A Life Shaped by Nature
Conversations with Phil Youngblood - Part I
Welcome to “Voices from the Field,” conversations with contributors who share their interests and expertise with us. I’m Lynne Berrett, co-founder with my husband Josh, of the nonprofit Ageless Mind Project. Please click the link below to listen to my introduction, and to hear today's contributor(s) speaking briefly about their chosen subject.
“We all need to feel connected to something. And when I was young. It was easier for me to connect to nature rather than the human world. And then, much later in life, once I learned a little bit more about people how to work with them, I found that having a mutual interest and respect for nature was a good way to connect with people as well.” - Phil Youngblood
Phil Youngblood is a scientist, educator, and nature enthusiast who retired from university teaching about five years ago. He is now very active in the Texas Master Naturalist Program, which is part of Texas Parks and Wildlife, and in the virtual world of Second Life (SL).
In SL, he’s one of the founders of The Science Circle Foundation, a multinational alliance of scientists, educators, students, and science enthusiasts collaborating to share knowledge and promote open source education around the world.
To understand Phil’s passion for the natural world, we need to travel back in time to his childhood growing up in California, Hawaii, and East Texas where being outdoors was an integral part of his life. “I grew up in the days when parents told their kids to go outside and play and come back when it was dark. I used to relish my time outside and missed it when I didn't have it,” Phil says. “If you think about the days when you didn't have a schedule, and you didn't feel the need to do something, and you didn't have people wanting something from you, that was what it was like for me before I started school.”
Phil’s special affinity for the natural world lasted until he became what he calls a “successful adult.” He joined the Navy where he spent eight years at sea on a ship that he describes as “a very artificial thing with metal all around, artificial lights, and temperature control, and little to remind you of the outside.” One memory in particular sticks out for him from that time, because he hadn’t seen the sun for a week. He remembers waking up at 4:00 but didn’t know if it was 4:00 AM or 4:00 PM. “I had a sudden panicky feeling and had to go up on deck to look at the sky and feel the breeze,” he says.
When Phil retired from the Navy in the nineties, he went into teaching as a university professor. “As a professor, the work seemed to be ever-present, unceasing, and seven days a week,” Phil says. “I found myself moving from one box to another. I'd be living in a box called home, then I'd go to a box called the car and drive to work in the dark on artificial roads beneath artificial lights. Then I’d get out of the car box and go into another box called the office. I’d do that day after day - rinse and repeat.”
Then one day, when Phil was close to retiring, he happened to look at the tree just outside his office window. It was spring and the tree was blooming. “I just felt this need to get up and go outside and walk around,” Phil says. “It was as if nature was calling, so I answered. That was my start back to a kind of healthier lifestyle.”
A Senior Wake-up Call
Once Phil and his wife became members of what he calls “the senior generation,” they made the decision to travel. “We needed to see the world a little bit,” Phil says. “We went to New Zealand, Norway, and lots of other places that made us realize we needed the natural world in our lives again.”
After returning from their travels, Phil and his wife began to actively work on cultivating their relationship with the natural world. “Nature is a perfect and benign world,” Phil says. “When you think about it, nature is very efficient and very honest. There's no hidden agenda like you often find in the human world.”
Happily, Phil has come to the realization that spending time observing, researching, interacting with, and sharing stories with others about the natural world is both a productive use of his time and good for his wellbeing. “Stepping outdoors or watching something natural gets you out of your head and into a different world,” he says. “I know that reading can do that, maybe even a good TV show. But getting out into nature is more active and interactive. In other words, you're making up the story, not being a silent observer in somebody else's story, and you don't have to be in some ideal situation.”
The other shift in perspective that nature has given Phil has to do with continuity. “Right now, if you look outside, Spring's returning. What I thought was dead is coming back to life,” he says. “This really gives me a sense of hope. Nature is enduring, and I know that even the trees on my property that were here long before I arrived will be here long after I am gone. It just gives me a lot of hope to think about that endurance and that continuity.”
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Look for Part II of our conversation with Phil next time.
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