March 30, 2008
EO Wilson Says Soccer Moms Are Natural History’s Enemy
Over at the Discover magazine blog Better Planet:
In a candid conversation with an audience here at the Aspen Environment Forum, eminent biologist/naturalist EO Wilson said soccer moms are killing off bio-education because they don’t let their children experience nature.
In what he calls the ”soccer mom syndrome” Wilson said the worst thing a parent can do for a child is to take him or her to a botanical garden where all the trees are marked and labeled. Instead, “Go to the seashore and give them a pale and bucket. Let them experience nature…and then come back and ask questions,” Wilson said, admittedly paraphrasing Rachel Carson’s advice. Carson famously wrote the book “Silent Spring.”
Wilson, who is compiling an encyclopedia of life (www.eol.org), which will describe every species known to man, didn’t back down when a woman from the audience said that she would “forgive him” for the soccer mom comment.
“Don’t,” he responded. “Think on it."
Posted by Robin Varghese at 08:59 PM | Permalink
Comments
Good for E.O.! It's true.
More thoughts from Wilson and other influential thinkers at the Aspen Institute's Environmental Forum, on the National Geographic magazine website this week:
http://ngm.typepad.com/aspen_forum/
Posted by: Marilyn Terrell | Mar 30, 2008 9:52:02 PM
Calling a pail "pale" makes me pale
Posted by: John Hall | Mar 30, 2008 10:59:46 PM
Soccer Moms are my mortal enemies. Every time I see one on her knees in the grocery store rubbing her screaming brat with hand gel and explaining ad nauseum why they can't have a candy bar when a good spanking and a "No" will do, I reach for my sword.
I always forget my sword though when I go to the grocery store.
Posted by: beajerry | Mar 31, 2008 9:00:55 AM
Beajerry, you might have better luck with a tranquilizer gun.
Posted by: Trish | Mar 31, 2008 12:41:59 PM
Everything seems to go to extremes nowadays; I suppose it is the only way for a journalist to get any reader's frazzled attention. Students are either hooking up with a different partner every night or they join a "chastity club". Soccer moms are castigated for taking their children out to get exercise, then they face criticism if the kids spends the afternoon in front of a video game. Now we can't take kids to arboretums, we must take them to wild forests. Well I, for one, take my son to soccer games and to arboretums and to wild forests and to beaches where he can play with his "pale". Moderation - can anyone still remember the word?
Posted by: Jared | Mar 31, 2008 1:47:09 PM
Oh dear, another scientist puts himself beyond the pale with a thoughtless remark. Not that the underlying issue isn't a serious one. However, the problem of children being raised in captivity goes far beyond the soccer mom - who is a mythical beastie anyway.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 31, 2008 4:04:48 PM
Vicki,
It's "beyond the pail."
Posted by: Chris Schoen | Mar 31, 2008 4:15:58 PM
Chris: turn not pail, beloved snale!
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Mar 31, 2008 4:21:35 PM
I am pretty sure there are literally millions of worse things you can do for a child than take him or her to a botanical garden. In fact, if you tried to list all of the horrible things that parents do for their children, taking them to a botanical garden probably wouldn't even enter your mind.
Posted by: blah | Mar 31, 2008 4:33:40 PM
"who is a mythical beastie anyway"
Depends where you live. In my Long Island suburb the soccer fields on Saturdays and Sundays are packed. I do, however, see a lot more soccer dads than soccer moms. I, myself am not a soccer dad but I am a swimming, art lesson, music lesson and Chinese lesson dad.
Posted by: Jared | Mar 31, 2008 4:37:15 PM
And no, I do not drive a minivan. That really would be beyond the pail.
Posted by: Jared | Mar 31, 2008 4:40:37 PM
Wilson's point is not too different from Whitman's:
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts, the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the learned astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
Posted by: deadman | Mar 31, 2008 5:44:07 PM
Much ado about nothing. Wilson was being humorous. The other day my wife did something that deeply shocked my British-born sensibility: she added sugar to the teapot. I still tremble at the thought, it makes me cringe like the words of Obama's grandmother. But I forgive her.
Posted by: aguy109 | Mar 31, 2008 6:27:02 PM
Actually Wilson is quite serious about this. His last book goes into detail about it.
Posted by: beajerry | Apr 1, 2008 8:54:42 AM
Sugar in the teapot is grounds for divorce.
Posted by: Jared | Apr 1, 2008 10:14:37 AM
Wilson was being invasively arrogant about soccer moms, resorting lazily to a bloated meme that means next to nothing but a projection of hostility toward mothers. His pretension to know that the kind of long term evolutionary advantage or not of soccerish-mom behavior -- about which he probably knows little, is laughable. This romance of the budding scientist on the beach discovering nature is too funny.
Posted by: sluethiness_in-the_blogosphere | Apr 1, 2008 5:37:46 PM
I defend E.O. Wilson's statement. I have five kids and when they were young I resisted the trend to enroll them in organized sports. I took them to parks and playgrounds and nature centers and woods and streams where they would explore and climb rocks and get wet and throw stones and build dams and collect pretty pebbles and dig in the dirt and make mud and notice things like moss, instead of having to run drills and listen to some dumb adult tell them what to do. As a result my kids learned about the natural world and also to climb and throw and run, which helped them later in sports when they wanted to play them. I remember my daughter's friend who told me wistfully how much she enjoyed stream-walking with us, because her mother never took her for walks in the woods.
Posted by: Marilyn Terrell | Apr 2, 2008 12:31:22 AM
Marilyn,
I don't think this is a case of either/or. We often take my 7 year old to wild nature areas where he can explore beaches and forests. He also goes to swimming class. In the future he will probably play soccer and take sailing lessons. Organized sports are not necessarily bad for people under 12.
Posted by: Jared | Apr 2, 2008 10:39:05 AM
I think the organized sports/soccer mom discussion misses the main point, and that is the drastic limitation on the mobility of kids and young teens that has been allowed to develop over the past 30 years or so. This has a variety of causes, and blaming mom (again) seems like such a copout.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Apr 2, 2008 2:03:49 PM
Vicki
I agree with you about the loss of mobility. When I was 8 or 9 I would go off on my bike all day and that was normal. Now kids can't even go to the mall without being driven there. The main reasons for this, I think, are increased traffic, which makes bike riding truly hazardous and an incredible level of paranoia that is really nothing short of hysteria. As an example, my wife and I were walking on a leafy suburban street with my 7 year old son. He ran ahead a hundred feet and was walking alone. Within minutes, a car pulled over to him and the people started questioning why he was "alone" and if we were really his parents! Another example, our local school recently issued a huge system wide alert about a possible sex predator who would sit in his car near schools. Turned out the man lived on the street and was in his car to smoke a cigarette because smoking was not allowed in his apartment. This is the hysterical environment kids are raised in now.
Posted by: Jared | Apr 2, 2008 2:22:01 PM
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