On Seeing

Connecting with Nature with the full use of our senses

A small seedling of Gambel oak, Quercus gambelii in a rocky setting.

When we explore the natural world, we need to fully engage our senses. Many things reduce our ability to clearly see what is around us. Today, we will talk about the problems posed by technology. In future stories, we will explore other factors in our perceptions of the natural world. First, though, a brief update on where we are with Our Trees, and where we are going.

---

We should all be very pleased with the growth in Our Trees subscriptions. It is allowing us to begin offering new features to enrich our discussions of our relationships with trees. At present, we are keeping access to all our stories (posts and notes) open to everyone. We provide other benefits to paid subscribers, and hope you will consider paying to support our work. Paid subscribers will:

• Be able to make comments and ask questions about individual posts, and receive responses;

• Help guide what stories we produce through a dedicated discussion page for your input;

• Participate in chats, webinars and workshops, with the opportunity to ask questions and get authoritative answers;

• Have the opportunity to participate in half-day or full-day field courses, learning about trees in their environment. These will only be in the Bluegrass for 2025, but soon will expand to other locations.

These features will roll out over the next few days.

Most importantly, your paid subscriptions allow us to expand what we do. We wish to make Our Trees the premier resource for information and discussion about the relationships between people and trees, including all the ways we use them. With your help, we will achieve that.

---

I have been teaching people about trees since I was an undergraduate in college. I have taught at every level, from kindergarten to graduate school. My most important audience in recent years has not been in schools but in informal settings. I lead groups of people on field courses in forest and parks throughout North America. I have become very attuned to what keeps your attention and makes my courses interesting. In recent years, I have noticed a significant change in the ability of people to focus on the experience, to fully absorb what they are seeing. The major factor is technology.

I am not a technophobe, quite the opposite. As a forest scientist, I use a lot of technology in the lab and the field. I routinely use digital tools in my field work, including GIS, GPS, Lidar, and others. I left my university job to start a technology company that used handheld devices for forest management, though an illness brought that to an end.

Here is what I am seeing in my field courses. As soon as we stop at a tree or other spot to have a discussion, out come everyones phones and on go the cameras. Everyone’s attention is divided between what we are seeing and what they are recording. I suspect that the amount of data captured in a 3-hour field course vastly overwhelms anyones ability to make use of the images later. The same is true when people are out in the field by themselves. Their time is spent capturing images and video to share later. This withdraws attention from the actual experience.

It doesn’t end there. There is a plethora of software tools that purport to enrich your outdoor experience. Plant identification tools like Picture This and Google Lens promise to eliminate the difficulty of identification. But here is what I have been finding in recent years: by shifting the intellectual burden of identification to a device, we forego the learning process that comes with plant identification. I see this in the inability of people to identify a plant when they see it again, even the same day.

Maps are another problem. One day, during one of my long hikes across the Sierra Nevada, I met a large family doing a day hike. They were lost. Their digital devices, equipped with the latest GPS, was not able to tell them where they were. We were in a fairly deep canyon, and the GPS satellites were unable to provide accurate location. The family did not have paper maps. When I showed them my topographic maps, they did not know how to read them. Our USGS topographic maps not only provide us with navigation tools, but also with a broad view of what is around us. They are priceless.

I am not suggesting that we leave our phones at home. They are valuable devices in case of an emergency. In my recent field courses, I have asked people to turn off their phones and put them in their backpacks or pockets. I provide a photo opportunity at the beginning and end of the field course so that participants have a memorial of the course. I have done this enough times to know that everyone’s experience is vastly richer without the “help” of their devices.

Everyone interested in identifying trees and shrubs is advised to do two things: take a course taught by a botanist on identification of local vegetation; and carry a good paper field guide with keys. Learning to use a field guide is far more rewarding than using a digital device and enriches your experience.

Once you get used to leaving your phone off, I promise that you will have richer experiences in the natural world, and your wonderful human brain will gain a huge amount of knowledge.

Let’s get out among the trees!

A group of people walking toward The Great God Tree, a bur oak, in the winter