One Farmer’s Efforts to Connect Kids with Nature

(Cedar Rapids) Gazette – April 12, 2008
By Orlan Love

In an increasingly digitized world, conservationists worry that a new generation of joystick-wielding, video-watching mouse clickers will become too disconnected from nature to care for it.

"This generation has lost its roots in nature. They don't feel a part of it," said Dick Jensen, an Elgin farmer and environmental missionary who is investing his time and money to reverse the trend.

Apart from the harm sedentary children do to their own physical and mental health, Jensen, 70, and other conservationists worry that people who don't wade in streams will not appreciate the value of clean water, that people who don't watch or hunt wildlife will be less likely to support critical habitat.

But perhaps worst of all, people who withdraw from nature deprive themselves of the peace and joy that come from living in harmony with their environment, said Jensen, who often uses the word "baptized" in discussing the introduction of a child to the wonders of nature.

"To me, it has a spiritual and emotional aspect. When properly understood and appreciated, nature should feed the human heart," Jensen said.

People who don't personally connect with nature are missing the emotional and spiritual lift it can provide, agrees Dennis Goemaat, deputy director of the Linn County Conservation Department.

"There's something about it, a calming effect, the feeling of being off the clock, that lets you reboot your systems," he said.

That feeling inspired Randi Hepker, 20, of Marion, who grew up in a non-hunting family, to take a hunter education course last month.

"Too many kids today spend too much time in front of TVs and computers, and they have too little respect for nature. It's sad, They are missing the natural beauty of the landscape," Hepker said.

Alicia Main, 31, of Lisbon, took the same course sponsored by the Linn County Izaak Walton League so she can share time outdoors with her 10-year-old son.

"He likes his video games, and it's getting to be more of a struggle to get him outside," Main said.

Fewer go outside

Children of the digital age interact with nature much less than their forebears — a trend documented in a recent study funded by The Nature Conservancy.

Since the late 1980s, the percentage of Americans engaging in fishing, camping and other outdoor activities has declined at slightly more than 1 percent a year and is down 18 percent to 25 percent from peak levels, according to biologist Oliver Pergams, co-author of the study with ecologist Patricia Zaradic of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

Pergams, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, blames the decline in large measure on videophilia, a term he and Zaradic coined to describe the recent human tendency to focus on activities involving electronic media.

Youngsters' preference for television, computers and video games, at the expense of outdoor physical activity, contributes to obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic performance, Pergams said.

But the biggest downside, he said, is that children who grow up estranged from nature will care less about it as adults.

The study draws upon data collected from fishing and hunting licenses and head counts from national, state and local parks.

Iowa data tell a similar story.

The sale of resident fishing licenses, for example, peaked in 1976 at 541,000, averaged 344,000 from 1995 through 2000 and leveled off last year at 310,000.

Resident small-game hunting licenses have steadily declined from an annual average of 339,000 in the decade ending in 1956 to an annual average of 197,000 in the decade ending in 2006.

Iowa doesn't track state park usage, but Kevin Szcodronski, chief of the Department of Natural Resources State Parks Bureau, said the loss of young campers, while a concern, is not as acute as in more urban states.

Fear of outdoors

Author and journalist Richard Louv, in his 2005 book "Last Child in the Woods," introduced the term "nature-deficit disorder" as shorthand for the many ills attributed to dissociation from nature.

"It's a useful concept in understanding how we can optimize kids' health," said Kathleen Janz, a professor in the University of Iowa Department of Health and Sports Studies.

Janz said electronic media, the fast pace of modern American life and parents' fear of leaving children to play without supervision — "stranger danger," as it's called — have combined to deprive children of "unstructured play in woods, creeks and fields" and to create "a cohort of children who are more sedentary and less healthy than previous generations."

Children's schedules are so full of organized activities that they simply lack time to spend outdoors, said Dale Braun of Cedar Rapids, who since 1987 has taught the fundamentals of hunting to 3,778 students through the Linn County Chapter of the Izaak Walton League.

Katherine McCarville, an assistant professor of geosciences at Upper Iowa University in Fayette, said pests such as ticks and mosquitoes, mere inconveniences to previous generations, are now — in an era of widespread publicity of Lyme's disease and West Nile virus — considered deal breakers by many young people.

Media coverage of melting ice caps and dwindling rain forests also has contributed to a sense of environmental hopelessness among today's youths, she said.

Doing something about it

While Louv raised awareness of the increasing dissociation of young Americans from nature, Jensen, the Fayette County nature advocate, had identified and begun to address the problem long before he'd heard of Louv.

In 1990, Jensen started bringing youth groups to his farm to teach enjoyment and value of nature. In 2000, he began building a 2-mile nature trail on his property at his expense as a way to help people learn to live with the Earth and take care of it.

In 2006, he founded TAKO, or Take a Kid Outdoors, a non-profit educational organization that has since introduced hundreds of youngsters to the joy of outdoor activities. This fall, Valley Community Schools in Elgin will introduce as a TAKO pilot project a place-based curriculum intended to teach students to appreciate nature in their own backyard.

"Schools are the key to reversing the trend. So many kids today come from single-parent homes, and they don't have a mentor to teach them about nature and introduce them to outdoor activities," Jensen said.

Valley Superintendent Cathy Molumby said she hopes the curriculum will balance and integrate nature and technology.

"One should not be at the expense of the other. They should be complementary," she said.

Recognition of Iowans' growing disconnection from nature also inspired the upcoming $20 million land preservation bond referendum in Johnson County.

Dissociation from the natural world has been accelerating in rapidly growing areas like Johnson County because "we are losing nature all around us to development," said Harry Graves, director of the Johnson County Conservation Department.

"We need more green infrastructure to give residents an opportunity to commune with nature," Graves said.

The DNR, county conservation departments and hunting and fishing-related conservation groups have all committed substantial resources to youth-recruitment efforts.

The DNR, for example, has introduced special youth hunting seasons that precede the regular hunting seasons for most popular game species. The Linn County Conservation Department built its Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center primarily to help youngsters learn about nature. And Pheasants Forever has introduced a "No Child Left Indoors" educational initiative aimed at unplugging youths from electronics and turning them on to nature and wildlife.

The movement is gaining momentum, said Jensen, who maintains environmental knowledge gleaned from the Internet is no substitute for learning about nature "through the fingers, arms, brain and heart."

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