In fourth grade, I joined the “Insect Club.” It was a very small club, established by a guy in my grade who liked to rummage around in his backyard in northern Virginia looking for insects. I had no particular interest in insects; I just liked the guy (later, in our graduating yearbook’s predictions of what all of us would be doing twenty years on, he would be described as “doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief”). I also needed a peer group to belong to and this was one of the few—maybe the only—that would accept just about anybody. You can imagine who belonged to the insect club. In any case, despite the insect club being a social activity rather than intellectual interest, I do remember a sense of sincere amazement at the turning over of a log and finding live creepy-crawlies to collect in paper cups. 
Up to the age of eleven, this was perhaps my sole emotional tie to the natural world. My core emotional ties were to my family, a couple close friends, a burgeoning comic book collection, and to the box in the basement. While my parents attempted to enforce a strict rule of only an hour a day of television, it was a very easy rule to break—and I did so on almost a daily basis. As one might expect from an article in a journal entitled "Conservation Perspectives", my partial intent here is to disparage such a misspent youth. Hours, days, months were spent absorbing the trivial, and it is little consolation that today I am a fairly formidable contestant at the game of Trivial Pursuit.
An altar to powers of which I am still only dimly aware, the box in the basement held sway over my young mind. I truly thought it important to know what moral lessons were to be learned from Richie Cunningham’s sage advice to the Fonz (and sometimes vice-versa), or whether American technology via Steve Austin’s legs, arm, and eye would again save us from nuclear Armageddon, Soviet domination, or alien invasion (real aliens—I can’t say I remember any episode of the Six Million Dollar Man devoted to halting kudzu). If I sound facetious here, it is only because I regret having cared so much. But I know that I did care, and cared deeply.
I was ultimately saved from the box in the basement by a combination of forces, the one of which I am most cognizant being 
four summers at a two-month camp in the Adirondacks where there was no electricity (not to mention no TV). I did not become a Nature-boy at this camp; I assiduously avoided all natural history activities and kept my free time to reading awful novels and daydreaming about ice cream. But despite my recalcitrance, this camp inculcated within me a love of the outdoors and of the “natural world.” And although I was not weaned from television for the other ten months of the year (hardly), neither the Fonz nor the Bionic Man remained true-to-life characters in my emotional constitution.
My experience is not unique; there are many of us born-again real-lifers out there who still shudder at the alternate universe of a life invested in the box in the basement. 
Now many of us are having children, and we are trying to figure out how to eliminate the allure of all that televised trash. One solution, as the bumper sticker says, is to throw it away. This can work, but too often I’ve seen it backfire, creating little people whose main goal in life is to seek out television via friends, extended family, stores, anywhere it is available (and it’s available in a lot of places). My youngest son being nearly two years old, I imagine this will be a problem I’ll be trying to work out for the next sixteen years.
But I’m worried. The box in the basement is a known commodity—I have a lifetime of experience with it. What about the box in the bedroom? While I am not sure at what age it will be, I can state with certainty that at some point my children will have a computer in their room. The virtual world they will access on the web is one that I could not have imagined as a child, and with which I feel barely able to cope as a parent. I had the great advantage of having adopted the Internet into my life as a grad student—grad school being a time when I was so busy that I had no time but to use the Internet as a research tool. And though I have since come to use the web for buying books and toys, keeping up with the Boston Bruins, and finding out about the adult careers of my former fellow Insect Clubbers, I came to it with a temperate, adult mind.
My children, on the other hand, will come to the Internet with open, unformed minds. Yet, because their brains will be formed with it, they will, to a large degree, understand it far better than I ever will. In the same way that my Dad used to call me in to adjust the reception on the TV so he could watch the news or a football game, I will be calling my sons to help me figure out the latest web technology. I can see now that it will take a monumental effort to ensure that my children cannot access violent and pornographic sites, and I really wonder if I’ll be able to do that for any meaningful length of time.
