Nasewaupee: Pokemon NO

     

"I know more about Pokemon than I do about the plants and animals that surround me" I wish I couldn't take credit for this quote but these are my words and I uttered them some two years ago to one of my co-workers as I was traveling on the east coast as an outdoor educator. On this particular day I was tasked with taking a group of two dozen eight year olds on a nature hike along the shore of the Anacostia river and it was during this walk when the kids incessantly kept asking me the question of "what's this" or "why is that" as only curious eight year olds can, that I realized I respected the natural world and I enjoyed being in it but I didn't know much of anything about it in terms of flora and fauna. In many ways I was still an eight year old. Those years of youth when my brain was a sponge and I should've been learning about these plants and animals and the important roles they play in the ecosystem I instead spent playing Pokemon Blue, Silver, and Sapphire on my Game Boy. I could tell you all about where to find a Slowpoke, what level Haunter learns Dream Eater, how to evolve your Magikarp into a Gyrados, or what set of Pokemon would best serve you to beat the Elite Four and ironically even as a 24 year old man, a decade and a half later, I can still answer most of those questions because it was that ingrained in me as a child. But I couldn't tell those kids what type of tree that was, or how long the ducklings stayed with their mother, or what grasshoppers ate, or how many types of fish lived in the river. I was their teacher and I didn't have the answers, because I grew up learning about fictional creatures in a fictional world instead of the real ones in my backyard.
         To be honest I feel like I wasted much of my childhood, adolescent years, and even some of my young adult years due to video games. I remember spending upwards of eight hours in a single day playing strategy games like Age of Empires or Civilization without ever leaving my house, or heck without ever leaving my basement. We'd go on family trips and travel the country to different National Parks like Yellowstone and the Redwoods but thanks to Pokemon and my Game Boy even some of those experiences took a back seat to video games. I remember in high school the highlight of my week being that I completed a quest in World of Warcraft... hard to believe right? If it wasn't for my brother, sometimes physically unplugging my gaming systems, and forcing me to go on adventures with him, I might still be that same lost soul today. It took real adventure, real risk, real challenge, and real engagement of my senses to pull me away from those fictional worlds and give me an appreciation for the real one. Navigating off trail, cliff jumping, swimming across lakes, cooking over an open fire, biking cross country, guerrilla camping; these are the things that saved me because when you live your life like a hero out of an adventure story, there's no need to vicariously live another life via a screen. I was more or less a client of wilderness therapy (before I ever knew what it was) and in many ways I still am. The wilderness changed my perspective on reality; it gave me a new lens with which to view the world and it's only been the last few years that I feel like I've begun to fully live out this life I've been given, a life where I spend more time outside engaging with the natural world and my fellow man than trying to escape it via television and video games.

       If we believe a virtual world is more exciting than our present existence then it's easy to fall into the trap of video game and tv addiction. I don't blame anyone for this because those are the same reasons I fell into video games. "Green Bay sucks, there's nothing to do, I'm bored," this was my rationale, this was my excuse for my behavior, this was my dull perspective. If you make no effort to seek out excitement or to take risks or if you fail to recognize the beauty and wonder of your fellow man and your surrounding landscape then naturally these electronic forms of entertainment are going to be your likely choice for activities. I get it, we all need to decompress and take a break every now and then but the danger of this allure to screens and fictional living; is that we forget about the real world - we neglect relationships and allow our communities to fall apart as we learn more about the emotions and feelings of our favorite characters and actors than we do about the people who live in the next room or across the street, we fail to develop talents and skills or pursue our passions because it's easier to develop a character in a fantasy world than to turn our fantasies into realities, and we passively stand by in the face of environmental degradation and injustice because we'd rather play the role of a hero in a game, than be a real one in this world. I say all of this from experience.
             We've got a whole lot of serious issues that we are facing as a culture that will need solutions in our lifetimes. Issues such as deforestation, the erosion of our top soils, the acidification of our oceans, the pollution of our air, the contamination of our drinking water, the over-consumption of vital resources, an obesity epidemic, rampant drug abuse, depression, and government corruption, - just to name a few. For many people these issues aren't even on their radar because watching reruns of The Bachelor or playing Call of Duty is more relevant to their lives, or so they think. We need more people in this world who have a connection to their communities and the land with which they live upon, more people who are willing to actively fight for positive change (environmentally and socially), and more people who are conscious and awake in a world where it's becoming ever easier to turn on the TV and turn ourselves off. We need more heroes and less zombies.

          Pokemon GO came out a little over a month ago and I see another generation falling into the same pattern as I did. Learning more about Pokemon rather than those wildflowers or that bird they just walked by. Wasting time and energy on something that will ultimately yield nothing for the betterment of themselves, their communities, or the environment. Sure with this new game you're walking, and maybe you can interact with your fellow players, but are you really engaged? Is that why I almost ran you over when you crossed the street without looking up from your phone? I often hear men my age tell me that the reason they still play video games like Pokemon is because it's their escape from a world they find negative or stressful. Well then I challenge you to be a real man and change your world instead of turning your back on it. Yeah the news likes to remind us of how much the world sucks and I won't deny that we are facing tons of problems, because we are, but this is a beautiful world we have and it is worth fighting for, and that fight won't be won if you don't help. We need more men and less zombies. The kids are watching; what kind of role model are you? 

