Like most I was saddened to hear of Steve Irwin’s death this week, and like most I wasn’t surprised at how he died ? on the job, victim of an animal attack. The unjaded among us might say he “died doing what he loved.”
Unlike the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Telander, however, I don’t find the occasion worth sneering about. Telander finds “something very much like karma at work” with Irwin’s death, and that’s after he calls the late naturalist an “animal provocateur” and “hyperactive entertainer whose giddily-excited expression was part-lemur, part-carnival barker.” (Aside: does anyone understand the “part-lemur” bit?)
Most grating to Telander is that Irwin was “lauded as a conservationist,” but he didn’t meet Telander’s expectations of a conservationist. Telander never spells those out exactly, but apparently they don’t include “mesmerizing awe-stricken kids crouched in front of TV sets” in “130 countries.” No, apparently reaching all those viewers with one’s great love for and excitement about nature did nothing. And worse, Steve Irwin … well, he made money doing it! (Horrors!)
Telander’s perspective on nature? Well…
I put on my bathing trunks, sprinted across the white sand into the warm water and instantly was stung by a Portuguese Man-of-War. … Believe it, I never went back in the Gulf.
Circuses always gave me the creeps … I never liked zoos, either. … When I saw Siegfried and Roy perform in Tokyo 15 years ago, I was creeped out …
The natural world always amazed me.
And it scared me, too.
Pity Steve Irwin didn’t run into a jelly fish and not the end.
What a feckless taunt, a nanny-nanny-boo-boo coming from the plastic bubble! As for me, I loved Irwin’s show and found his boyish enthusiasm over ivv’ry creachah he encountered to be downright infectious. The world would seem a less magical, awesome and exciting place if “The Crocodile Hunter” had been the shrinking violet to raw nature that Mr. Telander is.
Nevertheless, it is true that Telander lives on ? “exploiting” the death of Irwin for lucre while not sharing a passion for nature with kids (and adults) in 130 countries.