Violence and pornography on the web are well-recognized parental challenges; my inability to say anything remotely intelligent about them is reason enough to leave off with that subject. The relevant question here is this: To what degree will Internet keep my children from having a deeper experience with the natural world?
But wait; as a critical reader you surely will have noted the bias in such a question. Contrary to the bias, it will likely be the case that the Internet will endow a far better understanding of the natural world in my children than I ever had. Write an essay on the wildlife of Australia? At the age of 10 in 1977 (the first season of Eight is Enough), I probably could have done that with my school library’s resources. However, I would have written about kangaroos and koalas and what they look like; my children, on the other hand, will use the Net to write about quolls and echidnas and their roles in Australian ecosystems. And what about an essay on the wildlife of Papua New Guinea? I doubt I could have done that at all with my school library’s resources back then. But my kids will be weaving together stories about botanical treasure chests nestled amongst unequaled biocultural diversity.
When it comes down to it, my sons will be able to use the Internet to do an essay on the wildlife of just-about-anywhere at just-about-any temporal or spatial scale. Will their ability to access untold reams of virtual information about biodiversity mean they will have any real sense of the natural world? Again, I have to turn off the auto-cynicism; maybe the Internet could indeed become that metaphorical platform from which they can step out into the polyglot world of plants, predators, and parasites. But to do so successfully, I imagine, will depend on at least one fundamental precondition. To make that jump into the real world, they will need a guide of some kind, be it a summer camp, an inspirational teacher, a great book, or a kid’s own predilection (lucky kid). Here’s the banal part—well, it’s actually the fundamentally crucial point I’m trying to make here, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make it sound non-banal: Whatever manifestation the guide takes, that guide has to get the kids’ hands dirty in the natural world.
A parent can be that guide to some degree, but one has to be careful. I would love to know that if by chance I turn out to be a sufficiently responsible and crafty father, I might be able to be such a guide—to instill enough real Nature in their inchoate brains that they will be psychologically unable to be anything but conservation biologists when they grow up. That is, of course, unlikely. My insufferably patient, older brother once told me that the worst thing parents can do is to try to teach their own children to ski or swim, and through trial and error I found out that for once in his life he was right. [Author’s note: Please, if you successfully taught your kids to ski or swim, do not write in to tell me how you did it—at this point, I really don’t want to hear about it.] I imagine that what stands for skiing and swimming will stand for “inculcating a love of the natural world.” At worst, consciously setting oneself up as a model of how to get in tune with Nature is a recipe for a lifetime of mutual rejection and resentment. At best, parents can try to practice what they preach, parents can pray that their children are not bright enough to identify their parents’ multiple hypocrisies, and parents can take on the task of helping to find—if not be—that guide who can lead their children away from the boxes in the houses and out into the real world.
While my parents did an immeasurable service by sending me to that two month summer camp, I certainly do not want to make the mistake of assuming that what worked for me will work for my kids. And even if it could work, it is getting more complicated to send a kid away for two months since they will inevitably become enmeshed in the accoutrements of an over-stuffed (I mean, well-rounded) contemporary American education—some of the components of which will include soccer, hockey, football, or fencing practice; piano, clarinet, guitar, or accordion lessons; debating, juggling, philatelic, or Young Republican societies; etc., etc., etc.. Et cetera.
No doubt, the Internet will be a component in each and every one of these activities, and probably will enhance the experience (or at least the performance) of all our up-and-coming soccer players, clarinetists, and jugglers. In a similar way, I do have hopes that the Internet will enhance the experience (not the performance) of my children getting out into the natural world. Yet despite all of this unbridled optimism, I cannot deny a deep and abiding and otherwise clichéd concern that the Internet will tear my children’s generation even further away from the natural world than the TV did for mine. At this point, all one can definitely assert is that the Internet is still very young and nothing is written in stone. But I do predict that my children will need a guide, and I cannot see how the Internet could ever fill that role alone.
The views and opinions expressed in all articles that appear in "Conservation Perspectives" are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of NESCB.