Joe Kolodski was only the third U.S. Park Service ranger killed in the line of duty in the agency’s eighty-two-year history. As the Seattle Times reports, the crime rate in the Olympic National Park “wasn’t exactly a crime wave,” considering that the park counted 4.6 million visits. No city that size could claim so little crime.
In fact, the crime rate is falling in most wilderness parks. From 1990 to 1998, reported robberies in the national parks dropped from 184 to 25, murders from 24 to 10, and rapes from 92 to 29. Yosemite is, in fact, one of the safest of the nation’s parks. The killing of the young naturalist in Yosemite, though tragic, was the first murder reported there in a decade.
Worried about lions, tigers, and bears? The number of attacks is minuscule. Or West Nile virus? Mosquitoes, who love a good night-light, can transfer that bug indoors, too. And the brown recluse spider—often more deadly than any rattlesnake—prefers staying indoors. Brown recluse spiders take refuge in clothing that has been placed on the floor; they bite when trapped and pressed between the individual’s skin and clothing. We may fear the outdoors, but kids may generally face more dangers in their own home. The Environmental Protection Agency now warns us that indoor air pollution is the nation’s number one environmental threat to health—and it’s from two to ten times worse than outdoor air pollution. A child indoors is more susceptible to spores of toxic molds growing under that plush carpet; or bacteria or allergens carried by household vermin; or carbon monoxide, radon, and lead dust. The allergen level of newer, sealed buildings can be as much as two hundred times greater than that of older structures. Pediatric Nursing journal reports that those indoor ball-pit playgrounds at the fast-food restaurants can spread serious infectious diseases: “Although these commercial food establishments must adhere to the Food and Drug Administration’s model of sanitation and food protection,” none of their guidelines followed the “Centers for Disease Control recommendations for cleaning and disinfecting the areas in which these children play.”
Ironically, a generation of parents fixated on being buff is raising a generation of physical weaklings. Two-thirds of American children can’t pass a basic physical: 40 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls ages six to seventeen can’t manage more than one pull-up; and 40 percent show early signs of heart and circulation problems, according to a recent report by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
So where is the greatest danger? Outdoors, in the woods and fields? Or on the couch in front of the TV? A blanket wrapped too tightly has its own consequences. One is that we may end up teaching our children, in the same breath, that life is too risky but also not real—that there is a medical (or if that fails, a legal) remedy for every mistake. 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.
11. Don’t Know Much About Natural History: Education as a Barrier to Nature
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
—THOMAS HUXLEY
DAVID SOBEL TELLS this story: A century ago, a boy ran along a beach with his gun, handmade from a piece of lead pipe. From time to time, he would stop, aim, and shoot at a gull. Today, such activity would be cause for time spent in juvenile hall, but for young John Muir, it was just another way to connect with nature. (Muir, it should be noted, was a bad shot, and apparently never killed a seagull.) Muir went on to become one of the initiators of modern environmentalism.
“Whenever I read Muir’s description of shooting at seagulls to my students, they’re shocked. They can’t believe it,” says Sobel, co-director of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch New England Graduate School. He uses this example to illustrate just how much the interaction between children and nature has changed. Practitioners in the new fields of conservation psychology (focused on how people become environmentalists) and ecopsychology (the study of how ecology interacts with the human psyche) note that, as Americans become increasingly urbanized, their attitudes toward animals change in paradoxical ways.
To urbanized people, the source of food and the reality of nature are becoming more abstract. At the same time, urban folks are more likely to feel protective toward animals—or to fear them. 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. Sobel, one of the most important thinkers in the realm of education and nature, views “ecophobia” as one of the sources of the problem.
Explaining Ecophobia
Ecophobia is fear of ecological deterioration, by Sobel’s definition. In its older, more poetic meaning, the word “ecophobia” is the fear of home. Both definitions are accurate.
“Just as ethnobotanists are descending on tropical forests in search of new plants for medical uses, environmental educators, parents, and teachers are descending on second- and third-graders to teach them about the rainforests,” Sobel writes in his volume, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. “From Brattleboro, Vermont, to Berkeley, California, schoolchildren . . . watch videos about the plight of indigenous forest people displaced by logging and exploration for oil. They learn that between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than ten thousand acres of rainforest will be cut down, making way for fast-food, ‘hamburgerable’ cattle.”
