"Look, don't touch!"

Tim Gallagher sent this article by David Sobel from Orion about how our nit- picking, rule- bound, risk- averse society is creating a generation of kids who dislike and fear and are bored by nature and the outdoors. It should scare the hell out of you. Some quotes:

"Amanda notices a red eft in a patch of moss. She takes a few steps off the trail and Terri chastises her: “Remember, Amanda, nature is fragile! When you walk off the trail, you crush all kinds of little creatures you can’t see.” Farther on Ross scampers up into the inviting branches of a tree that has fallen across the trail. “Sorry, Ross, no climbing, too dangerous, we wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

"the “look but don’t touch” approach cuts kids off from nature, teaching them that nature is boring and fraught with danger. Inadvertently, these messages send children back inside to the dynamic interactivity of computer games. Could it be that our fear of litigation and our puritanical concerns for protecting each and every blade of grass are hampering the development of the very stewardship values and behaviors that we environmental educators all say we’re trying to foster?"

He contrasts the attitude with a quote from a childhood memoir from gentle John Muir:"We made guns out of gas-pipe, mounted them on sticks of any shape, clubbed our pennies together for powder, gleaned pieces of lead here and there and cut them into slugs, and, while one aimed, another applied a match to the touch-hole. With these awful weapons we wandered along the beach and fired at the gulls and solan-geese as they passed us... We also dug holes in the ground, put in a handful or two of powder, tamped it well around a fuse made of a wheat-stalk, and, reaching cautiously forward, touched a match to the straw. This we called making earthquakes." Sobel elaborates:

"This is probably not the kind of boy you’d want your children out roaming the neighborhood with. Dangerous, unmannered, destructive perhaps. Certainly, you’ve never seen an “Inventing Guns and Shooting Sea Gulls” program on Saturday mornings at the nature center. And yet John Muir helped create the national park system, and his writing has fostered environmental values and behaviors in countless millions of people."

Contrast this with the modern way of introducing kids to nature. "... researchers compared three kinds of childhood nature experience—wild nature experience, domesticated nature experience, and environmental education. They found that "Childhood participation in “wild” nature, such as hiking or playing in the woods, camping, and hunting or fishing, as well as participation with “domesticated” nature such as picking flowers or produce, planting trees or seeds, and caring for plants in childhood have a positive relationship to adult environmental values...participation in environmental education programs (in school, in Scouts, at camp, or in community environmental improvement programs) was not a significant predictor of either environmental attitudes or behaviors.” [Emphasis mine]

There is an enormous amount of valuable, thoughtful, and downright scary stuff here-- read it all. Sobel also has a book, and I'm getting it for the Peculiars (who were raised right themselves) if only to reinforce their already good ideas. Though I'm not sure Eli and the Peculiars really neeed this book as much as everybody else does...