We can no longer assume a cultural core belief in the perfection of nature. To previous generations of children, few creations were as perfect or as beautiful as a tree. Now, researchers flood trees with genetic material taken from viruses and bacteria to make them grow faster, to create better wood products, or to enable trees to clean polluted soil. In 2003, the Pentagons’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded researchers to develop a tree capable of changing colors when exposed to a biological or chemical attack. And the University of California promoted “birth control for trees,” a genetically engineered method of creating a “eunuch-tree that spends more of its energy making wood and not love.”

~ Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods (p23)

I’m inclined to agree with Louv, but what’s missing (apart from evidence of children thinking this way) is acknowledgment that the metaphors of science aren’t so different in some ways from ideals of “perfection” or the fantasies and wishes we project onto trees (playing Tarzan in the treetops, say). Valuing forests for their timber, their romantic shade, or the possibilities of medical breakthrough may (or may not) bear vastly different consequences for trees themselves, but all are a result of projecting human desires onto wild spaces rather than seeing those spaces as intrinsically valuable. So instead of lamenting the displacement of one lens by another, we might pay more attention — as parents, teachers, and environmentalists alike — to identifying the metaphors and resulting outcomes we take for granted so often.