In theory, these children “will learn that by recycling their Weekly Readers and milk cartons, they can help save the planet,” and they’ll grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth, “voting for environmental candidates, and buying energy-efficient cars.” Or maybe not. The opposite may be occurring, says Sobel. “If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation. In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots.” Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder. He offers this analogy of dissociation: In response to physical and sexual abuse, children learn to cut themselves off from pain. Emotionally, they turn off. “My fear is that our environmentally correct curriculum similarly ends up distancing children from, rather than connecting them with, the natural world. The natural world is being abused and they just don’t want to have to deal with it.”
To some environmentalists and educators, this is contrarian thinking—even blasphemy. To others, the ecophobia thesis rings true. Children learn about the rain forest, but usually not about their own region’s forests, or, as Sobel puts it, “even just the meadow outside the classroom door.” He points out that “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.”
By one measure, a rain-forest curriculum is developmentally appropriate in middle or high school, but not in the primary grades. Some educators won’t go that far, but they do agree with Sobel’s basic premise that environmental education is out of balance. This issue is at the crux of the curriculum wars, particularly in the area of science. One teacher told me, “The science frameworks bandied about by state and local education boards have swung back and forth between the hands-on experiential approach and factoid learning from textbooks.”
If educators are to help heal the broken bond between the young and the natural world, they and the rest of us must confront the unintended educational consequences of an overly abstract science education: ecophobia and the deat
h of natural history studies. Equally important, the wave of test-based education reform that became dominant in the late 1990s leaves little room for hands-on experience in nature. Although some pioneering educators are sailing against the wind, participating in an international effort to stimulate the growth of nature education in and outside classrooms (which will be described in later chapters), many educational institutions and current educational trends are, in fact, part of the problem.
Silicon Faith
John Rick, who was quoted earlier in these pages about his community’s restrictions on natural play, is a dedicated educator who left engineering to teach eighth-grade math. Rick is dismayed that nature has disappeared from the classroom, except for discussions of environmental catastrophe.
I asked Rick to describe an imaginary classroom saturated with the natural sciences and hands-on nature learning. “I keep coming back to a class devoid of nature,” he answered. “Unfortunately, a class devoid of nature looks just like any classroom you would walk into today. We have industrialized the classroom to the extent that there is no room for nature in the curriculum.” Curriculum standards adopted in the name of school reform restrict many districts to the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. These are vital subjects, of course, but in Rick’s opinion—and I share it—education reform has moved too far from what used to be called a well-rounded education. Rick elaborated:
The society we are molding these kids toward is one that values consumer viability. The works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold are seldom if ever taught to children in the public schools. Even in the sciences, where nature could play such an important role, the students study nature in a dry, mechanized way. How does the bat sonar work, how does a tree grow, how do soil amenities help crops grow? Kids see nature as a lab experiment.
The alternative? I imagine a classroom that turns outward, both figuratively and literally. The grounds would become a classroom, buildings would look outward, and gardens would cover the campus. The works of naturalists would be the vehicle by which we would teach reading and writing. Math and science would be taught as a way to understand the intricacies of nature, the potential to meet human needs, and how all things are interlaced. A well-rounded education would mean learning the basics, to become part of a society that cherished nature while at the same time contributing to the well-being of mankind. Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?
Public education is enamored of, even mesmerized by, what might be called silicon faith: a myopic focus on high technology as salvation. In 2001, the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit organization in College Park, Maryland, released “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers in Childhood,” a report supported by more than eighty-five experts in neurology, psychiatry, and education, including Diane Ravitch, former U.S. assistant secretary of education; Marilyn Benoit, president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; and primate researcher Jane Goodall. “Fool’s Gold” charged that thirty years of research on educational technology had produced just one clear link between computers and children’s learning. (On some standardized tests, “drill-and-practice programs appear to improve scores modestly—though not as much or as cheaply as one-on-one tutoring.”) The co-signers of the “Fool’s Gold” report went so far as to call for a moratorium on computer use in early childhood education, until the U.S. surgeon general can ascertain whether computers are hazardous to the health of young children. The public response was surprising. After “Fool’s Gold” was released, MSNBC conducted an online poll of subscribers, asking if they supported such a moratorium. Of three thousand people who answered, 51 percent agreed. And these were Internet users.
