ABSTRACT
Modern society, in all its urbanized and industrialized form, is wonderfully sophisticated, but more disconnected from the natural world than ever before. Despite many people expressing the value of connections through visits to the countryside and urban parks, and by the pleasure taken in their domestic pets and children's stories full of animal characters, many urban dwellers seem now to be completely cut off in their daily lives from green places and the wildness of the world. We now do new things, have learned new skills and derive many of our pleasures in new ways. But might something fundamental get lost when direct experience of nature and the living world declines, leaving us to care less about the consequences of modern economic progress? We may forget to ask, ‘What happened here?’, and so stories about the land and our relations to it recede further from memory. When the knowledge and stories go, so it becomes easier for others to damage or destroy the very places and resources created and valued over generations.
