Reconnect with nature--and bring the kids with you

By Gary Raham
North Forty News

I loved visiting my older married sister Joy during summers in the mid 1950s. She lived in "the country"--kind of a semi-rural area outside the city limits of Ypsilanti, Mich., where houses rose on either side of vacant lots and small wooded areas.

I hunted garter snakes with my nephews and nieces in a field where she hung clothes to dry, helped them build swings in gnarly trees, or terrorized squirrels and other small creatures in the "woods." I suspect my interest in bats and bugs and such started there. At least I knew that being outside until you absolutely had to go home to make a mustard and mayonnaise sandwich or filch a cookie defined the pleasure of summer vacation.

Today I can walk Wellington neighborhoods and rarely see children out playing, except maybe near the skateboard court. Many kids look a bit heftier than my old friends, too, and it's not just the muscles of their text-messaging finger.

It also seems children suffer from increased rates of attention deficit disorder, depression and other emotional problems.

What connections link play in nature, exercise and health? Richard Louv, author of "Last Child in the Woods," believes mental and physical health, increased creativity and an appreciation for one's spot in the web of life all accrue from regular exposure to nature--especially unstructured play that typically filled summer days of children during the '60s and earlier.

Last year, over 400 people came to hear Louv speak at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins. Zoe Wyman, a 20-something specialist in environmental education with the Fort Collins Natural Area Program, had read the book and was impressed. Unlike many in her generation, she had spent lots of childhood hours in the mountains near Boulder with her parents. Her mother loved to hunt mushrooms and identify wildflowers. Her father fished. Both liked to hike and took Wyman along.

"At the time," Wyman said, "they often had to use chocolate to lure me up the trail."

But she also remembers playing in the water and building stuff out of rocks. When it came time to choose a career, she knew she wanted to share her love and experience in nature with others.

The efforts of Wyman and Shelly Morrell, then with the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, corralled a long list of sponsors in the educational/environmental community to bring Louv to northern Colorado. His book, published in 2006, has become a surprise best seller and spawned a national effort called the Children in Nature Network that strives to find ways to reduce some of the barriers modern life has erected to getting out in nature.

Granted, it's not as easy to do this as it once was. We fill our daytimers with "things to do" (for both ourselves and our kids), we live in urbanized environments hard (or dangerous) for children to navigate alone, and we've been primed to worry about "stranger-danger" in unregulated environments.

Louv, however, presents convincing statistics that many fears are overblown and that many time management issues could be made to disappear if we learned not to consider unstructured leisure time in nature "frivolous," but an important part of sound physical and mental health.

Some more serious barriers to making nature part of our lives come from educational efforts and prejudices that may be eroding young people's positive associations with things natural and their specific knowledge and experience with living things in natural settings.

For example, Louv says, elementary school students overexposed to scenarios of eco-disaster without also knowing how wondrous it is to learn firsthand about jumping spiders, roly-poly bugs and a star-studded night sky may acquire negative rather than positive associations with all things natural.

Louv also contends true naturalists - people who can actually identify organisms and understand their interrelationships in the natural world --are disappearing in scientific communities. He quotes biologist Elaine Brooks who said, "Humans seldom value what they cannot name."

The ascendancy of disciplines like molecular biology, while important, tend to emphasize the inner workings of biological systems at the expense of knowing and appreciating individual species and how they interact.

Wyman finds it ironic, as an environmental educator who offers structured activities out of doors, that she must convince parents and their children that unstructured time outdoors can be fun, too. Louv, in his book, quotes a fourth grader in San Diego who said, "I like to play indoors better 'cause that's where all the electrical outlets are."

During his talk, Louv offered several critical mandates.

• Rediscover our connection to nature and our proper place within her.
• Create new generations connected in the same way.
• Build for a co-existence with nature. Nature is a partner not an adversary.
• Use our talents for creativity, intelligence and sociability to adjust to change quickly. Once aware of a problem, we are capable of fixing it.
• Cultivate the wonder and discovery found in nature as an antidote to despair.
• Follow the Platinum Rule: Do unto nature as you would have her do unto you.

For more information about Louv and his book, visit http://richardlouv.com. You will find links to Children in Nature Network and other resources for parents and teachers.

Next month, the local REI store at 4025 S. College Ave. will offer three free workshops aimed at familiarizing parents with ideas discussed in the book and providing an opportunity to have some outdoor fun, too. The events will occur from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 3, 17 and 23. For further details, contact REI's outreach specialist Silas Rappe at srappe@rei.com.