Steve Irwin, you will be missed (updated)
One part insanity, two parts Aussie accent, three parts animal lover, and six more parts insanity, and that’s what Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was. He passed as I imagine he would have liked, doing what he loved, exploring the animal kingdom. He brought a new energy and passion for animalkind to television, and inspired and enthralled a generation of kids, and he will be sorely missed. Keep hunting that Croc in the sky, Steve!
Update: if you’d like to make a charitable donation in Steve’s memory, here is a link to his charity, Wildlife Warriors.
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September 5th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Joel, I am so happy you wrote about Steve. I was so upset when he passed I am glad that you have imortallized him on your site(not that he wasn’t already all over the place.) Anyways I enjoyed your words, keep it up.
September 6th, 2006 at 3:55 am
I could not disagree with this immortalization more.
Steve was a great guy who did great things. Then, when he had children, he was obligated to shift gears.
This blog post sums up my views pretty well. Once he had children, he needed to segue into teaching, authoring, hosting — not the active death-defying stunts that characterized his early career.
As the headline to the linked post suggests, he placed greater emphasis on what he loved than on whom he loved. And two very young children will suffer for it.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:34 am
I could not disagree with your disagreement more.
Now that Steve’s gone, I would rather not pass judgement like that on a man. He was the Crocodile Hunter, take it or leave it, and I don’t think he knew how to live any other way. He grew up with dangerous animals, and you can tell by the way he worked with them that he knew them so well that he didn’t consider his work (very) dangerous. Certainly not life-threatening.
It was his essence, and I would be surprised if his wife or family would ever have wanted him to change that. Not to mention that swimming with stingrays is barely considered dangerous, and even animal experts agree that his death was a freak accident because stingrays are very docile creatures.
I see Steve like I see Dale Earnhart - he was who he was. If Dale had had to stop racing when he had kids, you know he would have died a little inside every day, and his family knew that, so they would never ask him to stop. Perhaps you could argue he shouldn’t have had kids then, but I don’t feel like I’m in a position to tell someone that they should or shouldn’t have kids. Because Dale kept racing, he became a hero and an icon to millions, and will be missed by millions. I assure you his family bears him no ill will for his desire to keep racing.
Lots of ordinary people with kids undertake dangerous activities all the time. Every soldier, police officer, fireman, airline pilot (or flight attendant for that matter), truck driver, bicycle messenger. Can we condemn every single one of these people as not caring enough about their own kids?
Steve had responsibiilities, yes, but he took calculated risks to bring his love of nature and wildlife to the world in his own way, and I’d venture to say that he had a bigger impact on wildlife awareness in the last decade than the more tame Jack Hanna.
Some people like Steve feel that their “mission” is bigger than themselves or their family, and I am not one to tell them they are wrong or irresponsible. How many orphans have been left behind due to the Iraq war? Whether you agree with the war or not, those soldiers believed firmly that they were protecting this country, and that their cause was more important than their own lives. Without being in their shoes, I cannot condemn them.
March 15th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Could you please send to me the contacts of developer of your site? It looks so damn good!