Greenpeace is a marvelous organization. So is the Sierra Club. Earth Day was a wonderful PR campaign, and everywhere I look I see recycling bins, "Love Your Mother Earth" stickers, and vegetarians, all working hard to keep the last pieces of nature from being sucked off the planet.

Which is great, except that I can't stand nature. At all. Being basically a city boy, I think I speak for many people in saying that, although I like nature and am fond of it, in many ways I'd be a lot happier if we paved the whole thing over and replaced the sun with a non-glaring fluorescent tube.

I think the reason for this was books - every children's book told me that woods were wonderful. Small woodland creatures were rarely rabid and always your friends. Mother Nature was a caring, loving woman who looked like Betty Crocker and would protect you from angry bees if you wandered into a nest of yellowjackets. Being a gullible kid, I swallowed these lies easily.

The biggest lie, of course, was the butterfly.

You know you're a kid when you read a children's book and are still genuinely surprised when beleaguered caterpillar becomes (*gasp!*) a butterfly at the climax of the book. We've all seen it ten million times. The final page is always this orgasmic chiaroscuro of colors; the butterfly always has that same, happy, joyous, "eat me" grin as he flies overhead, pooping colorful butterfly poop on all his detractors.

But we didn't have caterpillars in my neighborhood. We had Gypsy Moth caterpillars, which looked like crawling toilet brushes. At the time Gypsy Moths were everywhere, Gypsy Moths were a bona fide threat eating the leaves on our trees, eating our trees, our porches, small dogs, errant postmen, low-flying aircraft.... I locked a few of these Lovecraftian monstrosities away in a jar to see what they'd transform into. Every day I watched these creatures eagerly to see what they'd transform into. I thought innocently, gee, they're so ugly now that when they change they must transform into something really pretty.

The First Rule of Nature: What is ugly, stays ugly.

I don't want to describe exactly what the gypsy moths turned into, but they looked like extras from "Poltergeist" and I had to spray an entire can of Raid to sedate them before I could set them free. From that point on, I knew nature wasn't for me. Give me TV instead. Give me McDonald's. Anything.

I tried, lord knows I tried; I went waterskiing and came in first place at the 100-Meter Underwater High-Speed Drag, having to have several trout surgically removed from my sinuses afterwards. When we roasted marshmallows, mine was always the one that looked like a charcoal briquette. I was bitten by a llama at the petting zoo. I fell off the elephant ride. I became a camp counselor and discovered that I hate kids almost as much as I hate nature.

I've tried to appreciate nature, but I am a City Boy, born and bred for the city. There are many things I would like to do but cannot:

I would like to go out and dance around in the woods, but I am Irish and German, which means that my skin is so pale I am nearly transparent. Doctors can take x-rays of me just by holding me up to a bright light. As a child, I would go out to catch fireflies and would come back in with small patches of firefly-shaped sunburns on my hand. I don't want to bring the word "albino" into this, but you get the idea - direct sunlight is definitely out.

I would use my natural sense of direction, but my natural sense of direction is over-helpful. It doesn't want to hurt my feelings. Whichever way I turn, my sense of direction says cheerfully, "Yup! Keen eye there, Ferrett! Go that way!" and I wander off towards the camping site and wind up lost in Argentina. I'd use a compass, but every compass I've seen is a litle metal toothpick wobbling back and forth in a jar of spit, telling me that maybe, just maybe, that entire half of the horizon might be northerly. So compasses are out.

I would like to rely on my natural instincts, but my instincts are always telling me to get the hell out of the woods and back to the city.

And even if I could stay in the woods without getting lost or burnt or starved, my bloodline is the Bug Equivalent of a McDonald's. Bugs say, "Hey! There's a McFerrett! Chow down!" and I come off any camping trip looking like the Amazing Bump Boy.

But my biggest problem with the Great Outdoors is that it has too many smells and no roped-off areas. You see, nature is essentially space. Coming from the city, I'm used to space being sectioned up into small, easily-controlled areas such as the bedroom, the living room, the basement, et cetera. In nature, everything you see is just WOODS. Or PLAINS. Or BEACH. Everything's open to interpretation, which is more than a little unsettling when the section you have designated as your bedroom turns out to be some forest creature's bathroom. Or, worse yet, your bathroom turns out to be a family of bees' living room. (Remember how I told you that Mother Nature won't protect you? I spoke from personal experience, folks....)

I won't get into the smells, but at least in the city we keep all the smells underground where they won't hurt anyone. Certain smells shouldn't be allowed to roam free, you know?

So nature's wonderful. I think it's definitely a good idea to keep it, and we all should all work together to save the environment, and the animals, and the woods and the plains and the beaches and the quicksand traps. And meanwhile, I'll work even harder to keep them all far away from me.

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