>>The Wildlife Center of Virginia is one of the world's leading teaching and research hospitals for wildlife and conservation medicine, providing state-of-the-art veterinary care for more than 3,000 wild animals each year.

The Center draws on lessons learned from each patient admitted to teach the world to care about and care for wildlife and the environment.

>>Funding for Untamed is made possible by... (sounds of nature) (upbeat music) >>As long as I can remember, I've had a love affair with nature, a real connection to the natural world.

Even in my age, I haven't outgrown the sheer joy of wading in a mountain stream or rolling over a rock to see what's living underneath, sitting in the woods and simply watching the world go by.

It's something that was instilled in me as a little boy.

Now, I was very fortunate.

I had a mentor, my uncle Barney.

Now, he didn't have any kids of his own, but he took me under his wing and taught me about wild things and wild places.

He helped me deal with my fears about creepy crawly things or the darkness of the forest at night.

He helped me learn to love those things.

Now, back in 1958, he built a little one room cabin, and when I say little, it's 16 feet by 20 feet.

And at seven years old, I helped, or at least I thought I was helping.

Well, my uncle died in 2016, but he left me that cabin and the 50 acres that go with it.

And I have to tell you that, even today, it is my favorite place on the face of the Earth.

It is there that I remember the lessons, that I remember the feelings, and I can fill my spirit with that connection with the natural world.

Now, people protect what they love.

It's not just about the facts they have in their brain.

It's about the feelings in their heart.

It's about what touches their spirit.

Here at the Wildlife Center of Virginia, our mission is teaching the world to care about and care for wildlife in the environment.

We worded it that way because we know that people who care will act on those feelings.

Conservation is about changing human behavior.

People protect what they love.

The important thing for all of us is to build that connection.

And there are so many ways to get that done.

(acoustic music) >>What if I had stopped agreeing to this domestication, to the taming that some young part of me or some ancestor acquiesced to for some good reason, survival perhaps?

What if I stopped mowing the grass and let the flowers arise?

I wonder if someday I could remember the songs they sing to the bees, the ones I knew as a child by heart, the ones adults told me weren't there.

What if I stopped raking the leaves, let them lie?

Would the box turtle hide there and the newt, and perhaps just maybe the scurrying white-foot mouse that I adore would rush to nestle there and become something of the screech owl that I adore?

Who am I to judge what form love takes?

What if I told you about these wild things that inhabit untamed landscapes, the ones around us, the ones within us if I just let my voice go?

What if I asked you what your body remembers of being animal?

How does it want to move through the uncut grass?

How does it want to move through the leaves?

What does it want to take up in its talons?

What if I released you from your cage, and you, leaping forth into the vastness, rushing with great force towards the horizon, suddenly wielded, slowed to a contemplative pace, and breaking all of the rules, set me free?

So I've often used the arts as a medium for nature connection, both for myself and for workshop participants.

The arts, engagement of the arts in particular, allows for a sense of connectedness that comes to us through our senses.

It's a process of having to be as intimate as possible with your sense of touch, your sense of sight, potentially your sense of hearing.

That's the medium for being connected to the natural world.

The natural world allows us to become more intimate with place through what we see, through what we hear, through what we touch.

And so engagement in the arts is a process of becoming ever more aware of our senses.

It's a process that when we bring it into nature and nature landscapes is very transferrable in terms of our ability to literally reach and see and listen beyond ourselves.

So I think it's important for people to recognize that we are a part of rather than apart from nature because our relatedness, our sense of relatedness to the natural world has a strong influence on our beliefs and our actions.

If we regard ourselves as being part of the natural world, then there's an inherent sense of what you affect affects you.

It's a relationship of connection and belonging.

And what happens in the natural world is part of your relatedness to self, to your own physical body and wellbeing.

But if we objectify nature, if we see it as something separate than ourselves, then that cause and effect relatedness is no longer an aspect of our being or even more importantly, our sense of responsibility.

(acoustic music) >>The value of the National Park System is varied, but the main thing is that the National Park System protects special places that are part of our cultural history, or places of natural scenic beauty or value or importance.

And protection is the main word there.

And what we do is try to preserve these places so that they will still be here for generations to come, so that our grandchildren's children will be able to come to a place like Shenandoah National Park and see the same sorts of things that you're seeing today.

I think it's important for rangers to interact with visitors because it gives them a little more knowledge about the place that they're in.

There's a lot of times where I've seen people actually make connections, and it can be very subtle.

I can recall being with just a mother and her little three-year-old boy, and they had never seen a Monarch butterfly caterpillar, beautiful black, white-striped caterpillar, yellow.

And the mom got down after I was explaining what it was, and she kind of showed her a little boy what this was, and very gently just kind of petted the caterpillar.

