Later, I make the mistake of complaining mildly about these circumstances to my sixty-nine-year-old mom, who has come over to the Shack to see the kids. She’s not sympathetic. At all. She has that disapproving frown between her eyebrows and the tight-lipped smile that’s meant to be disarming, but in reality is a good indicator that she’s about to get confrontational.
“You’ve become Americanized,” she says, in a way that makes it abundantly clear that this is not meant as a compliment. “You should’ve parked over by the railway station. It’s the cheapest place in town.”
“Well, yes, but I was going three different places and none of them were anywhere near the railway station,” I respond, feeling myself involuntarily getting defensive.
“It’s not that far to walk from the railway station. You’re close to everything from there.”
“Yeah, but I was carrying my laptop and another bag, so I had a bit of a heavy load, and I was trying to be efficient,” I say, and point out that the distance I would have had to travel on foot to get to all my destinations would have been almost two miles total.
“That’s not that far. You usually like walking and getting some fresh air. What’s the problem?”
“Okay, as I mentioned, I was carrying some stuff. And I was dressed for a meeting, not a hike. I don’t mind walking at all, but it was kind of cold without shell pants on.”
“So you expect to be able to park exactly where you’re going? You’ve gotten way too comfortable.”
We agree to disagree on my purported laziness and move on to a less charged topic. But after she leaves I start to wonder if my perspective hasn’t changed after all. Although I’d never admit it to my mom, it’s entirely possible that I’ve gotten a little too comfortable with that drive-up window at the bank and the ability to drive pretty much anywhere I please back home.
The transformation that my hometown has gone through is far from unique—all over Scandinavia cities and governments are vying to reduce their carbon footprint and create sustainable communities. It seems to be working. In 2014, the Global Green Economy Index ranked Sweden as the greenest economy in the world, followed by Norway in second place and Denmark in fifth. Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, where 45 percent of the residents bike to work and school every day, was ranked as the greenest city, while Stockholm came in third. The air and water quality in Scandinavia is among the highest in the world, and the countries are leaders in renewable energy as well as sustainable building practices. Swedes are so diligent about recycling that the country now has to import trash from its European neighbors in order to fuel its incineration plants, which in turn generate heat and electricity for hundreds of thousands of households. Home composting is facilitated by the government, and in a majority of the municipalities household waste is collected and composted in a central location, where it generates either soil or biogas. In Sweden there’s a recycling center within three hundred yards of every residential area, provided by the packaging industry, according to the “polluter pays principle.” Separating your household waste is considered a basic civic duty, and when all is said and done, over 99 percent of the waste in Sweden is reused, recycled, composted, or incinerated to generate energy, leaving less than 1 percent to be deposited in landfills.
When incandescent lightbulbs were banned in the EU a few years ago, people switched them out for LED bulbs without much ado, and many happily pay a little extra for products to offset their carbon footprint. Many businesses are all-in as well, rarely missing an opportunity to tout their green credentials. Max, a popular Swedish burger chain, recently introduced five new vegetarian dishes to reduce their carbon footprint, and instead of calorie counts, the restaurant labels each item on the menu with the CO2 emissions generated. (A Grand Deluxe Cheese ’n’ Bacon Burger will saddle the climate with 3.1 kilos of CO2, whereas a fish burger comes in at a bargain 0.2 kilos.) Sales of organic foods in Sweden increased by nearly 40 percent in 2014, causing shortages for some products. As many as half of women of all ages and people under forty say that they often or always buy organic, and two out of three are willing to pay more for locally produced food. Interestingly, the trend transcends class, as low-income earners are just as likely to spend a little extra for organic food as the wealthy. At the grocery store, there’s no longer just a choice between conventionally grown or organic snap peas but a choice of organic, ethically sourced, fair trade snap peas, the proceeds from which also help pay for watering systems for impoverished Maya Indians in Guatemala.
Although many factors likely contributed to this green ethos, it doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to assume that a significant part of it stems from Scandinavians’ close relationship with nature. Many cultures in the industrialized world are dominated by an anthropocentric view of nature. They see nature almost as a detached entity, something that is mainly there for humans to master and extract resources from. Other cultures subscribe to the idea that humans are stewards of nature and all other living beings, and in some cases that this responsibility is bestowed on us by a divine creator.
