GreenSpace: Knowing more about plants and wildlife will do a world of good

Here's a novel idea for making the world a greener place: Have everyone get up close and personal with 50 local species.

Could it be that simple? A matter of making friends with a few frogs and flowers, butterflies and birds?

Kenn Kaufman has been pondering this since 2007, when the nationally known birder, naturalist, and author said in an interview that doing so would "profoundly change each person's sense of values, each person's sense of responsibility to the ecosystems that support all of our fellow creatures."

The interview appeared in a national birding magazine. And he surely raised eyebrows among the pros who pride themselves on being able to identify hundreds of species when he said, "we really don't need any more people who can identify third-winter Thayer's gulls."

What we need, he said, is "a lot more people who have some appreciation of birdlife and who will act on it - by supporting habitat protection, buying shade-grown coffee, planting native plants, laying off the pesticides. We need millions of perpetual beginners who will do these things."

The idea of reconnecting people - especially children - with nature is gaining resonance these days, not least from the Obama administration's Great Outdoors Initiative, announced in April.

So I called Kaufman and he emphasized he's not talking about merely naming species, but about knowing them - "actually connecting."

A lot of people claim to be interested in nature, but "they express it by watching nature programs on television," Kaufman said. So he doubts that many people could come up with a list of 25. Although, "if you stretched it to include elephants and lions and polar bears, then maybe the average person could barely squeak out 50."

Speaking of which, where he lives in northwest Ohio, inner-city Toledo kids come to a local nature center and are afraid bears will eat them.

People say they like butterflies, but then they'll squish a caterpillar, ending its life cycle before it becomes a butterfly. They recognize a robin in a book, but not on the lawn.

He doesn't blame the people, by the way, but nature education as a whole.

This matters because people aren't likely to care about something abstract. Kaufman likens it to not knowing anyone where you live. You'll be more likely to care what happens to the neighborhood if you know that the three kids next door like baseball, and that the widow next to them bakes great bread.