Sept 7 -- Having spent some time in the past few days coaxing students into wading around in swamps, I began thinking about dirt. It is clear that many of the new students, particularly those from abroad, are wary of getting dirty for the hell of it. This may have something to do with adolescent fastidiousness (in spite of the mayhem of a teenage room). I remember hating washing dishes for years because I would get dirty, and then one day having the life-changing revelation that of course you can wash the dirt off afterwards! It does not stay. Since then I love washing dishes, getting really piggy dirty, and then cleaning up. But it took me years to get the point.
Some of the students are old hand wilderness campers; but most are suburban kids, and appear never to have had the chance to get disgustingly dirty in a pond somewhere.
Of course the other problem is that these students are in environmental studies, and one of the failures of environmentalism has been the association of environmental goodness with purity and cleanliness. This is some perverse version of the 1950's puritanism that infected (and cleansed whiter than white) suburbia, and has now turned people into bottled water drinkers. Nature is a big creepy crawly mess, and you either delight in it, or shrink from it. I can only hope that this bunch enjoyed the goop.
(Peter T.)