Turn off, tune out and drop in

You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I belong to perhaps the smallest minority group in our country. It has nothing to do with my skin color or religion. I don’t have a freakish medical condition or an abnormal psychological tic. But I am conspicuously different from 99 percent of you.

For the past 11 years, I have lived in a home without a television.

“No television?” you gasp. That’s not only odd, it’s downright bizarre and yes, completely un-American.

I could ply you with statistics about television and health. For example, the average American youth spends 900 hours in school each year, but watches television for 1,500 hours, during which time he or she sees 20,000 30-second commercials. In a 65-year life, the average person will have spent nine years watching television.

But I am writing about television in a sustainability column for a specific, if not immediately obvious, reason. I believe that our culture’s dependence on television and other electronics is responsible for our concomitant destruction of the natural world. In my mind, it’s no coincidence that the proliferation of televisions in every household since the mid-1950s coincides with the devastation of the environment. For one thing, we are so constantly tuned in and hooked up to electronic gadgets, we’ve become blind to the natural world. It’s not possible to spend time in nature if you’re spending time playing video games or watching TV. Consider these grim statistics: Visits to national parks peaked in 1987 and dropped 23 percent by 2006. So as the natural world is destroyed, many of us have a blasé reaction or no reaction at all.

Second, we’ve responded to TV’s one purpose—to sell us stuff we don’t need. We consume. We use the world’s natural resources to manufacture stuff and then we’re continually convinced, through advertising, that we need the stuff. And buy we do, valuing human-made things more than we value the natural world, which isn’t sold in a television commercial. Poet and author Robert Bly cogently observes that never before in the history of humanity has the “selling industry” inserted itself in the home between parent and child.

To compound the problem, millions of television-addicted Americans fit the criteria for substance abuse as defined in the official psychiatric manual (see “Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor” in the February, 2002 Scientific American). These include using TV as a sedative, indiscriminate viewing, feeling loss of control while viewing, feeling angry with oneself for watching too much, inability to stop watching and feeling miserable when kept from watching.

Perhaps they also feel miserable because they’re alienated from nature, as is the contention of Richard Louv. In his most recent book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” he asserts that experience in nature is essential to a human’s well-being. He describes “the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.”

I invite you and your family to join me in being TV-free for just one week, from April 21-27, National TV-Turnoff Week. Just for a week, hide the remote control. Leave the screen dark, and free yourself from the noise and images that crowd out your own senses. Drop in to the natural world. Walk along the river, hike along a path in the woods or just stand outside in your yard. Stop and look around you, feel the stillness and reconnect with what E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia,” your inborn necessity to unite your spirit to the wonders of the natural world.