Many people who live in urban environments are fascinated about the wilderness through television, but never take a step outside to interact with the nature surrounding them. People who alienate themselves from nature, are unaware that the loss of direct contact is one of the greatest causes of ecological crisis. One lesson that Robert Pyle has mentioned in his book The Thunder Tree is that our culture lacks the intimacy with the living world. If we do not have direct contact with nature we lose the importance it holds because we allow ourselves to only imagine what it is like to have direct contact with nature. This lesson is important to Pyle because this mass disaffection in our culture is foreshadowing apathy for the condition of earth. This lesson is important to me personally because I now have a deeper understanding of nature and it helped change my perspective of what I thought was my environment. …show more content…
As seen in the text, “People who care conserve; people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?”(Pyle, 136). The extinction of experience was not only about humans losing personal contact with nature but the delicate balance between nature and humans being disrupted from the construction of the urban setting. There are people such as Mike Houck who has made an effort to get the community involved in cleaning up the cities and urban stream restoration. Pyle believes that if we had more people like Mike to help preserve nature and educate, then the source of our own experiences with nature will be