Introducing Wild Zones

Wild Zones – August 01, 2007
By David Hawkins

David Hawkins has worked for many years as a counselor, teacher and advocate for young people in schools, colleges, adventure playgrounds, arts centers, their homes, and the street. After teaching liberal studies at Exeter College to factory workers on day release, he worked for 10 years for the Inner London Education Authority with boys who had been suspended from school for violent or racist behavior. From 1996-2000 he was the founding Project Manager of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley California. In 2004 with his wife, Karen Payne he created an exhibition called Cultivating Community at the Eden Project in Cornwall, England about how gardens and other earth-based projects transform violence. Cultivating Community catalyzed a series of projects and conversations with schools, police, concerned adults and youth about anti-social behavior among teenagers and the lack of provision for their play and social needs. David and Karen co-founded Wild Zones which emerged from their experiences with Cultivating Community, Karen’s work with the American Community Gardening Association, David's work with the Edible Schoolyard and his lifelong engagement with youth issues.

There is a question I return to again and again when seeking a hopeful way forward in my work with young people.

“How do we raise a generation of young people who love the earth and love their own lives?”

Wild Zones are an attempt to create a context in which this aspiration might be realized. They are a new form of social space where adults, children and teenagers can come alive through working and playing together. Wild Zones are ecologically rich environments that offer open-ended possibilities for play, creativity, socializing and solitude. They differ from parks and nature reserves in that they afford the opportunity to do practical and adventurous things, such as building shelters, making trails, climbing trees, damming creeks, creating sculptures from natural objects and other types of exploration and free play.

The seeds of the idea of Wild Zones were planted when I was the founding project manager of The Edible Schoolyard at a public middle school in Berkeley. It was the idea of Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and, as a result, it received a lot of press and television coverage. However, how the garden was actually built by the 11- to 13-year-olds, with the help of their teachers and community volunteers, was a story that remained largely untold.

The weedy, trash-littered asphalt acre was a daunting prospect and some students expressed amazement that they were expected to build a garden during their school day without pay. I knew that the garden experience had to be fun and playful if it was to capture the hearts of a majority of the kids. I also knew that the relationship between the kids and the adults working in the garden had to be respectful, and tolerant of different reactions to the experience. What was a rich and exciting encounter with nature for some students was a potentially humiliating experience of dirty, low-status work in a bug-infested environment for others. Mediating such differences without judgment was a challenge worth meeting.

Over the next several years, The Edible Schoolyard became the location of a great deal of energetic and high-spirited work and play for the hundreds of kids who built the garden. My favorite part was the Middle River, which the kids began to dig quite spontaneously to drain a waterlogged part of the garden during our first relentlessly soggy El Niño winter. Never have I seen such a splendid playful application of youthful energy by so many young people over such a long time. The combination of water, mud, dams, floods, jokes and earnest hard work was a rich brew our children experience too rarely.

They reclaimed an overgrown area of the site, cutting back and uprooting the invasive cotoneaster, terracing and replanting the bank with hazelnuts they had grown from cuttings. The huge acacia tree that was crowding the California live oaks was gradually harvested and provided the material for building the circular shade structure the kids built as their meeting place. They planted, made pathways, bridges, walls, and wove a huge bird’s nest large enough for four or five people to sit in. They were trusted to use axes, pickaxes, sledgehammers and crowbars to go about their jobs, and never once did a serious accident occur in all the thousands of hours they worked in the garden.

The Edible Schoolyard fostered a very special sort of collective activity. It is rare in our culture for young people to be given the chance to create something tangible, to care for the earth, to choose the task they would like to do, and to learn to work together in a team. There were, of course, students who were not very interested, who hung out and watched or who had conversations, some who hindered or just got in the way. But the learning was incredible. It was not the kind of learning you could test anyone on. Sometimes it was a chance to learn what you could do, what resources and intelligence you could muster, whether your friends would be supportive, whether you could work with someone you didn’t like: to learn what kinds of interaction were constructive, and how things could fall apart. It was also a chance to find out about some of the elements we depend on to live on this planet – dirt, rocks, water, and plants.

Currently we are looking for a community that would like to develop a pilot Wild Zone that will:

• Use an asset-based approach that builds on people’s strengths and interests rather than focusing on their problems.
• Nurture relationships of respect and trust between the generations.
• Provide a context for enjoyable and challenging exercise that will combat obesity and improve overall physical and mental health.
• Address environmental justice issues by inviting youth and adults of all ethnicities, classes and abilities to engage in activities that appeal to them and encourage them to bond with the natural world.
• Be a living laboratory of conflict resolution: every collaborative endeavor involves differences of opinion – even among like-minded and well-meaning individuals.

The experience of the Edible Schoolyard, which involved hundreds of kids and scores of community volunteers, showed that many adults find joy and meaning in their lives through working with two or three kids on something they enjoy. It’s not like having the pressures and responsibilities of parenting or trying to control and teach a class of 20 or more kids.

In such seed relationships community is reborn and so may be the possibility of loving one’s life. We do not generally love life because of the things we buy, the places we escape to, or the status we manage to attain. I love life when I am able to be myself and be in a constructive relationship with other people. Perhaps this is true for a great many people?

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