There’s an undeniably smug pleasure many of us take in observing others’ failings or stupid behavior, and indeed, it’s hard not to feel superior when reading about the latest winners of the Darwin Awards. Or when gaping at the pictures posted on the People of Walmart site. Who goes out in public like that? How do some people come up with such incredibly dumb ideas?
And aren’t we special/smart/superior not to be like that?
And yet . . . and yet, perhaps the line between smart and stupid is a lot fuzzier than we think. Consider, for example, the gleeful fascination that self-styled outdoorsy types have with “tourons,” that mashup of tourist and moron used to describe people who think it’s a good idea to take selfies with a bison or elk, or who try to pet bear cubs. These encounters, which frequently end badly for the touron, are grounded in a Disney-fied view of nature and its creatures as essentially benign and placed on this world for our enjoyment. For a touron, the thought that we might be perceived as a threat—or even as a food source— is inconceivable. And it’s that lack of awareness that causes so much self-satisfaction for observers who pat themselves on the back for knowing so much better.
But what if we’re all tourons, to one degree or another, distinguished only by the clarity of our perceptions and the sophistication of our understanding? How much difference is there between the tourist who ambles up to a wild animal and the tourist who thrashes heedlessly through a tick-infested meadow, or who kicks up leaf mold and breathes in fungal spores, or who ignores a mosquito bite even after the headaches it caused progress to vomiting, high fever and aching joint pain?
That last set of symptoms describes the progression of dengue fever, which can leave a lucky person debilitated for weeks on end. The unlucky ones develop severe dengue, which causes plasma to leak out of blood vessels and results in organ failure. If untreated, with blood transfusions and intravenous fluids, the mortality rate is 15%. That’s probably higher than the mortality rate inflicted by bison goring stupid tourists, but thus far, at least, no one is calling dengue victims “tourons.” Not yet.
Although many Americans have never heard of dengue fever, or if they have, think of it as something exotic, it is in fact establishing a foothold in the United States, as are a growing number of other tropical diseases. Not seen in the U.S. until a few years ago, dengue is already found in the warmer, wetter parts of the country—Florida in particular, but also Texas, Arizona and southern California—and is expected to get a boost this year as a current explosion of the virus in Brazil moves north with the seasons. Depending on the weather, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi could be next. The few hundred cases reported to date could quickly swell into the thousands.
This spread of mosquito-borne diseases—not just dengue, but yellow fever, West Nile and Zika viruses, malaria and others—is just one result of a warming climate that gets more attention because of the extreme weather it produces. But the “natural” world of flora and fauna is just as strongly affected by climate change as the physical world of wind and ocean currents and the increasingly violent storms they kick up. Warming waters produce algae blooms that poison once-pristine rivers and lakes. Shorter winters enable the spread of tick-borne lyme disease far beyond its New England origins. “Valley fever,” once confined to the desert southwest, is becoming endemic throughout the country.
All of which is to say that the romanticized view of Mother Nature promoted by the campground industry, and now its glampground imitators, is just as superficial and ignorant as that of the tourons who view wild animals as cuddly photo-ops. There are numerous threats to our well-being when we venture out of our domestic bubbles, some not even visible to the naked eye, and that number is growing at an alarming rate. Ignoring those less obvious perils doesn’t make us superior to tourons—indeed, failing to recognize our responsibility for creating a more dangerous environment, through our contributions to climate change, arguably makes us dumber.
Nature is not inherently hostile to humans: it just doesn’t give a damn, any more than a lightning bolt concerns itself with the tree it cleaves. In the final analysis, then, we have only ourselves to blame when we put ourselves in danger’s way, whether that danger comes in the form of a 1,200-pound bison that can run 35 miles per hour, or a 2.5-miligram mosquito.
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