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. As we pour money and attention into educational electronics, we allow less fashionable but more effective tools to atrophy. Here’s one example: We know for a fact that the arts stimulate learning. A 1995 analysis by the College Board showed that students who studied the arts for more than four years scored forty-four points higher on the math portion and fifty-nine points higher on the verbal section of the SAT. Nonetheless, over the past decade, one-third of the nation’s public-school music programs were dropped. During the same period, annual spending on school technology tripled, to $6.2 billion. Between early 1999 and September 2001, educational technology attracted nearly $1 billion in venture capital, according to Merrill Lynch and Company. One software company now targets babies as young as one day old. Meanwhile, many public school districts continue to shortchange the arts. Even more districts fail to offer anything approaching experiential, environment-based, or place-based education. Some legislators suggest that the public must choose between classroom-based environmental education and experiential education beyond the classroom walls. That should be viewed as a false choice; both deserve more support. Proponents of an arts revival in schools offer a good model for action. In some districts, these proponents have successfully argued that the arts and music stimulate learning in math and science, and this reasoning has helped that cause. Similarly, an argument can now be made that nature education stimulates cognitive learning and creativity, and reduces attention deficit.
Nonetheless, the school district in my own county—the sixth-largest district in America—illustrates the more common lack of synchronicity. San Diego County, larger in size and population than some states, is an ecological and sociological microcosm of America. It is, in fact, a place with more endangered and threatened species than any other county in the continental United States. The United Nations declared it one of the Earth’s twenty-five “hot spots” of bio-diversity. Yet, as of this writing, not one of the forty-three school districts within this county offers a single elective course in local flora and fauna. A few volunteers, including docents from the local Natural History Museum, do what they can. Across the nation, such neglect is the norm.
The Death of Natural History
Though current waves of school reform are less than nature-friendly, individual teachers—with help from parents, natural history museum docents, and other volunteers—can do much to improve the situation without organized, official sanction. To be truly effective, however, we must go beyond the dedication of individual teachers and volunteers to question the assumptions and context of the gap between students and nature. We should do everything we can to encourage the incipient movement of what is sometimes called “experiential education.” We should also challenge some of the driving forces behind our current approach to nature, including a loss of respect for nature and the death of natural history in higher education.
A few years ago, I sat in the cluttered office of Robert Stebbins, professor emeritus at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. He grew up ranging through California’s Santa Monica Mountains, where he learned to cup his hands around his mouth and “call in the owls.” For him, nature was still magical. For more than twenty years, Stebbins’s reference work, A Field Guide to Western Reptiles and Amphibians, which he wrote and illustrated, has remained the undisputed bible of herpetology, and inspired countless youngsters to chase snakes. To Stebbins, our relationship with nature has been undermined by a shift in values.
For a decade, he and his students drove to the California desert to record animal tracks in areas frequented by all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs. Stebbins discovered that 90 percent of invertebrate animal life—insects, spiders, and other arthropods—had been destroyed in the ATV-scarred desert areas. While I spoke with him, he dropped scores of slides into an old viewer. “Look,” he said. “Ten years of before-and-after photos.” Grooves and slashes, tracks that will remain for centuries. De
sert crust ripped up by rubber treads, great clouds of dirt rising high into the atmosphere; a gunshot desert tortoise, with a single tire track cracking its back; aerial photographs taken near Blythe, California, of ancient and mysterious Indian intaglios, carved images so large that they can only be perceived from the air. Across the flanks and back and head of a deer-like intaglio were claw marks left by ATVs. “If only these people knew what they were doing,” said Stebbins.
What upset him most was not the destruction that had already occurred, but the devastation yet to come and the waning sense of awe—or simple respect—toward nature that he sensed in each successive generation. “One time, I was out watching the ATVs. I saw these two little boys trudging up a dune. I went running after them. I wanted to ask them why they weren’t riding machines—maybe they were looking for something else out there. They said their trail bikes were broken. I asked them if they knew what was out there in the desert, if they’d seen any lizards. ‘Yeah,’ one of them said, ‘But lizards just run away.’ These kids were bored, uninterested. If only they knew.”
Even among children who participate in nature activities, a conservation ethic is not assured. In a classroom in Alpine, California, I visited elementary-school pupils who reported spending far more time outside than I had heard reported in most settings across the country. Some of the students in this science class had watched bobcats play on the ridges; one boy had watched a mountain lion thread its way across his parents’ acreage. Many of these young people were growing up in this far exurb in the mountains because their parents wanted them to be exposed to more nature. One boy said, “My mom didn’t like the city because there was hardly any nature, so Mom and Dad decided to move here to Alpine. We live in an apartment. My grandma lives even farther out and she has huge property—most of it is grass, but part of it is just trees. I like to go there, because she has a baby mountain lion that comes down into her yard. When I was there on Sunday, we were going out to feed the goats and we saw a bobcat trying to catch birds. It’s really cool.”
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Page 15