Re-Wild Your Child!

daily.jstor.org/re-wild-your-child/

April 17, 2018

Imagine 20 million Americans taking to the streets, rallying in parks and congregating in
theaters, schools and universities to protest our treatment of the planet. It’s hard now to
picture this, but on April 22, 1970, the date of the first Earth Day, this is exactly what
happened. The radical feminist journal Off Our Backs summoned “ecology freaks” and
“student militants” to “take to lecture platforms, sidewalks and the streets to demand
America change her way of life.” That publication among dozens of others hoped the day
would have a lasting effect, but none could have predicted that, an alignment of Earth Day
activism with support from the government, would see the creation of the United States
Environmental Protection Agency, and the passage of the Clean Air, Clear Water and
Endangered Species Acts soon followed. Forty-eight years later, Earth Day is still an urgent
reminder that our planet needs help facing the challenges of a growing population and our
insatiable appetite for energy and resources.

When my daughter Eve turned three in 2010, Earth Day had become one of the largest
secular observances in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people. She has grown
up in an environment where recycling and taking public transport are the norm and, like
many of her peers, has been plugged into the mindset that it’s crucial to look after our
planet. She is ten now and her heightened awareness of the state of the world brings with
it a new challenge: how do you talk to your child about ocean acidification, desertification,
melting icecaps, plastic in the seas, extreme weather events, and the disappearance of

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polar bears, rhinos and elephants without filling them with grief and hopelessness. How
does one navigate this fine line of teaching a child to respect the environment without
passing on the fear of total climate apocalypse?

When she was two, the activity Eve enjoyed more than any other was pottering around our
tiny patio in London making “soup” in an old yogurt pot. She would chuck soil, dead leaves,
petals and anything else that may have blown in from the dirty streets around us and mix it
all up with rainwater from flowerpots. Then she would stand on her tiptoes and pour the
brown slop into the compost for the worms. They were her pets. When friends talked about
their puppies and kittens, she would rave wildly about her worms.

It feels good digging in dirt! (Photo by Joanna Pocock)

But not all city-dwellers have a few square feet of soil in which to raise a bunch of worms.
Urban children are the most likely to suffer from Nature Deficit Disorder—the term coined
by Richard Louv, in his 2005 bestseller Last Child in the Woods. In the book, Louv argues
passionately for the importance of nature in children’s lives and links a lack of outdoor time
to childhood obesity, diabetes, mental illness, anxiety, anger and ADHD. Although the
positive effects of nature on children seem obvious to most of us, policymakers and those
who see land as something to be paved over, drilled into, mined, or fracked need studies
and books to see the benefits of a childhood lived near forests, fields, or in the case of
cities, small patches of scrubby, forgotten ground. Over the past half-century, children’s
roaming areas have been vastly restricted, especially in cities, because parents fear that
their offspring may be abducted, abused or injured. But now, researchers talk about the
benefits of Forest Kindergartens in Finland and how deprived teenagers from inner cities
thrive when they are handed a compass and a map, and sent off into the bush.

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Louv’s points about our disassociation from the environment have been backed up by
scientists, philosophers and scholars. A 2002 Cambridge University study found that 80
percent of British children between the ages of four and 11 could identify the names and
species of Pokémon characters but only 53 percent of them could name common plants
and animals like oak trees and badgers. And this was fifteen years before the release of
Pokémon Go, which not only gets kids glued to their screens, but removes them completely
from the real world.

In order to profoundly appreciate the natural world for all its beauty and mystery, we
urbanites don’t necessarily have to jack it all in and move to the hills.

After the publication of Last Child in the Woods, Louv co-founded the Children and Nature
Network, a non-profit organization with a mission to connect children with nature. Rewild
Portland, a non-profit set up by Portland’s Peter Michael Bauer, is a brilliant template for
city-dwellers elsewhere who want engage children and their parents with hands-on crafting,
foraging and replanting. And the UK is starting to see a rise in Forest Schools, a body set
up to increase “educational experiences in the natural world.”

