Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (54 page)

58
. Religious organizations, take a leadership role. In Houston, for example, inner-city churches, nonprofits, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department work together to take inner-city kids camping, fishing, and hiking. Their goal: the development of life skills and strong moral character through shared experiences in nature.

59
. As a young person, become a “natural leader.” Help organize regional campaigns, or volunteer at nature centers or with such programs as the Sierra Club’s Building Bridges to the Outdoors and Inner City Outings, the Student Conservation Association, Outward Bound, and the Service and Conservation Corps. Others who have youth engagement programs are the National Wildlife Federation, Audubon Society, and Nature Conservancy. Faith-based summer camps also offer opportunities to serve. The Sierra Club and the Children & Nature Network are pursuing the creation of a Natural Leaders network.

60
. Consider a career change to a nature-oriented job. Conservation organizations are experiencing a “brain drain” as baby boomers retire; this presents career opportunities you may not have considered.
Or, if you wish to stay in your current field, consider ways to make the children and nature movement part of it.

61
. Participate in Take a Child Outside Week, an annual international program that originated at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History (
www.takeachildoutside.org
).

62
. Give corporate leadership and support to the creation of regional and national campaigns that connect children to nature, through contributions of money, services, employee volunteer time, or goods in kind.

63
. Adopt a targeted effort. Your company can fund bus services for underbudgeted school field trips, sponsor outdoor classrooms for schools, underwrite nature centers and programs for vulnerable children, join with land trust organizations to protect open space—and help build family nature centers on that land.

64
. For your own employees, sponsor on-site nature-based child care centers, as well as nature retreats for employees and their families.

65
. Save your own business. The outdoor equipment and sporting goods industry faces diminished sales if the divide between the young and nature continues to widen. The industry can help raise public awareness about the benefits of nature to child development and on a practical level can put more entry-level gear in the hands of children and families, particularly those who cannot afford to buy it. To find out more, contact the Outdoor Industry Foundation (
www.outdoorindustryfoundation.org
), the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (
www.rbff.org
), or Anglers’ Legacy (
www.anglerslegacy.org
).

66
. Construction and urban design professionals: convene conferences at local, state, and national levels on how to create new kinds of housing developments that connect residents to nature. Establish incentives for child- and nature-based development. Louise Chawla, a professor at the University of Colorado, proposes a children and nature design certification along the lines of the green industry’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. A good resource: Children, Youth & Environments Center for Research and Design (thunder1.cudenver.edu/cye).

67
. Lawyers and insurance agencies: promote the concept of comparative risk as a legal and social standard. Establish public risk commissions to examine areas of our lives that have been radically changed by litigation, including the experience of nature. Create a Leave No Child Inside legal defense fund that would, using pro bono attorneys, help families and organizations fight egregious lawsuits that restrict children’s play in nature and bring media attention to the issues. One provocative resource is Common Good (
www.anglerslegacy.org
).

68
. Health care providers and public health officials: in your community advocate children’s contact with nature as integral to healthy development. In the ongoing search for answers to child obesity, attention-deficit disorder, and childhood depression, health care researchers, practitioners, and public health officials should emphasize free outdoor play, especially in natural surroundings, as much as they now do organized sports. At the national level, health care associations can support nature therapy as an addition to the traditional approaches.

69
. Create a “grow outside” campaign. Pediatricians and other health professionals, using office posters, pamphlets, and personal persuasion, can promote the physical and mental health benefits of
nature play. This effort might be modeled on the national physical fitness campaign launched by President John F. Kennedy. A similar approach, “green checkups,” is proposed by the National Wildlife Federation: “State health and natural resource departments can follow the lead of the American Academy of Pediatrics and ask doctors to recommend regular outdoor time as part of a wellness check for children.”

70
. Parent-teacher groups: support educators who sponsor nature clubs, nature classroom activities, and nature field trips. Establish annual awards for the teachers and principals who most creatively and effectively exemplify the “leave no child inside” slogan.

71
. Become a natural teacher. Learn more about the cognitive benefits of nature experience. Also learn how nature outings help reduce teacher burnout. Resources include:
Green Teacher
magazine, available in English, Spanish, and French (
www.greenteacher.com
), and the
Learning with Nature Idea Book
, published by the Arbor Day Foundation (
www.arborday.org
).

72
. Ask your students to take the nature-deficit disorder survey. Created by Dave Wood, an eighth-grade teacher at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., for his students and for National Environmental Education Week, the survey is available at
www.eeweek.org/resources/survey.htm
.

73
. Green the K–12 curricula. Tap professional resource programs, among them Project Learning Tree (
www.plt.org
) and Project WILD (
www.projectwild.org
), which tie nature-oriented concepts to all major school subjects, requirements, and skill areas. The National Environmental Education and Training Foundation’s Classroom Earth (classroomearth.org) maintains a directory of environmental education programs and resources for K–12 teachers, parents, and students.

