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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Louv
Read between
September 19 - September 30, 2023
Today, kids are aware of the global threats to the environment—but their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading.
For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality. Increasingly, nature is something to watch, to consume, to wear—to ignore.
Several of these studies suggest that thoughtful exposure of youngsters to nature can even be a powerful form of therapy for attention-deficit disorders and other maladies. As one scientist puts it, we can now assume that just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood.
Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion. Nature can frighten a child, too, and this fright serves a purpose. In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.
The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
Parents, educators, other adults, institutions—the culture itself—may say one thing to children about nature’s gifts, but so many of our actions and messages—especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver—are different. And children hear very well.
this new frontier is characterized by at least five trends: a severance of the public and private mind from our food’s origins; a disappearing line between machines, humans, and other animals; an increasingly intellectual understanding of our relationship with other animals; the invasion of our cities by wild animals (even as urban/suburban designers replace wildness with synthetic nature); and the rise of a new kind of suburban form.
Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order.
“Based on previous studies, we can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors,” says Sallis, “and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems.”
One of the great benefits of unstructured outdoor recreation is that it doesn’t cost anything, Sallis explained. “Because it’s free, there’s no major economic interest involved. Who’s going to fund the research? If kids are out there riding their bikes or walking, they’re not burning fossil fuel, they’re nobody’s captive audience, they’re not making money for anybody. . . . Follow the money.”
they spend more and more time in car seats, high chairs, and even baby seats for watching TV. When small children do go outside, they’re often placed in containers—strollers—and pushed by walking or jogging parents.
new studies suggest that exposure to nature may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and that it can improve all children’s cognitive abilities and resistance to negative stresses and depression.
Nature-deficit disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.
long-standing studies show a relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies.
land shapes us more than we shape land, until there is no more land to shape.
the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.
The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.
one of the main benefits of spending time in nature is stress reduction.
More important, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching?
everybody is innately creative but that modern society suppresses the creative instinct, while promoting artists as a gifted elite, “who, as it happens, have all the fun.”
The loose-parts theory is supported by studies of play that compare green, natural play areas with blacktop playgrounds. Swedish studies found that children on asphalt playgrounds had play that was much more interrupted; they played in short segments. But in more natural playgrounds, children invented whole sagas that they carried from day to day to day—making and collecting meaning.
Our children no longer learn how to read the great Book of Nature from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes.We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens. —WENDELL BERRY
Studies conducted in association with the Kaiser Family Foundation, released in 2005 and 2006, found that nearly one-third of children from six months to six years of age lived in households where the TV was on all or most of the time.
Children between the ages of eight and eighteen years old spent an average of nearly 6.5 hours a day plugged in electronically—that’s forty-five hours a week, more time than once was considered an adult work week.
Man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; [the Lakota] knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. —LUTHER STANDING BEAR (C. 1868–1939)
In 2001, the British Medical Journal announced that it would no longer allow the word “accident” to appear in its pages, based on the notion that when most bad things happen to good people, such injuries could have been foreseen and avoided, if proper measures had been taken. Such absolutist thinking is not only delusional, but dangerous.
The good news is that children today are less likely to kill animals for fun; the bad news is that children are so disconnected from nature that they either idealize it or associate it with fear—two sides of the same coin, since we tend to fear or romanticize what we don’t know.
Children learn about the rain forest, but usually not about their own region’s forests,
“It is hard enough for children to understand the life cycles of chipmunks and milkweed, organisms they can study close at hand. This is the foundation upon which an eventual understanding of ocelots and orchids can be built.”
nature has disappeared from the classroom, except for discussions of environmental catastrophe.
Public education is enamored of, even mesmerized by, what might be called silicon faith: a myopic focus on high technology as salvation.
The problem with computers isn’t computers—they’re just tools; the problem is that overdependence on them displaces other sources of education, from the arts to nature.
“humans seldom value what they cannot name.”
[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren? —naturalist ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE
Until recently, most environmental organizations offered only token attention to children. Perhaps their lack of zeal stems from an unconscious ambivalence about children, who symbolize or represent overpopulation.
Pergams and Zaradic warn of what they call “videophilia”—a shift from loving streams (biophilia) to loving screens.
The study indicated that adult concern for, and behavior related to, the environment derives directly from participating in such “wild nature activities” as playing independently in the woods, hiking, fishing, and hunting before the age of eleven. The study also suggested that free play in nature is far more effective than mandatory, adult-organized activities in nature. Paradoxically, this suggests that organizers of nature activities should strive to make the experience as unorganized as possible—but still meaningful. Not an easy task to accomplish.
“Most children have a bug period, and I never outgrew mine. Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend long stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”
(An astute book editor once told me: “A book written for everyone is a book for no one.”)
If children do not attach to the land, they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature, nor will they feel a long-term commitment to the environment, to the place. This lack of attachment will exacerbate the very conditions that created the sense of disengagement in the first place—fueling a tragic spiral, in which our children and the natural world are increasingly detached.
We need to draw an important distinction between a constructively bored mind and a negatively numbed mind.
complaints of boredom may be cries for a parent’s attention.
“So kids feel they’re not getting enough action. If they don’t see a grizzly bear rip apart a caribou calf, then it is boring.”
A unique gardening project is the sunflower house. In an eight-by-eight-foot square, parents and kids can plant sunflower seeds or seedlings in a shallow moat, alternating varieties that grow about eight feet high with ones that grow to four feet. You can also plant a few corn plants among the sunflowers; corn discourages Carpophilus beetles, and the sunflowers protect the corn from army worms. Inside, plant a carpet of white clover. As a child plays within the containing protection of the sunflower house, bees, butterflies, and other insects will congregate at the blooms above. Plant seeds of
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To increase your child’s safety, encourage more time outdoors, in nature. Natural play strengthens children’s self-confidence and arouses their senses—their awareness of the world and all that moves in it, seen and unseen.
We shouldn’t be worshipping nature as God, he said, but nature is the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. “God communicates to us through each other and through organized religion, through wise people and the great books, through music and art,” but nowhere “with such texture and forcefulness in detail and grace and joy, as through creation,” he said. “And when we destroy large resources, or when we cut off our access by putting railroads along river banks, by polluting so that people can’t fish, or by making so many rules that people can’t get out on the water, it’s the moral
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Teaching children about the natural world should be treated as one of the most important events in their lives. —THOMAS BERRY
“This isn’t memorizing information for a test,” the teacher told Nixon. “When you sit in silence in front of a glacier and see the glacial pond, the dirt of the glacial moraine, the succession of plants from the lichens to the climax forest, and you write and sketch what you see, you make a bond with that moment. This experience becomes part of you.”
