6.2. Living in a Virtual World

There are many other symptoms of our estrangement from the world. I once spoke to an extremely intelligent high school graduate who was not sure in which direction the sun rose. Bill McKibben tells of a camping trip during which he learned that adolescents who had lived their whole lives in the Adirondacks did not know there was such a thing as the Milky Way. I've heard an astronomy teacher lament that, after Star Wars, students lost interest in the "boring" view through a telescope, and a naturalist complain about the television generation's disinterest in the not-sufficiently-exotic local flora and fauna.

None of this reflects a shortage of information. The problem is that today something is substituting for the child's intimacy with the world. And if you want to know the nature of the substitution, consider the lenses, video screens, instrument panels, windows, phones, loudspeakers, books, faxes, billboards, newspapers, magazines, and various protected environments through which we gauge our relations to the world. How can the child possibly feel that the natural world counts for much of anything at all?