           I'm passing judgment and I realize I'm getting very preachy but the voice you hear is the voice of my twenty four year old self reaching back to that little eight year old in Green Bay who turned his Game Boy on for the first time to play Pokemon Blue. I want to tell him to go outside, to run around with the neighborhood kids, to talk to his Grandpa, to put down the controller and pick up the guitar, to listen to his sister, to follow his brother and bike to far off lands, to watch the birds and eat Dandelions, and most importantly to smash in the TV and toss that Game Boy in the trash. Trust me you'll thank me in                                          sixteen years...
          Am I perfect in living out my own ideals, no. It took me seeing a horde of kids aimlessly wandering the streets staring at their phones trying to catch Pokemon for me to realize I still didn't know much about the species in my backyard. The same day I came to this realization and once again uttered those words of the opening quote from above I took my field guide and headed to the State Park to start a real adventure in discovering the life that's all around me. I struggled, but I successfully identified a few species - wild bee balm, white baneberry, the Blue Fronted Dancer damselfly. Learning to read the natural landscape and identify species with a field guide is like trying to learn a new language with a pocket dictionary. So I got help. I utilized my local library and searched the internet. I found books on mushrooms, and wild edibles, as well as literature on wild medicinals, all written for foragers in the Great Lakes regions. Online I found a host of youtubers who posted in depth videos about common wild edibles that you can easily collect from your own backyard or from a stroll down a country road. I read the books and watched the videos, I was filled with knowledge and ready to put it to the test.
   

   My first time looking for mushrooms and I found a patch of edible black trumpets along with turkey tail, not to mention a multitude of beautiful, but poisonous, gilled mushrooms along the forest floor. It's strange how once you become conscious of something's existence you find it everywhere. So many mushrooms! And that's just the beginning. As I turned my gaze to the plant life in my yard I was amazed to find a host of edible plants - those white flowered plants blooming along every roadside in Door County right now- that's Queen Anne's Lace, also known as wild carrot - dig that up, there's a tap root that looks and tastes like a carrot (it's a little late in the season now, but now you know for next year, how cool is that!?). Oh and those bull thistles that are everywhere, you can eat those roots too, along with the mid ribs of the leaves but wait until fall to dig those up. Oh and don't get me started on Dandelions. These things are a super food! Why pay top dollar for organic spinach from a grocery store when you can be eating wild Dandelion greens from your backyard that are more nutritious and free? Why have we been trying to eradicate these things!? Vitamin K, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Calcium, Iron, and Antioxidants (just in the greens) not to mention that you can make coffee from roasting the roots and eat the flowers too! And Staghorn Sumac, that crazy looking tree that looks like it belongs in the African Savannah, you can harvest those red fruit clusters and make some

amazing sumac-ade (tastes like fresh lemonade but without the need for sugar). Then there's Plantain, no not the banana looking thing, I mean the herb that's growing in your backyard right now, no seriously, look at this image and go check your lawn, it's there and it's awesome. Anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory - get some leaves and make yourself a tea or a poultice to enjoy the health benefits of this plant. I could go on... I'm just scratching the surface of what I've discovered in the last two weeks and I'm already seeing the world differently - Sumac are suddenly springing up everywhere along with all the other species I've identified (funny how a landscape that was once so familiar can look so different once you have a name and a search image for the flora that inhabit that place). 

Yellow Garden Spider
  (Beautiful but definitely creepy)
Found... in my garden

      There are now over 700 Pokemon that you can catch. Exciting isn't it, that's 550 more than when I was a kid. Well, there are over 2,500 plants and vertebrates alone in Wisconsin, not to mention thousands of more invertebrates, that you can identify. Some are poisonous, some can fight cancer and cure other maladies, some you can domesticate, some you can eat, some you can use for shelter, some are magnificently beautiful, some are scary, some are extremely rare, others can be found anywhere. Once you start opening your eyes to the diversity of life that surrounds you, there's no reason to try and escape this present reality. There's so much to learn and do that there's not even time for video games or television. Boredom is simply not recognizing the opportunity for discovery and adventure that awaits you if you merely took the initiative to pursue it. I regret having wasted so much of my valuable time on such pointless and frivolous entertainment. I wish I had learned these lessons sooner in life... but it's never too late to become who you might've been. 

          I'm heading out to the woods tomorrow to help lead a camp for a dozen or so kids. I hope I can share some of the knowledge I've learned, I hope I can give them at least one connection with nature that will change their perspective, I hope I can inspire them to want to learn more, and I hope this time around I can better answer their questions because I'm starting to change the tide and know more about the real plants and animals in my life than the fictional ones.