Back here in Northampton, one of the chief delights is going on walks, as I have said many times before. Although this evening's excursion was uneventful, besides the normal fare of squirrels, raccoons, and whatnot, black bears are not uncommon, and a person usually ends up seeing one or two every year. Though this is not the country by any means, a delightful array of animals can be seen. On a fairly recent occasion, my father saw a coyote, and a few years ago I came across a red fox in a local park. Further, moose are frequently seen by others, and elsewhere in New England, rarely, mountain lions have been sighted.

I have been pondering the variety of regional wildlife for about a week, since speaking with a friend of mine who is going into education. She was up late in the library designing a lesson plan, and I noticed a handout on, typically, the endangered giant panda. Little different from the handouts I came across when I was in grade school, I immediately asked, "Why a lesson on the giant panda?" "Oh, the giant panda is endangered, kids should learn about it." "Yes, but giant pandas do not live around here," I replied. Minus the specimens in zoos, they don't even inhabit the Western Hemisphere. To give a Wikipedia lesson, their habitat is the most minuscule of areas in China. And yet they are one of the icons of cutesy ecological awareness. Just as missionaries have often been lampooned for their zeal to convert the Far East or to bring the Gospel to the heart of Africa, and ignoring their literal neighbors, the greens prefer to educate our children about the plight of animals they'll probably never encounter. Thinking of subsidiarity, I asked, "Have you ever thought of doing a lesson on squirrels?" That would be awesome, but to her it was a novel thought.

Recently, I have lamented the lack of knowledge moderns have of flora and other plant life (in a particularly distressing sign of the times, the Oxford Junior Dictionary recently removed natural, Christian, and historical terms, replacing them with mainly technological terms). Lessons on anything from commoner New England wildlife to critically endangered animals like the mountain lion, would have a much greater utility for the greens themselves, and help to remedy ignorance of nature.