Between the erosion of recess, the lure of screens, the fear of lunatics, and the compulsion to over-commit (Girl Scouts, swim team practice, dance recital, piano lessons, and much more) it’s a wonder kids these days get outside at all.
For those of us who grew up running around in woods and fields, losing ourselves to made-up games in parks, and tossing Nerf balls in backyards, we understand an adolescence divorced from nature represents change, but not progress.
We can remember what it felt like to be 11, on our backs in the grass and staring at clouds. The bird songs were so pleasing.
The songs aren’t going away, at least not yet. But increasingly, young people aren’t hearing them, because they don’t spend much time outside. Theirs is the first generation so profoundly stuck indoors, according to author and activist Richard Louv.
Louv, who writes about what he calls “Vitamin N” — the “N” stands for nature — believes nature is vital for mental and physical health, as well as the vigor of a culture. He argues, persuasively, that we need to introduce younger generations to the wild world around them. It doesn’t need to be the Grand Tetons; the wilderness can mean the stream behind the swings, or the place under the big cottonwood where kids eat lunch during summer camp.
“Take nature away from kids,” Louv said, “and I think you are removing part of their humanity.”
Louv’s books, Last Child in the Woods, and The Nature Principle, dig deep into the premise that when cultures lurch away from nature, quality of life erodes. More and more research, he says, suggests societal problems like obesity and attention-deficit disorder may spring, at least in part, from our collective internment between walls and under roofs (and sitting before screens).
In an interview, he pointed toward a recent study that made connections between an epidemic of myopia in the developed world, and people’s remove from forests, meadows and even, simply, patches of grass with trees around. All of that gazing into rectangles of light and just across rooms, instead of into horizons and across mesas, may be turning us blind.
Vitamin N isn’t just for the dissipation of medical issues. When kids are playing independently in a field or on a mound of dirt, free from video games or cartoons, they invent their own games, learn social and problem-solving skills, and nurture creativity.
Battling the nature-free epidemic has become a movement. Louv’s books spawned theChildren & Nature Network (www.childrenandnature.org), a nonprofit that promotes connecting kids with nature, and broadcasts relevant scientific research. The National Wildlife Federation ( www.nwf.org), the nation’s largest and oldest conservation organization, has made connecting families with nature a top priority, said Lindsay Legendre, the head of the non-profit’s Be Out There program. Among other things, the Be Out There program sponsors the Great American Backyard Campout every June, an effort to get families into tents in their yards.
“We look at it from a health perspective,” she said. “A lot of kids are overweight, a lot are on medication now and they never used to be. It’s a very sedentary lifestyle. We are advocating for more outdoors because it can help with those childhood issues. Also, as an environmental organization, if kids don’t develop a love for the outside, why will they care as adults to protect it? We are doomed if we don’t make sure kids are connected to nature now.”
I believe all of it.
When my wife and I decided to uproot our family from the city of Baltimore and move to the Front Range, nature — as it is for a lot of recent Coloradans — figured largely into the decision.
We wanted more — much more — of it.
Before we had kids, we spent years in Minnesota and New Mexico, where we marinated in wetlands and forest (The Land of 10,000 Lakes) and desert and mountains (The Land of Enchantment).
With children we lived in Baltimore, which had its seductions (it is named Charm City, after all, and for good reason), but nature was not one of them. It just doesn’t figure largely into Baltimore’s manifold pleasures.
I think had we worked at it with more ingenuity and grit, we would have found the nature we needed, but we didn’t do that. We moved to Denver, and then to Boulder, and we camped, we hiked, we biked, we pursued Centennial State wilderness at a near-manic pace.
Quickly, we noticed that after our kids spent time in nature, their moods seemed softer, their demeanors a bit more wholesome and lovely. The youngest one tended to turn crabby at the prospect of a long walk on a trail, but her attitude often transformed, for the better, during the hike. If she had a friend along, the jaunt was just a big adventure from the outset.
And all along, here in Colorado, we sent our kids to summer camps that leveraged the outdoors. They held chickens and picked carrots and planted seeds in farm camps. They trotted around dusty rings in horse camps. They swam in traditional camps, the kind where days are divided into different outdoor activities: tennis, swimming, kickball.
At a camp in Gold Hill, in the foothills between Boulder and the Peak to Peak Highway, my oldest took a shine to mountain boarding, a sport like snowboarding — you tear down a mountain on a board — only the board has wheels, and the falls involve dirt, rocks and roots instead of snow. Did she say ouch? She did, many times. But she kept going back for more ouch because she loved it.
Ropes courses, lake plunges, canoeing, sailing, yoga under Colorado’s blue skies — camps have given my kids enviable, and I think character-building, summers.
I don’t think an annual parade of camps is necessary for the development of a well-adjusted child, but I do believe valuing and trumpeting nature should vault higher in our cultural consciousness, and by that I don’t mean “liking” more cute photos of lion cubs on Facebook.
I mean smelling pine and hearing ravens and shielding eyes from snow-reflected sunlight, all at the same time. That sort of thing. Make that important, for you and your kids. We take much for granted, and in today’s hyper-wired and hyperkinetic world it is easy to miss the vibrant schools and playgrounds all around us — the trails headed up and up and up (and then, down), the tangles of vegetation at the edges of the soccer fields where the animals live, the branches of the oak that seem made for climbing.