Like many urban kids, my daughter has been lured by Dance Moms and the competitive
hysteria of Britain’s Got Talent. But I try, as so many of us do, to let her run free and
unsupervised. Where we live in East London, the park bushes hide hypodermic needles,
the drunks congregate on benches, and the drug dealers roar up in their cars throwing
baggies at the queue of junkies in return for crumpled ten-pound notes. Children, however,
are incredibly adept at blocking out the din of adult-created madness in order to connect
with the natural world even if for them it’s a patch of grass in a gritty dog-fouled park. As
Robert Michael Pyle, the award-winning author of Wintergreen, and other books points out,
“we need not tear our flesh in the Wide-Open Wild or gnash our teeth in the Big Bush” in
order to come face to face with the power of the natural world. “It is with us almost
everywhere,” he reassures us and then recounts how he was changing trains in Portland
when he “spent an hour in the fully-artificial gardens outside Union Station, watching a
nectaring cabbage butterfly ambushed by a handsome gray and yellow-spotted salticid
jumping spider hiding among palm fronds.” He was “utterly transported in that
anthropogenic confection no less than in a New Guinea jungle.”

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 Getting into “the cycle of nature.” (Photo by Joanna Pocock)

Pyle is perhaps connecting on a level many of us aren’t able to, but he does bring up
something I have been thinking about a lot in my ten years as a parent. We should be
making sure our children get dirt under their fingernails, mud inside their gum boots, and
spiders in their hair, but we also need to somehow allow nature to seep inside them. We
need to rewild them from the inside. This is a philosophical shift as much as a physical one.
We can achieve this by teaching them not to fear nature, but to embrace it even if the wild
for them is a gigantic puddle in a disused railway yard.

There was a time when there were no wild animals, because we ourselves were wild.
Children instinctively know this. They have a wildness within that we do our best to civilise.
And there’s the rub. We want our children to behave well, to achieve decent marks at
school and to land a good job. But maybe we need to tune into another frequency alongside
this. Maybe this backseat generation, the kids who are ferried in cars to cello, tae-kwon-do,
ballet, and Mandarin classes need us, the adults in their orbit, to focus on something other
than grades and achievements. They need us to encourage their connection with the
natural world by trusting them to explore it on their own, to rewild themselves without us
watching. That alley behind our house might look boring or potentially threatening to an
adult, but to a child it could be a place of magic. Pyle is convinced, as I am, that in order to
profoundly appreciate the natural world for all its beauty and mystery, we urbanites don’t
necessarily have to jack it all in and move to the hills. We and our children can find “The
wild, the Other—the stilling phenomena and numina … almost anywhere, from the wild
sublime to the pastoral to the vacant lot, which is anything but vacant to a curious kid.”

This is the key to it all. We need to get our children out of the cycle of want and into the
cycle of nature. On the days when my daughter watches hour upon hour of TV (usually so I
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can work), she’s a monster: She wants things and seems dissatisfied with what she has. On
the days we wander through a forest or walk the banks of a river, she’s a being at one with
herself and the world. I think of this Jekyll and Hyde as being the result of “screen time”
versus “green time.”

I have come to realize that one of my jobs as a parent is to tap into the wide-eyed wonder
that I once had for nature, so my daughter can find it for herself. In order for her generation
to grow up as stewards of the planet, they have to know what’s at stake. I don’t want to fill
her with fear of environmental collapse but with awe that so much of it still exists.
Celebrating Earth Day is a way of bringing joy back into our connection with the planet. We
can forget about the failures momentarily and engage the children in our midst with the
movement towards sustainability. The worms in our compost are no longer her pets, but
my daughter’s wonder is still there, buried inside and wanting always to be allowed out. It’s
my job to let it. The Earth depends on it.

JSTOR Citations

earth day
Off Our Backs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (April 11, 1970), p. 4

off our backs, inc.

Increasing Children's Freedom of Movement: Introduction

By: Lia Karsten and Willem van Vliet

Children, Youth and Environments, Vol. 16, No. 1, Increasing Children's Freedom of
Movement, and Other Papers (2006), pp. 69-73

University of Cincinnati

Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary on Peter Kahn's

“Encountering the Other”
By: Robert Michael Pyle

Children, Youth and Environments, Vol. 15, No. 2, Children and Governance, and Other
Papers (2005), pp. 398-400

University of Cincinnati

Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokémon

By: Andrew Balmford, Lizzie Clegg, Tim Coulson and Jennie Taylor

Science, New Series, Vol. 295, No. 5564 (Mar. 29, 2002), p. 2367

American Association for the Advancement of Science

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