Technology, City Life and the Value of Minnesota’s Nature Experience
by Rich Pagen
What is it about technology that makes life simpler while simultaneously making it more complicated? The average American spends 8.5 hours a day in front of a computer, TV, or cell phone screen. Facebook, Twitter, smartphones – each of these tools helps us to be better connected to one another and to information. Each of these tools assists us in becoming more organized and efficient, freeing up our time so we can spend more of it on other interests and pastimes, and with our families and friends. But is this really what happens?
We are all familiar with the following scene. You enter your local coffee shop to find that you can hear a pin drop. The tables are full, but yet the place is completely silent. Everyone is intently immersed in their laptops, carrying on a virtual conversation with someone not in the room (maybe not even in the state), without a second thought to the person who happens to be sitting next to them (who is, of course, doing the same thing). This identical story is playing out in coffee shops across Minnesota, the U.S, and beyond. It is a particularly ironic phenomenon if we consider that the coffee shop originated (long before laptop computers) as a gathering place, a haven for conversation, a hub for the community. In some way, coffee shops still provide this function, but now on a completely different scale and in a completely different way.
Automobiles, in addition to the freedoms they provide, have their own list of complications, one of which is the effect they have on the way we experience our neighborhoods and communities. When in a car, we travel closed off from those around us, and we often travel alone. In some cases, we drive our car right into the garage attached to our home, eliminating any interactions we may have had with our neighbors (assuming that they aren’t driving right into their attached garages as well). One of my favorite winter pastimes is cross-country skiing, but getting in the car to drive to a place to ski somehow takes away slightly from the experience.
The big snowfall on February 7th and 8th of this year created perfect conditions for skiing. The snowfall was so heavy and of such an extended duration that I was able to walk out of my South Minneapolis apartment, strap on my skis and take off down the sidewalk. I was in heaven! To be able to remove the car from the equation made the experience that much more enriching. I skied down to the lake and out across its snowy, frozen surface. Sitting in the middle of the lake, with falling snow nearly obscuring the Minneapolis skyline, it occurred to me that I might very well be “the person furthest from any other person in the entire city of Minneapolis.”
I skied back off the lake and arrived 5 minutes later at a cozy coffee shop, where I sipped a Chai tea while jotting down notes for this article on the back of an old receipt. Minnesota is a state awash with escapes into nature; and so it would follow that the city of Minneapolis is as well. I just had an incredibly rewarding experience, and one that is central to why I choose to call Minneapolis home. Skiing on a frozen lake that I had nearly to myself, followed by warming up in a bustling and atmospheric coffee shop, with a short 5-minutes (and no car) linking the two experiences.
As technology continues to simultaneously simplify and complicate our lives, wild places and open space will only continue to grow in importance as a way to balance our busy lives. We are fortunate to have so much of it here in Minnesota; some, as I mentioned, is mixed right into the fabric of our cities. In fact, it’s ironic that one of the larger natural areas in the Twin Cities (Fort Snelling State Park) sits right below Fort Snelling, the very settlement whose original mission included the development of the American west.
Here in Minnesota, I take pride in the fact that wolves still roam less than 100 miles outside the Twin Cities, and that they survived the widespread extermination effort that wiped them out everywhere else in the Lower 48 States. I take pride in the fact that I can sit in a bird blind at sunrise, with prairie chickens displaying in the grass outside as they have for thousands of years. And I take pride in the fact that someone who came long before me (and who knew nothing about Facebook or Iphones, or about me for that matter) had the foresight to protect and set aside these places, so I would have the opportunity to seek out balance in my life, both in the city where I live, and across the state.
Citations:
Stelter, B. “8 hours spent on screens, study finds.” New York Times. 26 March, 2009. Web. 16 February 2010.
Minnesota Historical Society. “Historic Fort Snelling: A brief history of Fort Snelling.” http://www.mnhs.org/places/sites/hfs/history.html 16 February 2010.
* An essay written for the Conservation Minnesota Newsroom, February 18, 2010. (Pagen, R. W. 2010. Technology, city life and the value of Minnesota’s nature experience. Conservation Minnesota Newsroom. 2/18/10.