The lack of real, direct experience in and with nature has caused many children to regard the natural world as mere abstraction, that fantastic, beautifully filmed place ① filled with endangered rainforests and polar bears in peril. This overstated, often fictionalized version of nature is no more real ― and yet no less real ― to them than the everyday nature right outside their doors, ② waits to be discovered in a child’s way, at a child’s pace. Consider the University of Cambridge study which found that a group of eight-year-old children was able to identify ③ substantially more characters from animations than common wildlife species. One wonders whether our children’s inherent capacity to recognize, classify, and order information about their environment ― abilities once essential to our very survival ― is slowly devolving to facilitate life in ④ their increasingly virtualized world. It’s all part of ⑤ what Robert Pyle first called “the extinction of experience.”
* peril: 위험 ** devolve: 퇴화하다