And this was a safe, you know, one you could do.

And the little boy's eyes were just like, "Wow, what is this?"

And you could just see the happiness, the cheerfulness, the joy of discovery.

When you're working with kids, a lot of times kids are more tactile.

They like to touch things.

They'd like to be in the moment.

You can teach children by telling them, "Okay, here's a milkweed plant, and it's got these pretty purple flowers on it.

And bees come and they pollinate it, and that's important, and then they have these seeds."

And the kids are going, "Okay."

Or you can take them out to a patch of milkweed plants and say, "Hey, how many insects can you find on one milkweed plant?"

And suddenly the kids are engaged.

As rangers, we have hope; that is what we're all about.

We don't know what a visitor's going to go away with.

We hope that they will, in having enjoyed the park, will want to learn about it or continue to learn about it if they already have.

We hope that they will come back because this is a place that they have enjoyed.

But our further hope is that somewhere along the line they might just get in touch with a little bit of passion, that they might share, the same as we do, about the place that they're in and take away with them the idea that yes, these places need to be protected, and their actions can affect the future of our public lands, like National Parks.

The value of spending time in the outdoors, whether it's a national park, a park around where you live, a local lake, or just a children's park in your neighborhood is that it takes you away from a place where you normally are, whether it's an office, a room in your house, a school room, a classroom, and it takes you to a different place.

And that's a place of discovery and exploration, and it can be the sidewalk.

So many different things grow through the cracks in the sidewalks.

You don't have to come to a national park to discover nature.

It's all around us.

(acoustic music) >>For some people, finding that connection with nature, it's easy.

They just go outdoors.

But for other people, it's not that easy.

They may need a mentor, a guide, a teacher to help them understand the natural world to feel comfortable in nature.

Now, here at the Wildlife Center, some of our most important work is helping people understand the connections that exist between wild things, wild places, and humans and their activities.

And there is no better way to convey those stories than through the actual case histories of our patients.

Through our outreach and education program, through social media, indeed through this television series, we want to help people understand and feel the impact of human behavior on the natural world.

(acoustic music) >>Why does nature matter?

That's the big question.

And there's a big answer, but I think that the answer is a little easier to wrap your mind around once you see it through the right perspective.

I believe there's a tendency with a lot of people to think of nature as something that's somewhere else; it's away; it's somewhere else; it's different; there have to be animals; it has to be someplace wild.

I don't think that's true.

I think that nature is all around us all the time.

It's the water that we drink, the air that we breathe; it's you; it's me.

Nature is everything around us, and for that reason, it matters.

I first found my connection with nature, I think probably like a lot of people in this field, when I was pretty young.

And I can recognize now, looking back on it, that who I am today is entirely and wholly a product of my upbringing.

And I realized that that's not a chance everybody had, the chance to go outside, have a natural area just beyond your backyard, run through the woods, get dirty, look for snails and frogs in the stream and stuff.

Being able to see nature as a place and as a thing that I can interact with certainly made me value it at a pretty young age.

Nature Deficit Disorder is a term that first started showing up around the year 2005 in publications, and it's the idea that even though humans have been trending more and more towards an indoors lifestyle since the agricultural revolution, during the past 30 years specifically, the disconnect between young people and nature is growing at a faster rate, primarily because of, well, not just technology, but also a lack of natural and wild places that are available to young people.

And finally, the third factor that results in Nature Deficit Disorder is what some people might call over-parenting: The belief that kids outdoors these days are in greater danger than past generations might have been.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, that's just a fabrication.

There's no evidence to support that crime is up.

There's no evidence to support that kids are less safe outdoors than they used to be.

But those three things combined, over-parenting, the draw of indoor entertainment and technology, and the lack of available wild spaces that is accelerating the disconnect between young people and nature.

And that's what we call Nature Deficit Disorder.

At the Wildlife Center of Virginia, our mission statement is not "Take care of animals."

Our mission statement is "Teaching the world to care about and to care for wildlife and the environment."

So one of the ways that we attempt to get people to feel that connection between themselves and nature is through our outreach and education programs.

So featuring the stories of patients, former patients that are now our education animals, and lots of other mediums as well, our website, social media posts, all those efforts in outreach and education are designed to get people to feel that connection with the natural world.

Even in my lifetime, I have seen technology, and particularly entertainment devices change really, really quickly.

I think that with the modernization of the internet and smart devices, there are so many things that are so attractive to people to stay indoors rather than go outside.

What worries me about that is that by not being invested in your direct natural surroundings, in not taking ownership of those things, that the world in the future might be a darker place.

If we are unable to form that connection at a young age, chances are pretty good that when we're adults, we won't care as much to protect it for ourselves or future generations.

(upbeat music) >>So I was born in southern Arkansas right on the Louisiana border.

