The Future is Going to Be Better than It Used to Be
Thoughts for the New Year
Some say the future isn’t what it used to be. Here’s a different view. The future is going to be better than it used to be.
Sure, the news looks challenging. But just look how far we’ve come in such a short time — and consider the potential for the children and nature movement in 2009. The real miracle is the rapidly growing network of thousands of individuals, families and organizations that have made this movement their own. Folks like you.
We have a long way to go, but the grassroots are growing; and so are the netroots.
During the past three years, the Children & Nature Network’s role has been to collect and make easily available the growing body of information about the importance of nature to children; to help build a broad network of support for that movement; to educate the public about the movement; and to develop new methods and tools. Through the leadership of C&NN Managing Director Amy Pertschuk, we’ve seen a dramatic expansion of our Web site, the most in-depth source of information and tools available related to the children and nature movement. Awareness is spreading.
Between 2006 and 2008, C&NN helped galvanize over 50 regional and statewide campaigns in North America. In 2008, we sponsored a C&NN Grassroots Gathering of over 100 grassroots leaders — including young people from very diverse backgrounds. We worked with the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, the Conservation Fund, National Audubon,Hooked on Nature, the Trust for Public Land and many other groups to support programs that connect kids to nature and to promote changes in public policies.
Last year’s most visible legislative success came in September, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the No Child Left Inside Act, sponsored by the No Child Left Inside Coalition. If approved this year in the Senate, the bill will help the states support environmental education.
Our Canadian partners, including Nature Child Reunion and the Robert Bateman Get to Know Program, are quickening their strides. And through the efforts of C&NN President Dr. Cheryl Charles, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, at its World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, officially designated connecting children with nature as an international priority.
These are just a few of our shared milestones.
Now comes 2009, and the beginning of a new era — with new opportunities to strengthen ties and build new relationships.
The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA), for example, has presented recommendations to President-elect Obama. AFWA listed children and nature as No. 2 in their roster of five Priorities of a National Agenda for State Fish and Wildlife Agencies. Other conservation-related initiatives are in the works.
We’re pleased that the incoming Obama administration has indicated there will be expanded federal emphasis on early childhood education.
With that in mind, C&NN will continue to make the case for the child-nature connection and environmental literacy as fundamental elements of children’s cognitive development. We believe that future education reform must widen the definition of the classroom. To help young people learn in nature, not just about nature, policy-makers must view parks, wildlands, farms and ranches as the new schoolyards. We’ll push for an expansion of the number of nature-oriented preschools, including experiential education and greened schoolyards in Head Start.
This month, in an article titled ” Nature Makes a Comeback in Wisconsin Schools,” the Wisconsin State Journal reported: ” To reconnect children to nature, school districts are expanding school forests around the state while also developing low-cost, small projects such as rain gardens that can be effective even in poor urban areas.”
We’d like to see more progress like that.
In 2009, education reform must also be about a reformation of values, not just the distribution of more information.
Consider the words of Oberlin professor David Orr, one of the world’s foremost proponents of environmental literacy and a leading voice on climate change. In his seminal essay, ” What Is Education For,” he describes ” the way our education has prepared us for how to think about the natural world.” Orr, a member of C&NN’s board of advisors, argues correctly that more education ” is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems.” The worth of education ” must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival. The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.”
We share David Orr’s belief that nature-deficit disorder belongs on this list, and is linked to each of these priorities. We’ll continue to make the case that a meaningful human relationship with nature, shaped in children’s formative years, is crucial to our society’s practice of stewardship, its sense of community, and the strength of family bonds. We also believe that natural play will increasingly be recognized as a key element in any successful effort to turn the tide on child obesity.
The emerging body of scientific knowledge supports these theses, but more research is needed. This is why one of C&NN’s priorities will grow in importance.
In November, C&NN board members Dr. Stephen R. Kellert and Dr. Martha Farrell Erickson convened leading scholars and co-facilitated the first National Children and Nature Research Summit. Co-sponsored by Yale University, the University of Minnesota, and the Children & Nature Network, the summit brought together 20 eminent scholars and practitioners from throughout the United States to address the importance of nature in children’s lives, to identify strengths and gaps in current knowledge, and to establish general principles and guidelines for inquiry. Insights from this summit will be available this year in a white paper that we believe will help stimulate future research and the necessary funding to support it.
