GETTING BACK TO NATURE

Why is play increasingly disappearing from the landscape of our children’s lives? And what legacy will we leave our children, and our children’s children, if we do not provide opportunities for them to experience the wonder of nature as they play — to create childhood memories that will be emblazoned on their hearts forever? (Introduction to “A White Paper on Research conducted at Dimensions Early Education Programs in Lincoln, NE” 2009)

It’s probably fair to say that most gardeners developed their love of nature as children, whether it was playing in their parents’ or grandparents’ gardens, hiking, camping or beachcombing with family or exploring in local parks, ravines and woodlots. It’s also probably fair to note that many gardeners don’t just care about growing plants. They’re also interested in birds and insects and doing whatever they can in small or large ways to keep the environment green and clean for their own children and the children of future generations.

Discovering wildlife

It’s this sense of connection to the natural world, a feeling of stewardship towards the planet, that many fear is being lost because children these days just aren’t experiencing nature the way they used to, with the freedom to explore and discover that previous generations enjoyed. More and more, children spend their leisure time indoors glued to a television, computer or smart-phone screen.

A September 2012 survey, commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation, found that 70 per cent of youth spent an hour or less outdoors each day. “There is now a huge gap between the amount of screen time young people are getting and the amount of time spent outside. For instance, an American survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that young people spend an average of seven and a half hours a day on entertainment media,” the Suzuki Foundation Web site notes.

Richard Louv, the co-founder of the Children & Nature Network, has coined the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe this disconnect between children and nature, and he makes the case that this trend does not bode well for our children or the future of the planet. In the introduction to his book, Last Child in the Woods, Louv says: “For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear — to ignore. A recent television ad depicts a fourwheel-drive SUV racing along a breathtakingly beautiful mountain stream — while in the back seat two children watch a movie on a flip-down video screen, oblivious to the landscape and water beyond the windows.”

Louv’s landmark book, first published in 2005, has created an international movement to study the problem and find ways of getting kids away from their video screens and back to nature.

The Child and Nature Alliance of Canada grew out of Louv’s creation of the Children & Nature Network in the United States, and it is actively working with groups across the country to foster unstructured outdoor play for Canadian children. There are a number of initiatives on its Web site, childnature.ca, that people can get involved in, including a competition for schools for a $20,000 grant to build an outdoor classroom.

Finding woodland treasures

Another positive step was taken in September 2012 at the World Congress of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) meeting in Jeju, South Korea, which was attended by representatives of the governments of 150 nations and more than 1,000 non-governmental organizations. The congress passed a resolution declaring that children have a human right to experience the natural world and a healthy environment and calling on the IUCN’s membership to promote the inclusion of this right within the framework of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. The resolution recognizes that:

“…children, since they are an inalienable part of nature, not only have the right to a healthy environment, but also to a connection with nature and to the gifts of nature for their physical and psychological health and ability to learn and create, and that until they have these rights they will not bear responsibility for nature and the environment …”

Keith Wheeler, Chair of the IUCN Commission on Education and Communication, and Dr. Cheryl Charles, President and CEO of the Children & Nature Network, made the case that “nature-based experiences help to offset children’s increasingly sedentary lifestyles with associated negative consequences such as obesity, diminished creativity, attention disorder problems and, most important to the worldwide conservation community, a lack of experience to prepare them to care for the world’s natural environments for generations to come”.

The two organizations have jointly produced an exhaustive report that contains five volumes of studies done over the past several decades from around the world which examine children’s experiences with the outdoors and nature. The findings in the studies will confirm what people are observing in everyday life such as:

• A 2009 study surveyed 2,400 mothers from diverse cultures in 16 countries about the leisure activities of their oneto 12-year-old children, revealing many similarities, including 72 per cent reporting that the most common activity their children engaged in outside of school was watching television.

• Studies in the United States, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark and the United Kingdom all show the same trends. Physical outdoor activity among children has gone down significantly while media use has shot up. Activities outside school tend to be structured and parent-supervised, with parents saying that while they recognize physical activity is desirable, there isn’t time or they don’t feel safe leaving their children outside unsupervised.

As the evidence piles up that children need to be connected with nature for their own health and the health of the planet, there are many creative and innovative projects afoot to make sure that happens. More and more schools across Canada are expanding their curricula to include teaching outdoors and greening their schoolyards. St. Brother André Catholic School in Ottawa began to transform its grass and paved yard six years ago. It planted 56 shade trees, edible vines and a vegetable garden and also installed zigzag log seating so kids could sit in the shade and watch games.

A major inspiration for the movement to green schoolyards came from the Coombes School in southern England. In a 2010 article in the Globe and Mail, science writer Anne McIlroy described that school’s playground as “an arboretum” where “narrow paths snake through the shrubbery past apple, willow and walnut trees. There is a pond, two labyrinths, a garden and plenty of good spots to dig for worms. Lessons often take place outside.” It was created by educator Sue Humphries, who spent four decades transforming a barren yard into an outdoor classroom because of her conviction that sitting in chairs is not the best way for children to learn. McIlroy goes on to say: “Studies suggest that interacting with nature can help children pay attention, motivate them to learn and improve both classroom behaviour and scores on standardized tests. Neuroscientists and psychologists are investigating why nature is good for young brains and how being around trees and shrubs helps recharge the circuitry that children use to focus on a page of fractions or a spelling test.”

Similar results have been reported in Lincoln, Nebraska, where in 2004- 2005 the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation constructed the first Nature Explore Classroom at its research laboratory school where teachers documented the children’s activities and interactions in the outdoor classroom.

Playing with water

Designed with the help of the children themselves, it includes a greenhouse with child-size tables and benches, a spacious sand area big enough to allow an entire class to play in the sand at the same time, a large, messy materials area filled with natural materials to manipulate such as wood chips and sections of cut tree trunks, a dirt-digging area, a climbing-crawling structure with multiple slides, ladders and landings, a large perennial garden and a vegetable garden. There’s also a large grassy area in the middle providing space for children to run and tumble, with a corner designated as the music area where teachers bring drums and other instruments outdoors daily. Easels stand in an artists’ garden with a multi-tiered mosaic surface, designed and made by the children.

Children need to connect with nature for their own health.

What this project and others like it are doing is helping children rediscover their connection to the natural world, a place where they can be in charge and allow their creativity and imagination to run wild, devising games, building things, watching things grow, running, climbing or just lying in the grass looking up at the clouds and daydreaming, as untold generations of children have done before them.

The benefits are manifest and many, including dramatic improvements in physical and emotional health, improved academic performance, development of social skills, including learning to collaborate and eliminating bullying. And, perhaps most of all, children gain a sense of peace, of being connected to the world, which they cannot learn in any other way.

It leads to a lifelong love of and respect for the Earth, which will ensure our little blue planet will have many guardians for generations to come.

Victoria Stevens is a retired journalist and Toronto Botanical Garden volunteer.