Could our cultural focus on technology, both as tool and entertainment, be undermining our ability to provide stewardship for the planet?
Let me back up and explain how I came to this question.
The other day I watched King of Kong – an excellent little documentary about Steve Weibe’s efforts to unseat Billy Mitchell as the record-holder in Donkey Kong. As an avid video game player in the mid-80s, I have some sense of the skills needed to take this crown: Pattern-recognition, patience, persistence, concentration, and will.
A little later I read Tigerland in the April 21 New Yorker – an essay about a journey into the Saznekhali Wildlife Sancutary in India, a mangrove forest haunted by man-eating Bengal tigers. The author travels with Dr. Pranabes Sanyel, an expert on mangrove forests, capable of identifying the 28 mangrove species, and tigers. No doubt his skills, developed over years, depend on pattern-recognition (such as for the female tigers pawprint, which is slightly rectangular, from the male tigers, which is more square), patience, persistence, concentration, and will.
The romance of the article, for me, stems in part from a fascination with nature – an abiding, but largely unexplored, interest in animal behavior and forest ecology. My upbringing in an urban setting (Sacramento, California) didn’t exactly preclude me from exploring these interests, but the distractions in that urban environment (reruns of the Brady Bunch and Hogan’s Heros, video games such as Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, and Joust) ultimately took more of my attention than, say, studying the ladybugs, ants, and bees near our backyard swimming pool. Even today, in an effort to deepen my understanding of sustainability, human psychology, and my own purpose, I find myself periodically distracted by games, such as Fantasy Basketball and Desktop Tower Defense.
However interesting, game-playing isn’t my interest today; rather, it’s how the skills these games require, which could translate easily to a deeper study and, quite possibly, empathy with the ecosystems that support our daily endeavor, but instead seem to redirect toward – well, what? I’m not sure. The point is Steve Weibe’s mastery of Donkey Kong is pretty much a luxury. What if he’d turned that attention to bats, bees, or native plants? The skills, I suspect, would translate, and who knows what good it might bring our ecosystem.
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