THE ONLY HOPE FOR A BEAUTIFUL PLANET?
by Stephen Sylvan Willig
“It’s not right raising children so far from nature. This pavement is fine for cars, but it is hard medicine for children. Hills are always more beautiful than stone buildings, you know. Lots of people hardly ever feel real soil under their feet, or get far enough beyond the street lights to catch the enchantment of a night sky studded with stars.”
--Walking Buffalo, Nakota Sioux
Our youth spend the school day enclosed in classrooms. If they are lucky, there may be windows. Many, if not most, of their physical education classes are also inside. During recess they will probably be sent outside, but more than likely they will be playing on asphalt or wood chips. In their classes most subjects are taught in the abstract; math, reading, social studies, etc. In those rare classes in which the subject is more tangible, like the natural sciences, it is still typically taught from texts rather than from direct experience. For example, the solar system is taught through books and diagrams; the pupil is generally no more likely to be able to pick Saturn out of the night sky, or to know the current phase of the moon than before the class. After school there will probably be computer screens, homework, telephone, and television.
Children today spend less time outdoors than any previous generation. In fact, they generally spend little more time outdoors than the time it takes to walk from the school bus to the home. Richard Louv, in his influential book, Last Child in the Woods, cites that today only 6% of children spend any substantial time outdoors.1 Children who play structured outdoor sports—baseball, for example-- are an exception, but even then they aren’t actively engaged with nature; it is the background setting, and is ignored.
Most adults are probably even more isolated from nature in their lives. From climate-controlled homes to climate-controlled autos to climate-controlled work places and back— then they complain about the heat or cold!
It wasn’t always this way. Adults used to sit out on the porch and watch the “heat lightening” on a hot summer’s night. Up until the 1940’s schools utilized nature much more frequently in natural sciences education, taking children outside to study frogs in ponds rather than dissecting them in labs.2
I grew up in the 1970’s in a comfortable working class small town neighborhood in Ohio. No one there had air conditioning, and on a hot summer’s day it could get over 100°. Today if anyone there would not have AC people would ask in disbelief, “How can you stand the heat in summer?” We withstood it by opening the windows to the cool evening air. (We could hear the crickets and owls then.) We might turn on a fan. Sometimes we sweated … but so what?
What are the effects of this isolation from nature? Could it be the fundamental cause of our current environmental crises? The more time we spend with something—anything—the better we understand it. The better we understand something—anything—the better we love it. And the deeper our love for anything, the more likely we are to take care of it. As successive generations have grown more detached from nature, have they grown to care for it less? I think it matters to our planet and, consequently, to ourselves that we are so isolated.
It also matters to our bodies that we are separated from nature. Today’s children (and adults) are more obese than any other generation, in part, because they no longer run and play outdoors.
Furthermore, it matters to our psyches that we are not attuned to nature. Research shows that children with AD/HD are more focused and calm after being outdoors.3 Imagine: instead of drugging our excitable children, we could just send them outside for two half-hour sessions every day. There is also a growing movement in psychology for adults that successfully treats mental illness through connecting patients with their environment— “ecopsychology” some call it.4
I certainly think it matters to our souls if we are connected to nature. Who doesn’t feel more at peace, more at one when sitting outside on a quiet day, gazing on a beautiful natural scene? In the forest there is no trace of one’s little self with all of its cares and worries, although they may seem so important from one’s everyday perspective. In the forest one can see these cares from the grander perspective, the transcendent perspective, and realize how insignificant they really are. Then, you can really disappear. Later, back in one’s house, when one gets too absorbed in the concerns of one’s little self, one can glance out the window and remember that the trees are still swaying, untainted by those worries. As Whitman wrote in “Song of the Universal”: “In the broad earth of ours/ Amid the measureless grossness and the slag/ Enclosed and safe within its central heart/ Nestles the seed perfection.”
I encourage everyone to be less isolated from the Earth. Raise the blinds on your windows so you can see outside, turn off the AC in summer, lower some of the lights in your home and yard at night. Spend some time outside every day, even in the same spot every day. Get to know how the seasons’ changes subtly affect your special outdoor spot. You’ll come to deeply care for it.
For those raising children, try to get them outdoors, too. Persuade their teachers of the importance of teaching about the natural world firsthand. When the children are home, insist that they leave the video games behind for a couple hours and put on their boots (or even go barefoot!) Even adults who can’t bear to be outdoors themselves, because of whatever thing “out there” they might fear, or because of whatever discomfort they feel they can’t handle, can still have their kids play outside without them.
I think raising children in such a way, raising them to know and love nature, is the only hope for our beautiful planet.
NOTES:
1 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods (Algonquian Books of Chapel Hill, 2005)
p. 39.
2 Robert Pyle, “The Rise and Fall of Natural History,” Orion, v20 n4 pp.16 – 23
Aut 2001
3 Faber Taylor, A., Kuo, F. E., & Sullivan, W.C., “Coping with ADD: The surprising
connection to green play settings.” Environment and Behavior, 33(1),
pp. 54-77. 2001
AND
Kuo & Taylor “A potential natural treatment for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence from a national study.” American Journal of Public Health, 94(9), pp. 1580-1586
4 Refer, for example, to the writings of Theodore Roszak, such as Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, Sierra Club Books, 1995
For a very inspiring article by Richard Louv on the importance of getting children outside, go to http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/240/
Refer to http://www.whitehutchinson.com/children/articles/childrennature.shtml for a thoroughly researched and annotated article by Randy White on the importance for children of outdoor experiential education and natural play areas.