In the meantime, C&NN’s Web site continues to report the growing body of correlative research. Among the studies published in major journals in recent months: a new one from Andrea Faber Taylor and Francis Kuo showing that children with ADHD concentrate better after walking in a park; UK research finding that living near parks and woods boosts health, regardless of social class; and in October, researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine-Purdue University and the University of Washington reported that greener neighborhoods are associated with slower increases in children’s body mass, regardless of residential density. One reason that last point is important, as Kuo says, is that it dispels the mistaken assumption that more green equals more sprawl.
We need nearby nature everywhere, especially in the most urban neighborhoods.
That principle must be among the central precepts of any planning for the future of urban design, education, and health care — and should be at the forefront of any discussion of child obesity by agencies of the Obama Administration. As Howard Frumkin often says, ” Yes, we need more research, but we know enough to act.”
This brings us to the need to examine how we act.
In the current economic climate, we need a new model for change — and new tools to stimulate cultural transformation. That transformation is most likely to occur at the personal and neighborhood level, where we live, work and play.
In 2009, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, C&NN will continue to work with three Michigan communities, applying the principles of our C&NN Community Action Guide. The design of our built environment is a key factor. Across the country, we’ll encourage urban planners, neighborhood organizations and community action groups, along with such organizations as the Trust for Public Land, to protect the remaining islands of urban nature — and create new ones. One possibility: neighbors working with conservancy groups to establish what might be called ” nearby-nature trusts.”
We also hope to encourage young people to seek careers in the fields and professions that connect people, particularly children, to nature — to become park rangers, biophilic architects and urban designers, nature therapists, natural play organizers and natural teachers.
In a similar vein, C&NN’s Natural LeadersTM strategy, which, with the help of the Sierra Club and other supporters, will continue to encourage young people to organize themselves as leaders of the movement. C&NN Board members Martin LeBlanc and Brother Yusuf Burgess are helping to guide that effort.
Working with our partners ecoAmerica, the Nature Conservancy and other non-profit or business partners, C&NN will help launch a major social marketing campaign to directly engage parents and grandparents. And in coming weeks, we will officially launch the C&NN Nature Clubs for Families Initiative, with funding help from REI and other groups. Coming to our Web site soon: an easily downloaded Family Nature Clubs Tool Kit designed to give families the tools and inspiration they need to take action in their own lives — without waiting for programs or funding. Also coming in 2009: C&NN’s Green Grandparents Campaign. These initiatives will be featured as part of C&NN’s upcoming Children and Nature Awareness Month, in April.
Think how the lives of our children — our lives, too — would improve if these new forms of social-nature networking were to spread as quickly as book clubs and Neighborhood Watches did in recent decades, or the use of social networking tools did during the 2008 presidential campaign.
We believe that you and thousands of other people like you will help shape the coming era, a time of human restoration through nature.
Despite the bad news that dominates current news coverage, we believe that we’re seeing the emerging shape in a new landscape, that there is no practical alternative to hope. And we agree with the poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote: ” Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops — at all.”
The future: better than it used to be.
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Richard Louv is chairman of the Children and Nature Network. He is the author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.”Now in its 21st printing in the United States, “Last Child” has been published in 9 languages and 13 nations.
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Richard,
It is, indeed sad that we are not giving our children & grandchildren enough time to “stop & smell the roses” or name the “birdies”. I feed many species of critters in my back yard & am always trying to educate my grandkids on their names & habits. Keep up e good work & I will do my best to do what I can.
Richard, et al,
Kudos on your efforts to date. You are so right, the future will be better–awareness has a way of improving things. The inexorable decline of the role of in-situ exposure as a key part of educating anyone, not just children, in the natural sciences–or physics, or accounting, or most any topic–is one of the many negative unintended consequences of the otherwise noble quest to provide basic education for every child that began as an incredible dream in the 18th Century. While our world will no doubt sustain the system of centralized, costly, inefficient schools for another two decades or more, I am advocating for the initiation of a reboot of public education to start over and redesign it from square one. If you could do that today, would your resulting system resemble much of what we have today?
