Evidence suggests that children and adults benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy.
This intuition is not new. Henry David Thoreau wrote of the “tonic of wilderness.” A century ago, John Muir observed that “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” (Fox, 1981, p 116)
A theoretical basis for the notion that nature contact is good for health has been expanding. In 1984, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson introduced the concept of biophilia, “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” (Wilson, 1993, p 31). Wilson pointed to the millennia of human and prehuman history, all embedded in natural settings, and suggested that we still carry affinities and preferences from that past. Building on this theory, others have suggested an affinity for nature that goes beyond living things to include streams, ocean waves, and wind (Heerwagen and Orians, 1993).
More recently, environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have demonstrated that contact with nature restores attention, and promotes recovery from mental fatigue and the restoration of mental focus (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995). They attribute these beneficial qualities to the sense of fascination, of being immersed “in a whole other world,” and to other influences of the natural world.
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NPR: Americans Spending Less Time in Nature
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Since the late 1980s, the percentage of Americans taking part in such activities has declined at slightly more than 1 percent a year. The total effect, Pergams says, is that participation is down 18 percent to 25 percent from peak levels.
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Children's Outdoor Play & Learning Environments: Returning to Nature
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All the manufactured equipment and all the indoor instructional materials produced by
the best educators in the world cannot substitute for the primary experience of hands-on
engagement with nature. They cannot replace the sensory moment where a child's attention
is captured by the phenomena and materials of nature: the dappled sparkle of sunlight
through leaves, the sound and motion of plants in the wind, the sight of butterflies or a
colony of ants, the imaginative worlds of a square yard of dirt or sand, the endless
sensory experience of water, the infinite space in an iris flower -
Studies have provided convincing evidence that
the way people feel in pleasing natural environments improves recall of information,
creative problem solving, and creativity.19 Early experiences with the natural world have
been positively linked with the development of imagination and the sense of wonder.20
Wonder is important as it a motivator for life long learning.21 There is also strong
evidence that young children respond more positively to experiences in the outdoors than
adults as they have not yet adapted to unnatural, man-made, indoor environments.
The natural world is essential to the emotional
health of children.22 Just as children need positive adult contact and a sense of
connection to the wider human community, they also need positive contact with nature and
the chance for solitude and the sense of wonder that nature offers.23 When children play
in nature they are more likely to have positive feelings about each other and their
surroundings.24
Outdoor environments are also important to
children's development of independence and autonomy. Outdoor space allows children to
gradually experiment with increasing distance from their caretaker. While the development
of greater independence from toddlerhood to middle childhood can happen within the
confines of indoor spaces, safe space outdoors greatly adds to the ability of children to
naturally experiment with independence and separation, and the adult's willingness to
trust the child's competence which is essential for separation to happen. This is
particularly important for children who live in small and crowded homes.25 -
However, if this human natural attraction to
nature is not given opportunities to be exercised and flourish during the early years of
life, the opposite, biophobia, an aversion to nature, may develop. Biophobia ranges
from discomfort in natural places to active scorn for whatever is not man-made, managed or
air conditioned. Biophobia is also manifest in the tendency to regard nature as nothing
more than a disposable resource. -
Flash knows a turntable, the way Tom Brady knows how to perfectly balance throwing touchdowns and humping supermodels. I have eaten it. I have coddled it.
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Childhood and outdoor play are no longer
synonymous. Today, many children live what one play authority has referred to as a
childhood of imprisonment.5 Child care facility playgrounds are often the only outdoor
activities that many young children experience anymore. -
It is a well accepted principal in early
childhood education that children learn best through free play and discovery. Children's
free play is a complex concept that eludes precise definition, but children's play
typically is pleasurable, self-motivated, imaginative, non-goal directed, spontaneous,
active, and free of adult-imposed rules1,2. Quality play involves the whole child: gross
motor, fine motor, senses, emotion, intellect, individual growth and social interaction.3
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Lessons in Learning: Let the Children Play: Nature’s Answer to Early Learning
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they begin to converse on many levels at once, becoming actors, directors, narrators, and audience,[17] slipping in and out of multiple roles.
