Send the kids outside... (updated)


...and let them discover the wonders of nature for themselves.

Have you camped out in the woods with your kids in a tent lately?
Via Sunfell's blog and NPR's All Things Considered comes this article at Orion Magazine.

As a boy, I pulled out dozens—perhaps hundreds—of survey stakes in a vain effort to slow the bulldozers that were taking out my woods to make way for a new subdivision. Had I known then what I’ve since learned from a developer, that I should have simply moved the stakes around to be more effective, I would surely have done that too. So you might imagine my dubiousness when, a few weeks after the publication of my 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, I received an e-mail from Derek Thomas, who introduced himself as vice chairman and chief investment officer of Newland Communities, one of the nation’s largest privately owned residential development companies. “I have been reading your new book,” he wrote, “and am profoundly disturbed by some of the information you present.”

Thomas said he wanted to do something positive. He invited me to an envisioning session in Phoenix to “explore how Newland can improve or redefine our approach to open space preservation and the interaction between our homebuyers and nature.” A few weeks later, in a conference room filled with about eighty developers, builders, and real estate marketers, I offered my sermonette. 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.

I was ready to make a fast exit when Thomas, a bearded man with an avuncular demeanor, stood up and said, “I want you all to go into small groups and solve the problem: how are we going to build communities in the future that actually connect kids with nature?” The room filled with noise and excitement. By the time the groups reassembled to report the ideas they had generated, I had glimpsed the primal power of connecting children and nature: it can inspire unexpected advocates and lure unlikely allies to enter an entirely new place. Call it the doorway effect. Once through the door, they can revisualize seemingly intractable problems and produce solutions they might otherwise never have imagined.

This is environmentalism that I can support. Kids should be outside and in as much nature as possible.

As a Pagan, I get criticism because I do not automatically and enthusiastically support the global warming agenda without question. I am an environmentalist, just not in the sense that We Are In Crisis Because Of The Actions Of That Unnatural Beast And Destroyer Of The Natural Balance, Man. Practically speaking, this planet is the only thing we have for several foreseeable decades and possibly centuries to come. It's in our own self-interest as a species to take care of the planet, but we can only do that through individual choice. Part of my faith includes reverence for the planet and cherishing the cycles of life and death that shape us all.

And while I am at it, I am going to plug Sunship Earth, a great program that helps kids realize some very important things about this planet we live on. I volunteered for a Sunship Earth program one year, and I consider it one of the most rewarding times with children that I have ever spent.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - March 1, 2007 at 02:51 PM  Tag


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