I appreciate your closing thought: “We believe that you and thousands of other people like you will help shape the coming era, a time of human restoration through nature.” I would modify it to read “…a time of human restoration through community.” As you will see on All New Public Education (click through on my name above), I see public education as beginning at conception and extending to two or three days after death or each and every human being. Everyone is a student throughout their lives and, as soon as they have something to share, everyone is a teacher. Lessons are taught in the kitchen, the park, the office, the museum, and anywhere there is something to observe and learn from. And yes, there is online collaboration, for communities need not be dependent on physical proximity.
I will soon include your concept and content in All New Public Education for the obvious alignment in a common good. Your thoughts on ANPE would be appreciated as well. Together we strive to redirect mankind off the tangent that the industrial age set us on, back to a path through the world we live in–for as long as we live in it.
Again, congratulations and many thanks for all you have invested and all you are still committed to do for this worthy vision.
Stephen Dill
All New Public Education
Richard,
Reading your column almost offsets a reading of the grim misdirected California State Parks, Off-Highway Motor Vehicle Recreation Division 2008 Strategic Plan. The basin premise of this document is flawed: OHV recreation is a sustainable environmental enhancement. To help make their point, on page 8, Last Child in the Woods is referenced adjacent to a photograph of a child, riding a motorcycle on a dirt road, completely encased in the appropriate protective gear, including a fully padded helmet. They use your words to promote this activity as healthy and capable of instilling caring values for the natural lands of California. By implication the young rider is pursuing an activity that will connect him (her) with the natural world. The picture is nearly identical to the one accompanying your blog with the child walking on the road.
This is a ludicrous position for a State Agency charged with protecting the environment for future generations to take. It is deeply cynical to use your words to promote children riding OHVs as a healthy recreational pastime. Many of the riders begin at an early age (sometimes below 5 years) to experience nature in a synthetic cocoon of speed and sound, while their central nervous systems are developing and acutely sensitive. Their bonding (probably at the cellular level) is with a machine, noise and vibration, not the natural world.
OHV riding, and its associated trails, is known to be one of the most destructive human activities on the functioning of the natural systems in our wildlands. It is queer indeed that the state chooses to endorse OHV recreation as an environmental enhancement, when research shows that its effects cannot be mitigated. It appears to me that the OHV Division suffers from nature-deficit disorder. Perhaps you can suggest a cure. At the very least please suggest they stop promoting you book in their strategic plan.
Pat Flanagan
Environmental Educator
Richard and all,
I am privileged to give nature tours as a docent at Konza Prairie Biological Station. On a Bison Loop tour with a busload of 42 5th graders, I was holding forth about the history of bison, how they almost became extinct. About 30 bison including calves were a few yards from the bus, so the kids could get a good look. The discussion turned to how some animals and plants are domesticated and others are wild and will not be domesticated like big bluestem, bison, zebras, deer, antelope and elk.
A girl began frantically waving her thin arm over her head, “Can you milk a bison?” That question raised the hairs on the back of my neck. What a gift that question was to open a discussion and to let the children’s imaginations go.
That question opened up many strategies for me to use to mine the curiosity of children and adults whether we are out on a 3 mile hike through the tall grass or sitting on a bus scanning the horizon for bison.
I find that children and adults are eager to discover what nature has to offer them. I applaud the efforts of everyone working to get children and adults out in nature.
Diane Barker
To Pat Flanagan:
Thanks for the note. I’m definitely not keen on introducing more motorized vehicles to natural areas or to moving away from the “traditional park” model (if traditional means natural), as mentioned in the report. I’ll be looking into this. Thanks again.
Rich
I had been reading reviews of your book and was thrilled to pick up the National Parks edition while visiting the Jedediah Smith Redwoods National Park this past September. Thank you for such an insightful look into the healthy development of our children.
I see that you will be visiting my “neck of the woods” in March with a presentation in Reading, PA. WELCOME. You’ll love our area. There are wonderful facilities for outdoor experiences.
