Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: The Voice of One Crying in the Urban Cluster

Skip to comments

Mike Peterson Published: April 10, 2013 1 minute 5 comments

The Barn, one of my two favorite comic strips starring a sheep (that's not a joke, but it's funny anyway), is in the early stages of an arc about field trips.

I've told the story before of seeing a cow on exhibit at the Lincoln Park Zoo, and I observed then that it's not just poor, inner city dwellers who are out of touch with nature and the real world.

We have become a nation of city kids. In 1910, 72 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Now it's down to 16 percent.

Much of the Scouting movement at the start of the 20th Century grew out of a sense that American kids were losing touch with the earth.  

Baden-Powell is better known, but the other founding father of that movement is more relevant to the discussion at hand: Ernest Thompson Seton wrote "Two Little Savages," a foundational novel of woodcraft and plucky lads that advanced the idea that boys needed to be more in touch with nature.

It's not perfect. He not only advanced the Noble Savage stereotype but, in his other writings, a similarly melodramatic view of animals, a style of sentimental, inauthentic writing that naturalist John Burroughs famously called out in a 1903 essay that launched the "nature fakers" controversy.

Now, I do think my dog is dreaming about something specific when he urfs and growls and twitches in his sleep, and he certainly has a sense of play and even of injustice, but I don't believe his conscious life is much like that of the puppies in "101 Dalmatians," nor do I think "Bambi" or "Black Beauty" or "Babe" were documentaries.

As a kid, however, I assumed Seton's fanciful tales of introspective animals were on the level.

There are modern back-to-nature movements, however, and for all that the sentimental claptrap continues to get the most response, the various Nature Centers that abound in most communities are, in my experience, pretty hard-headed when it comes down to what they teach kids. 

Moreover, nature documentaries have not only stopped chucking lemmings over cliffs, but have also quit suggesting that the cute little antelope always gets away from the big mean lion. 

So kids can find out the truth about nature, if, like sparrows harvesting undigested oats at a stable, they can sort through the Bigfoot documentaries and staged rattlesnake hunts that surround these good bits.

The sparrow reference being largely lost on city folks.

Part of this whole issue hinges on our definition of country.

This writer disputes the Census Bureaus statistics, arguing that their "urban clusters" include small towns of 2,500 or fewer people, areas he considers rural.

Ever since I left home, I've had people say, "Oh, I grew up in a small town, too," but what they mean is that they grew up in an urban cluster or, as we call it, the suburbs. After years of pointless attempts to explain how my definition differed from theirs, I found the shortcut, the question that got right to the heart of the matter: "How far did you have to drive to see a movie?"

If they came close to my answer — "an hour" — they won.

So now I live in an urban cluster (The movie theater is about a mile and a quarter away) and it feels like the city to me, but, no, not the city-city. I've lived in real cities: In Denver for a couple of years, and then in Colorado Springs for a little over a dozen. That was city life, though in both places I had a lawn and could walk to a park with some grass and trees and suchlike.

It wasn't all concrete, but I wasn't in the country, either, and I'm still not.

However, life in the urban cluster is not the same as life in downtown Manhattan or even the outskirts of Metro Denver. After I post this, I'll take the dog to a fairly large park on the Connecticut River where we're very likely to see bald eagles and less likely to run across foxes, beavers and osprey, though they're around, too.

It's not "country," but it'll do. Sheep don't bound there, but dogs frolic, or, at least, they do if they know what's good for them.

Meanwhile, I am not the voice of one crying in the urban cluster, or at least, I'm not the only voice crying. Richard Louv wrote "The Last Child in the Woods" and, in this video which I am unable to embed, he talks about kids and nature, including the level of nature that little people can find in urban clusters, if they're allowed and encouraged to do so.

It's worth the click.