Where The Wild Things Could Go

Emma Marris urges national parks to create “nature play areas,” where kids can “go off trail, climb trees, collect specimens, and generally leave as much trace as they want”:

Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, agrees that parks should make room for kids to play. “If kids don’t have some kind of connection to nature that is hands-on and independent, then they are probably not going to develop the love of nature and vote for parks and the preservation of endangered species,” he says. “Unless you know something you are unlikely to love it.”

There’s some research to back up this intuition. One 2010 study in the journal Children, Youth and Environments found that among people who ended up dedicated to nature and conservation, most had a childhood filled with unstructured play in nature, some of which “was not environmentally sensitive by adult standards; rather, it included manipulation of the environment through war games, fort building, role playing of stories in popular children’s adventure books and movies, and the like.”