Fortunately, our two sons and now our grandchildren are able to explore outdoors in our still somewhat rural neighborhood. It would be wonderful if all children would be able to enjoy what we have.
Best wishes continuing to spread your message.
Louise
Richard Louv and Nature Deficit Disorder…
Their objective rings true: give children of all ages the chance to experience what you are teaching—hands on and in context—so that so much more is learned and appreciated than the one or more learning points of the lesson and the experience is so…
As a psychologist who has spent too much time working in ‘adolescent treatment centres’ and psychiatric hospital units, I am very aware of the consequences of the disconnect with nature. In relaxation imagery, no one ever suggests, ‘and imagine yourself in a shopping mall’, it is usually a nature scene.
Artists of all stripes tend to refer back to nature.
I would like to issue an invitation to anyone in the Victoria BC area, to include the following event, if you are coming to hear Richards presentation. The art exhibit has been extended till the end of March.
And I beg your indulgence in a blatant promo to bring people closer to nature and wildlife.
OASES presents: An Afternoon with Wildlife.
*Don’t miss this one! Come and be wowed by visits from a number of live animals, and become informed about lemurs, porpoises, lizards and birds of prey.*
John Creviston, former curator of the Crystal Garden Conservation Centre, will speak about the incredible life and habits of the Solomon Island Skink. These unique lizards have a family structure rarely found amongst reptiles, and have a “grasping” tail used when climbing through their rainforest habitat. Two skinks, each about 2 ft. long, will be in attendance.
Anna Hall will talk on the always fascinating porpoises. Anna, a PhD candidate in Zoology, is considered an expert in these mysterious mammals. She recently spoke at the reception for the “Celebrating Wildlife� art exhibit, and was so well received that she was asked back by popular demand.
Jeff Krieger of Alternative Wildlife Solutions will discuss the life and antics of raptors. Live birds will be present, including a red-tail hawk and gyrfalcon, so that the beauty of these normally shy animals can be appreciated. Some basics of falconry will be discussed by Ben Wallace, president of the BC Falconry Association. A flying demonstration might also occur.
Lisa Gould PhD, professor of Biological Anthropology/Primatology at UVIC will give a talk on some of her favourite creatures…lemurs. There is a lot more to them then just being the stars of a TV series “Lemur Streetâ€�. Come and learn what Lisa has been doing on her trips to faraway Madagascar, and what could be done to help these primates and the people who live among them.
Please be sure to enjoy the display “Celebrating Wildlife�. This exhibit features a variety of sculptures, prints and photographs depicting local and exotic wildlife. Some of the artists will be in attendance and may be persuaded to discuss how they Celebrate Wildlife through their artwork.
When: Saturday, March 7, 2009. From 3-5 pm.
Where: Victoria Arts Connection, 2750 Quadra Street, (just north of Hillside).
*Admission is free, but please support all our presenters in their efforts to help wildlife.*
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For more information or to interview presenters please contact:
Herman Surkis at 250-472-6995, oases@shaw.ca, and visit oasesconservation.org
I’m helping to start an intergenerational preschool, opening fall 2009. We will have seniors living in one wing and a nature and art-focused preschool in the other. We hope to be getting these two generations together outside every day for gardening, walking in the woods, or just reading a book together in the shade of a big tree. We never stop needing the healing power of the natural world.
Richard,
Congratulations on all your success. I know this message is dated but I hope everything is still going as planned. I first came aware of your efforts while reading your book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. I had no idea how important natural play was or that your movement was supported by so many groups and organizations. I am now a supporter of the Leave No Child inside Act and will continue to stress the importance of green play with my family and friends. Growing up, I spent numerous hours outside getting dirty with my neighborhood friends; so I know from firsthand experience how beneficial natural play can be. I agree with you 100% when you said, “We believe that future education reform must widen the definition of the classroom. To help young people learn in nature, not just about nature…†As a person who does his best thinking while enjoying the great outdoors I am in favor of this. Taking long walks when I have writers block or when I’m having trouble with a tough assignment always clears my mind. If parents see that school systems are in favor of green play and green learning, they will feel more obliged to get involved themselves. I will continue to spread the word on the benefits of natural play on my end.
Best wishes,
Donald