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PHOTOGRAPH BY BERNARD FRIEL, EDUCATION IMAGES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
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By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor
Half my family lives in mountainous Asheville, North Carolina. This gives me endless opportunity for backcountry hiking (on Sunday we saw gorges, bogs, granitic domes, and waterfalls on the Panthertown Valley Trail) and epic springtime vistas from the Blue Ridge Parkway.
But not everything wild stays in the wilderness. Today I saw a rafter of wild turkeys on my morning walk. Yesterday a black bear barreled through our garbage, turning the yard into a biohazard zone (I put my pandemic rubber gloves to good use!).
My own encroachment on their space reminded me of something Henry David Thoreau wrote (right after he noted that we can never have enough of nature): “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.” Our lives, as pun-tificating Thoreau might say, should become pasturized. Cultivating an appreciation for the natural world around us—and of our own inextricable and entirely dependent place within that world—is one of the best ways to honor Earth Day.
Earth Day should be every day. For travelers, remembering our place on the planet can be as easy as a walk in the park—or a drive in the wild. This week, Terry Ward writes about the best drives in the U.S. for viewing springtime wildlife. Our story stretches from bird sanctuaries and flyways to national parks, seashores, and wildlife refuges. (Pictured above, a bighorn sheep walks along the highway retaining wall in Montana’s Glacier National Park.)
“Most of our national wildlife refuges have wildlife drives,” says Toni Westland, supervisory refuge ranger at J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, in Sanibel, Florida. These roadways—while not as intimate as a walk in the woods—can help foster a sense of ecological literacy among children, says Mark Bailey, a professor at Oregon’s Pacific University. “Long before we can ask children in classrooms to behave in an environmentally thoughtful or sustainable manner, we need to help them develop a love for the natural world,” he says.
This is also National Park Week—an event that renews our invitation to explore the wild. As it happens, national park visitation plans were built around auto touring. “Park roads were designed to see great landscapes, including wildlife,” says Cynthia Hernandez, National Park Service spokesperson. She reminds travelers to drive carefully and mitigate a vehicle’s emissions.
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