{"id":2419,"date":"2012-07-15T10:00:44","date_gmt":"2012-07-15T14:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=2419"},"modified":"2012-07-15T09:54:30","modified_gmt":"2012-07-15T13:54:30","slug":"a-very-small-but-good-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2012\/07\/15\/a-very-small-but-good-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"A very small but good thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

A quote I posted on Tumblr broke through.<\/p>\n

Quick explanation: Tumblr is a social media site, a lot like Facebook. Younger people (in their teens and 20s) make up the majority of Tumblr users. (Facebook’s demographic is older now: mostly 40s and 50s.) NCPR has a Tumblr account<\/a> and I use it to share a lot of NCPR’s photos and stories. I also post other stuff: things I find interesting and help define the station’s personality.<\/p>\n

Often, the things I post are re-blogged (similar to a “like” on Facebook or re-tweet on Twitter), meaning someone liked what I posted and wants her\/his readers to see it, too.<\/p>\n

I recently posted this excerpt from the Thoreau essay Walking<\/em> (written originally for the Atlantic<\/a>):<\/p>\n

We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.<\/p>\n

-Henry David Throreau, on the 195th anniversary of his birth<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That was the whole post. And it didn’t get re-blogged by a lot of people (I didn’t expect it to), but one of them was an 18-year-old whose Tumblr page is filled with pictures or video of puppies and movie stars.<\/p>\n

Actually, almost every post on her page is visual, not verbal. And this is pretty common among Tumblr users, especially the younger set.<\/p>\n

But she re-blogged Thoreau. I consider this a (very)<\/em> minor achievement, simply because a writer I love – whose work was inspired by the nature of a very different world eight generations ago – resonated with a young woman emblematic of our current tech-y, multi-tasking culture.<\/p>\n

No matter what else happens today, I know that Thoreau has a place next to the Avengers, puppies and well-coiffed celebrities in the mind of a young person.<\/p>\n

Like I said, it’s a very small thing, but it’s worth noting. Partly because it’s worth building on.<\/p>\n

If young people can appreciate the writings of Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold and Mary Hunter Austin, they can appreciate what these authors were writing about, which is nature.<\/p>\n

And if young people can appreciate nature, we’ll all be better off.<\/p>\n

It might be only a germ of a hope, but lots of our best hopes – and greatest accomplishments – started this small.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quote I posted on Tumblr broke through.
\nQuick explanation: Tumblr is a social media site, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2421,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions\/2421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}