74
. Teach the teachers. Many educators, especially new teachers, may feel inadequately trained to give their students an outdoors experience, so programs must be created and existing ones broadened. Many wildlife refuges, working with nonprofit organizations, provide professional development programs that have been correlated to public school curriculum standards (
www.fws.gov/refuges
). For example, an interdisciplinary workshop called Teach the Teachers is regularly offered at Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland.

75
. Green the schoolyards. Tap the knowledge of such programs as Eco-Schools in Europe (
www.eco-schools.org
), Evergreen in Canada (
www.evergreen.ca/en
), and the Natural Learning Initiative (
www.naturalearning.org
) in the United States. A worldwide list of schoolyard greening organizations, including ones in Canada, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, can be found at
www.ecoschools.com
. To get started, send for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Schoolyard Habitat Project Guide” (
www.fws.gov/chesapeakebay/schoolyd.htm
).

76
. Create nature preschools, where children begin their school years by knowing the physical world firsthand. Encourage nature-based public, charter, or independent K–12 schools that place community
and nature
experience
(not only environmental education) at the center of the curriculum. Resources include Antioch’s Center for Place-based Education (
www.anei.org/pages/89_cpbe.cfm
).

77
. Establish an eco club. One example: Crenshaw High School Eco Club is one of the most popular clubs in the predominately African-American high school in Los Angeles. Students have received their first introduction to the natural environment through the club’s weekend day hikes and camping trips in nearby mountains, as well as through expeditions to Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. Community service projects include coastal cleanups, nonnative invasive plant removal, and hiking trail maintenance. Past members become mentors for current students. Student grades have improved.

78
. Start a Salmon in the Classroom project or a similar endeavor. In Washington State, participating students in over six hundred schools receive five hundred hatchery eggs to care for in each classroom. They learn about life histories and habitat requirements and release the salmon as fry into the streams they have studied (wdfw.wa.gov/outreach/education/salclass.htm).

79
. Beyond the school grounds, create nature-based community classrooms through outreach programs that engage parents, physicians, landscape designers, businesspeople, parks departments, and civic leaders who can help develop safe natural learning environments within walking distance of every school. Include visits to parks and overnight camping trips in the curriculum.

80
. Follow Norway’s lead and establish farms and ranches as “the new schoolyards,” and thereby create a new source of income to encourage a farming culture. This will teach kids about the sources of their food and give them hands-on experience with lasting benefit, regardless of their future occupation.

81
. Return natural history to higher education. Work to require universities to teach fundamental natural history, which has been eliminated from the curricula of many research universities, and to fund research on topics involving the relationship between children and nature. Higher education can be a doorway to more career choices, including recreation and service-learning opportunities.

82
. Work for legislation. At the national, state, and local levels enact bills supporting environmental education in the classroom and outdoor experiential learning.

83
. Launch a governor’s campaign in your state. For example, in 2007, Jim Douglas announced the No Child Left Inside challenge in Vermont, John Baldacci unveiled Maine’s Take It Outside initiative, and Ed Rendell appointed a task force to organize a series of public meetings on the issue across Pennsylvania. Governors also can sponsor versions of the Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights, signed by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007 (to see the bill, go to
www.calroundtable.org
). The National Governors Association could also take action.

84
. Mayors and other local and regional government executives: Review zoning barriers to nature; support environmental and outdoor education in municipal and state parks and recreation centers; convene meetings of developers, health and childhood experts, landscape architects, and outdoor play experts to consider future development and redevelopment policies.

85
. Enact legislation that strengthens public health and education by increasing both opportunities for contact with nature and investments in research related to children and nature.

86
. Provide state and federal funding to train teachers in environmental education, develop model outdoor education and environmental literacy programs, finance grants to teach teachers how to take kids into nature, and reestablish an office of environmental education within the U.S. Department of Education.

87
. Support policies that increase the supply of naturalists at our parks and other nature settings. Government conservation agencies could build a stronger national conservation corps (or family conservation corps) to actively recruit young people from diverse backgrounds into the conservation professions.

88
. At the federal and state levels, park systems can replicate Connecticut’s No Child Left Inside program, which has so successfully repopulated that state’s parks with families. Innovative nature attractions should be supported; for example, the simple “canopy walk,” created by biologist Meg Lowman in Florida, doubled attendance at one state park.

89
. Adopt policies that keep farming families on their land, strengthen land trust law, and decrease property owners’ liability when they allow children to play on open land.

90
. Build collaborations between the departments of Interior, Education, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services that focus on children and nature. This is a challenge that affects them all and can best be addressed through multiple disciplines.

91
. Reach beyond government. By encouraging and working with a national Leave No Child Inside movement, government agencies can seek philanthropic partners—for example, foundations concerned about child obesity, education philanthropies promoting experiential learning, and civic organizations that see the link between land and community.

92
. Create a regional Leave No Child Inside campaign. The challenge of connecting children to nature is place-based, planted fully in the biology and human ecology of each region. There is no single set of solutions. However, leaders of regional campaigns are already learning from one another. To find out more, go to the Children & Nature Network (
www.cnaturenet.org
).