And my mother was an avid angler and a great gardener, and she liked working in the outdoors.

I was her last child, and the other children really didn't want to be outside.

And so I spent a lot of time outside with my mother at a young age.

And so she took me out to Bayou Bartholomew in southern Arkansas, the longest bayou in the world.

And it was here at Lake Enterprise that I got connected to nature.

I saw no one that looked like me, so it was very difficult for me to get involved in conservation as a child or even as a high school student.

But as I got older, I heard the song by Marvin Gaye, and it was "Mercy Mercy Me," and it talked about things are not like they used to be, and it said what happened to the blues skies?

And then it talked about radiation in our air, but then it said mercury in the fish.

And I thought about fish.

They were so important to me because they were part of my diet.

So conservation was more about pollution for me at first, and how do I do my part to make a difference?

But again, I saw no role models.

I saw no one who looked like me until I went to college, and I was asked to participate in an internship program for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

And I thought the program was going to be in Arkansas when I signed up for it.

I later found out it was in Wisconsin.

So I took my first internship in Wisconsin, and I joined the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a student and then spent the rest of my career with them.

So the value to connect to nature to human beings is all about, in my mind, mentally first, it's so refreshing to be outside.

And this is one of my favorite places that I come and sit on a log and just relax and gives me time to bring some clarity to some of the problems that I have.

So that's certainly a part of it, mentally.

And they've done research now.

There's a doctor in this organization that's called Park X, and he's discovered that he needs to bring out his prescription pad.

And really, he prescribes 120 minutes per week for people to get outside.

So mentally, that's part of it, but then physically, the connection is there as well.

And as you think about the walking and all that you get when you're out there, that's certainly a benefit as well.

But one that we often forget is, in my mind, that's a benefit of nature and why we should protect it is as I talked about earlier, being an avid angler and eating fish, Ecosystem Services.

When I talk to children and kids on the Chesapeake Bay watershed, I show them blue crabs because I know that they like to eat blue crabs, and I connect them to the Bay and tell them if we keep the Bay clean, we can have more crabs.

We can have more oysters.

We can have lobsters in other parts of the country.

So the Ecosystem Services are as important.

And then we talk to them about wetlands and how with climate change, how important it is to have wetlands in our lives in the fact that they're like sponges to keep the water from flooding our communities.

And they're also like a sifter when you think about flour, and how you sift the flour.

They're there to filter the trash away from our streams.

And so it's important for us to think about how nature really benefits us.

So nature for all is all about everybody, no matter what your gender, no matter what your ethnic background, no matter if you're urban or rural, nature for all includes everybody.

Nature for all is also not about large landscapes.

It's about small landscapes.

It's about urban environments.

It's about everybody and everything and every animal.

Nature for all is about everybody being able to see animals in the outdoors.

It's also about different types of of activities outdoors, and sometimes that's a struggle.

As regional director of US Fish and Wildlife Service in the northeast, we had a challenge.

We had to decide how we were going to allow certain activity on our National Wildlife Refuges.

So nature for all means that everyone will have the opportunity to use it.

However, we have to meet each other where they are, at the table with them to make sure that everyone's opinion counts, but that we also make sure that we're keeping nature and preserving nature and protecting nature so it will be there for all.

(mellow acoustic music) >>Connecting with nature and building a relationship with the natural world has so many benefits, physical, emotional, indeed spiritual, but as technology is intruding further and further into our daily lives, sometimes maintaining that relationship is not easy, but there are things you can do.

Certainly the simplest and most basic among them is get outside; explore your area.

Find different places to visit, maybe a local park, open spaces, natural areas, or even a corner in your own backyard.

Now, maybe your activities are more vigorous, mountain biking, paddling, canoeing, mountain climbing, or maybe you're more contemplative and enjoy a more peaceful experience.

Try painting, photography, even writing poetry.

Find your pathway to that connection.

There are many things available.

Invite others to join you in this endeavor.

First of all, it's sometimes fun to do it with like-minded people, but you're also perhaps helping others develop their relationship with the natural world.

And being a mentor is always a good way to give back what you have received.

Now, mentoring is important.

Mentor your own children, maybe your nieces and nephews, your grandchildren, and if you don't have any of those, maybe the kids next door.

There are many opportunities to share your love of nature and what it means to have that relationship with the natural world.

And if you're in a community, there are opportunities to work through other organizations.

Consider getting involved with organizations like Scouting or Big Brothers Big Sisters or any of the others that find volunteers to take children into the natural world who might not otherwise have the opportunity.

The bottom line is form that relationship with the natural world, but then care for it as you would a relationship with another person.

Nurture it.

Cultivate it because in the end, you'll be glad you did.

>>Funding for untamed is made possible by... (sounds of nature) (bright, trilling music)