Real Nature and the Treachery of Images
By: The Good Men Project
Tags: Nature, Expectations, Environment, Experience, Social Media

Real Nature and the Treachery of Images

Photo Credit: iStock

By David Davis

On a return trip from Antarctica, a bad storm took a turn for the worse. Waves were breaking across the bow, tossing the ship almost on its side. After a moment of calm, a massive wave took the ship all the way over. It seemed like an eternity, so much so that the dilemma finally struck: Cut the tether and surface to catch a breath, or stay tethered to the ship and risk drowning beneath it.

It’s a true story, it’s just not mine. Matt McFadyen, the man telling it in the first person at the 2015 Blue Mind Summit stayed tethered and lived to tell the tale. The story circulated the Internet in various forms for a while after the event, and to be sure, it’s gripping. My own outdoor exploits are comparatively tame, so much so that they hardly seem worth recounting.

Social media diminishes genuine experiences. We’ve seen an arms race that applies to everything. There are videos of the most extreme weather, daredevils who sledge to the poles, or jump out of helicopters to ski down mountains, surf giant waves, or dive to dark depths of the ocean.

Psychologists from Stony Brook University have found that comparisons to one’s social media community can lead to depressive symptoms and related mental health concerns. Anecdotal sources also point to social media negatively affecting self-esteem. For parents getting their kids outside, hiking, camping, canoeing, or (gasp) doing nothing of consequence, the challenge of social media is that it runs the risk of belittling the kinds of activities that people are most likely to engage in.

Anything less than outsized extremes is a waste of time.

We’ve lost our collective sense of wonder to such an extent that even bringing up a sense of wonder seems trite and juvenile. Wonder is for the unsophisticated, those who haven’t yet read this article (or at least read the headline and subtitle- they have statistics and everything), seen these 30 seconds of video, learned the one simple trick that drives [insert professionals of choice] crazy. There’s no point in taking a banal walk in a local park, because someone trekked through the Amazon, and live-streamed it.

On-demand media exacerbates the problem.

We’ve suddenly become accustomed to being able to order any experience when we want it, for more or less as long as we want it. If you’re so inclined, you can be chased endlessly by zombies or dragons, when there are spare moments.

If you want to learn about meerkats, or how to make fennel air with endives, or find out what faceless horror is going to pick on poor Will Byers for the next eight hours, you can do that any time you feel like it, and still somehow feel aggrieved that producers were only able to cobble together those eight hours for you. This can leave people — kids especially — demanding the best experience whenever they want it.

All of this leaves nature to appear woefully disorganized and potentially anticlimactic. What if you want to spend 30-minutes, right now, watching wildlife, but the deer or great blue herons don’t show up? You could have banged out half an episode of a series you’ve been meaning to start in that time, and instead wasted that time outside.

Of course, this is the treachery of images.

Experience isn’t fungible. A live-stream of something isn’t the thing itself. A picture of someplace in the background in someone else’s selfie isn’t the experience of being in that place. Just like Magritte’s pipe, these are facsimiles that fall hopelessly short of the real thing. An hour actually experienced in a wooded local park is worth more than a picture of someone on a trail in Patagonia.

For parents looking to combat the effects of social media, setting aside time to go outdoors helps to create perspective about what the natural world is actually like, and distances us at least a little from media that are designed in large part to sell us things. Moreover, the fact that the most interesting things in nature don’t always show up on cue is an important experience for kids. Not only does it make the unusual happenings more significant, but it teaches patience, and encourages kids to explore their surroundings.

Parents can stack the deck in favor of positive outdoor experiences for kids by planning ahead and preparing. Knowing the weather and packing accordingly is key to kids enjoying the experience and to sticking with it, even through a little rain. Field guides are another good resource and are strongly preferable to using a phone or tablet for a similar purpose. It’s easy to flip through a hardcopy field guide to try and spot a picture of some bird that just landed, and the electronic device just incites requests for Plants vs Zombies. Peterson publishes are a wide array of guides on topics like birds of eastern and central North America, butterflies and moths, or Rocky Mountain wildflowers. Audubon publishes a series of general guides that have an assortment of trees, other plants, insects, mammals, and birds, arranged around various geographical locations.

While I still believe my best outdoor adventures are ahead of me, I also concede that fighting a potentially deadly storm on the Southern Ocean is not likely in my future. But, I’m not going to deprive my kids of the right to climbing Hawksbill Summit or paddling a local lake, because it’s not likely to get 10,000 retweets.

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The story was previously published on The Good Men Project.

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About David Davis

David Davis is a husband, father of two, and a conservationist in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. He has worked as a cartographer, and as a project manager, operations manager, and strategist for various applied science organizations. He writes about the value of nature, practicing Christianity, socially responsible business, and STEM workforce development.