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children are less likely to have access to outdoor play spaces in natural environments. Technology, traffic, and urban land-use patterns have changed the natural play territory of childhood.[3] Parents, increasingly concerned about the security of their children, are making greater use of carefully constructed outdoor playgrounds that limit challenge in the name of safety
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Play and Literacy
There are consistent findings in research about the close relationship between symbolic play and literacy development and good evidence that increasing opportunities for rich symbolic play can have a positive influence on literacy development.[18]
Pretend play with peers engages children in the same kind of representational thinking needed in early literacy activities. Children develop complex narratives in their pretend play. They begin to link objects, actions, and language together in combinations and narrative sequences. They generate language suited to different perspectives and roles.
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Travel | National parks reach out with electronic field trips | Seattle Times Newspaper
Tags: deficit, nature, outdoors, webisodes on 2007-12-01 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Even as experts blame 21st-century technology for declining interest in national parks, the National Park Service has embraced so-called electronic field trips, an increasingly popular teaching tool in schools nationwide.
"The general thinking is that kids are spending more time indoors rather than outdoors," said Jackie Skaggs, a Grand Teton spokeswoman. "There was a concern that we need to reach out and touch children with the mediums that they are comfortable with already."
The "Tails from the Tetons" electronic field trip has seven "webisodes" covering topics including wolves, forest fires and how plants and animals adapt to their environment. The final Webcast was a live question-and-answer session with rangers.
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Why Kids Need Nature | Scholastic.com
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New research focuses on raising healthier kids -- Health -- USA WEEKEND Magazine
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That's because of the increased perception of violence. Anytime something happens in the woods, it gets intense media coverage.
Mitchell: It's a shame. It used to be "Go outside and play until dinner-time." Now, it's "Go grab a snack and play video games until dinnertime." -
Because the situation is getting worse. The Nature Conservancy found that kids under 13 now take part in freestyle play outdoors for only a half-hour a week. Look, I'll plead guilty to being nostalgic for my childhood, when I interacted with nature for hours each day. But there is now more documentation that the trend of decreased outdoor activity is growing and having a negative impact on children's physical and mental health.
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Some states, including Connecticut, California and Maine, have launched initiatives to get more young people outdoors. And on the federal level, the pending No Child Left Inside Act seeks to provide new funding for environmental education.
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Getting Lost in the Great Indoors - washingtonpost.com
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biophilia hypothesis: Information from Answers.com
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Conservation Science at The Nature Conservancy - Conservation Science - The End of the Wild?
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Is there any wilderness left? A new article in SCIENCE magazine co-authored by The Nature Conservancy's chief scientist says not really — and that conservation's task is no longer to "preserve the wild, but to domesticate nature more wisely."
While human history has been defined by the domestication of species, the article cites strong evidence that nature itself has already been almost completely "domesticated":
- There's nearly six times as much water held in storage (e.g., behind dams) as there is in free-flowing rivers.
- About 50 percent of the world's surface area has been converted to grazing land or cultivated crops.
- And only 17 percent of the world's land area in 1995 was untouched by the direct influence of humans (such as agriculture, roads or even nighttime lights
"There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people," write the authors. "In the modern world, wilderness is more commonly a management and regulatory designation than truly a system without a human imprint."
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Leave No Child Inside | by Richard Louv | Orion Magazine March-April 2007
Tags: children, education, nature, orion on 2007-03-10 and saved by14 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Developers and environmentalists, corporate CEOs and college professors, rock stars and ranchers may agree on little else, but they agree on this: no one among us wants to be a member of the last generation to pass on to its children the joy of playing outside in nature.
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The recycling and antismoking campaigns are our best examples of how social and political pressure can work hand-in-hand to create a societal transformation in just one generation. The children-and-nature movement has perhaps even greater potential—because it touches something even deeper within us, biologically and spiritually.
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Here’s one suggestion for how to accelerate that change, starting with children: nationally and internationally, pediatricians and other health professionals could use office posters, pamphlets, and personal persuasion to promote the physical and mental health benefits of nature play. Such publicity would give added muscle to efforts to reduce child obesity. Ideally, health providers would add nature therapy to the traditional approaches to attention-deficit disorders and childhood depression. This effort might be modeled on the national physical-fitness campaign launched by President John F. Kennedy. We could call the campaign “Grow Outside!”
