropolis of three million plus people.  There is no place I can go without hearing the rumble of cars in the distance, trains rolling by or planes flying overhead.  I believe in the magnificence of cities and in human ingenuity but there is something to be said for a quiet patch of green.

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