tat. Depending on which science you believe, we’ve got something like 20 years to turn the ship around and start heading in a sustainable direction. But we’ll never get there unless we care about the places we live—and why would we ever care if we don’t spend any time outside in those places?
What scares me the most is that many of today’s parents did not grow up outside—they’re young enough that their parents kept them indoors. So we’re now into the second generation of children who are effectively growing up under house arrest. The average kid can recognize over a thousand corporate logos, but fewer than a dozen plants native to where they live. If this trend persists, we risk los- ing our cultural memory of nature connection altogether.
So we need a cultural change. The environmental movement has been unsuccessful in part because we’ve focused overwhelmingly on people’s minds rather than their hearts, and the message has been one of doom and gloom. I confess to being part of this echo chamber. As a scientist, I have spent years making dire predictions about global warming and species extinc- tions based on present-day trends. But the reality is, people don’t respond to doom and gloom. What changes behavior is emotional engagement with nature.
How can conservationists help make that happen? Programs that take underserved kids up to a national park so that they can spend a night or two camping are great, but that’s not where real nature connection is going to occur. It’s going to happen locally, so we need to find ways to “re-nature” backyards, schoolyards, and parks so people can have these experiences daily. Seeing a bull elk or a bear once is less transformative than seeing the same place
If I had not spent so much time sleeping in tents as a child, I’m almost certain I would not be a paleontologist today.
every day with new eyes because you’ve learned to look at it differently—for example, watching the flowers and birds come and go with the seasons. People from less advantaged socioeconomic back- grounds in particular often lack access to nature. Right now the children-in-nature movement is largely a white, affluent movement—but it needs to be everybody’s move- ment. We need to break down the silos between organiza- tions working on these challenges and form alliances. I’m talking about coordinated programs where partners lever- age each other’s assets; where, for example, natural history museums and school districts team up with nature centers and land trusts to engage kids from toddlerhood through adolescence.
How does your current work fit in to that solution? I recently moved to Denver in large part to help develop an urban-scale solution to the human-nature disconnect. I love to use dinosaurs and mammoths and rocks to help get kids excited about the place that they live in, to understand how it came to be, and how it’s going to change moving forward. Most important, I tell them that the story is un- finished, and that the decisions they make today are going to change the outcome in some way. We must understand that we are powerful actors in this amazing, multibillion- year narrative. If you don’t have any sense of your place in history, why would you ever care about the future?
INSIGHT · 29
jedrzej borowczk
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