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If society embraces something as simple as the health benefits of nature experiences for children, it may begin to re-evaluate the worth of “the environment.” While public-health experts have traditionally associated environmental health with the absence of toxic pollution, the definition fails to account for an equally valid consideration: how the environment can improve human health. Seen through that doorway, nature isn’t a problem, it’s the solution: environmentalism is essential to our own well-being.
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John Flicker, president of the National Audubon Society, is campaigning for the creation of a family-focused nature center in every congressional district in the nation. “Once these centers are embedded, they’re almost impossible to kill,” says Flicker. “They help create a political constituency right now, but also build a future political base for conservation.”
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though the roads at some U.S. national parks remain clogged, overall visits by Americans have dropped by 25 percent since 1987, few people get far from their cars, and camping is on the decline. And such trends may further reduce political support for parks. In October 2006, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park joined the cadre of activists around the country calling for a no-child-left-inside campaign to make children more comfortable with the outdoors. In a similar move, the U.S. Forest Service is launching More Kids in the Woods, which would fund local efforts to get children outdoors.
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Studies show that almost to a person conservationists or environmentalists— whatever we want to call them—had some transcendent experience in nature when they were children. For some, the epiphanies took place in a national park; for others, in the clump of trees at the end of the cul-de-sac. But if experiences in nature are radically reduced for future generations, where will stewards of the Earth come from?
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Urban Ecology Center
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the back page of an October issue of San Francisco magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him—but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work.
The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams.
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Recent research also shows a positive correlation between the length of children’s attention spans and direct experience in nature. Studies at the University of Illinois show that time in natural settings significantly reduces symptoms of attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder in children as young as age five. The research also shows the experience helps reduce negative stress and protects psychological well being, especially in children undergoing the most stressful life events.
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According to a range of studies, children in outdoor-education settings show increases in self-esteem, problem solving, and motivation to learn.
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Yes, there are risks outside our homes. But there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgment and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth—and, most immediately, threats to their psychological and physical health. The rapid increase in childhood obesity leads many health-care leaders to worry that the current generation of children may be the first since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents. Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming—and, especially, experiencing nature directly—could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young.
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Urban, suburban, and even rural parents cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework, and other pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger. Conditioned by round-the-clock news coverage, they believe in an epidemic of abductions by strangers, despite evidence that the number of child-snatchings (about a hundred a year) has remained roughly the same for two decades, and that the rates of violent crimes against young people have fallen to well below 1975 levels.
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In a typical week, only 6 percent of children ages nine to thirteen play outside on their own. Studies by the National Sporting Goods Association and by American Sports Data, a research firm, show a dramatic decline in the past decade in such outdoor activities as swimming and fishing. Even bike riding is down 31 percent since 1995.
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Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience their neighborhoods and the natural world has changed radically. Even as children and teenagers become more aware of global threats to the environment, their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. As one suburban fifth grader put it to me, in what has become the signature epigram of the children-and-nature movement: “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”
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We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature—if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm—they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those “places of initiation,” in the words of naturalist Bob Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world seen and unseen. When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down.
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Support has also come from religious leaders, liberal and conservative, who understand that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that one of the first windows to wonder is the natural world. “Christians should take the lead in reconnecting with nature and disconnecting from machines,” writes R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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For decades, environmental educators, conservationists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature—usually with inadequate support from policymakers. A number of trends, including the recent unexpected national media attention to Last Child and “nature-deficit disorder,” have now brought the concerns of these veteran advocates before a broader audience. While some may argue that the word “movement” is hyperbole, we do seem to have reached a tipping point. State and regional campaigns, sometimes called Leave No Child Inside, have begun to form in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, St. Louis, Connecticut, Florida, Colorado, Texas, and elsewhere. A host of related initiatives—among them the simple-living, walkable-cities, nature-education, and land-trust movements—have begun to find common cause, and collective strength, through this issue. The activity has attracted a diverse assortment of people who might otherwise never work together.
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The folks in the crowd were partially responsible for the problem, I suggested, because they destroy natural habitat, design communities in ways that discourage any real contact with nature, and include covenants that virtually criminalize outdoor play—outlawing tree-climbing, fort-building, even chalk-drawing on sidewalks.
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