In Scandinavia, however, a third narrative prevails, as here most people see themselves as inseparable from nature. Nils Uddenberg, the Swedish psychiatrist and author, notes that Swedes even tend to value other living beings as highly as they value humans. “This attitude is generally motivated by the fact that all living beings—including humans—are dependent on the ecological context of which they are a part, and fill a function in these.” Following this logic, if you harm nature, in the end you also harm yourself. Helle Nebelong, a Danish landscape architect who is passionate about designing natural play spaces for children, puts it this way: “Us humans are a part of nature and we have a need to be in nature. I think this need will grow with the global development. We need to be in nature on a regular basis to achieve balance and harmony. In the long run, we can’t deny that we are biological organisms.”
Many parents pass down this ethos to their children through friluftsliv. Andreas, whom I meet during an outing with a family nature group, says that he started bringing his son Arvid to the woods partly because he enjoys the outdoors himself and wanted them to have something to do together. “But of course I also hope that it’ll lead him to become aware of environmental issues,” Andreas says. “At this age we mostly just talk about not littering and destroying nature. You don’t have to become an activist, but at the very least you need to know that.”
Parents are not alone in this quest. In Sweden, nature conservation, which involves making sure children “acquire a caring attitude to nature and the environment,” is considered so important that it’s one of the main tenets of the national curriculum for the preschool. On top of making sure that children have an opportunity to play in natural environments, the preschool is tasked with helping them understand how they can contribute to a better environment, both now and in the future.
This doesn’t mean children at Swedish preschools spend their days talking about burning rain forests, climate change, and species extinction, something that David Sobel believes can actually cause them to fear nature. Instead, a young child’s first simple act of environmental stewardship may very well be putting his apple core in the black composting bag after snack time. At Nora’s preschool, composting is one of the first “green” behaviors that is usually learned. There’s good reason for this: I know from personal experience that once you’ve gotten used to separating out your food waste from the trash, it becomes very hard to knowingly send a banana peel to the landfill when you get older.
At most preschools, environmental education is part of the daily routine, but sometimes it’s also highlighted through special events. At Nora’s preschool, the annual litter pickup in the neighborhood around the school is one of them.
“Today I want you to put on your special glasses, because today we’re going to look for trash that people have thrown away,” says Ellen, one of the preschool teachers, when preparing her group before leaving the school gro
unds. “When we see it, we’re going to pick it up so that it doesn’t destroy nature.”
Nora, who is used to picking trash from going on litter sweeps with me back home in Indiana, quickly grabs one of the white trash bags and takes charge. The other kids know the drill too, since many of them have done it before both at the school and at home.
“Trash! Trash! Trash!” they yell in unison as they scatter across the small grassy field behind the school, then continue their search behind the indoor tennis arena nearby. Cans, plastic bottles, a metal wire, some candy wrappers, and a couple of pieces of a broken hose all end up in Nora’s bag. I’ve never seen children so elated about finding discarded bottle caps before. They might as well have been hunting for Easter eggs full of candy.
“Why do you think some people throw trash on the ground?” I ask Kerstin, Nora’s best friend at preschool, while she’s trying to reach a plastic cup that has blown into some bushes.
“Because they don’t know where the trash cans are,” she responds assertively.
After they’re done with their assigned area, the kids get to go down to the basement and see where all the trash from the preschool is sorted into recycling bins. Cardboard, glass, light bulbs, batteries, plastic, compost, and nonrecyclables all have separate bins. The trash that the children have picked up, too, will be sorted at a special recycling event with several other preschools the following week.
Even though the preschool is obliged by law to provide the children with environmental education, it’s obvious that the teachers are excited about it. “The kids think this is a lot of fun; they learn it quickly. Sometimes children tell us that their family doesn’t recycle at home. If that’s the case, we just tell them, ‘Well, now you’ve learned how to do it here, so maybe you can show Mommy and Daddy how to do it,’” says Barbro. “I think the parents are positive, too, because all of this is so widely accepted today.”
She’s right. All the parents I talk to think that it’s a good thing that children learn environmentally friendly behaviors early. “At my son’s preschool, they’ve worked a lot with composting, and I think it’s great that they learn how long it takes for things to decompose,” says Veronica, a mother of three boys under the age of ten. “Sometimes I don’t feel like it makes a difference if I throw my cans in the right bin or not, but I know we all have to do our part if we want to keep living on this planet. Recycling is something we’ve been drilled with since we were little too.”
Come spring, the children at Nora’s preschool also start to visit their “school forest,” about a fifteen-minute walk from the preschool, on a more regular basis. School forests are sections of woods that can be used by schools and preschools for outdoor play and environmental education, and in Sweden there are over one thousand of them. The concept was developed in the 1980s as a collaboration between private landowners and schools to increase children’s knowledge of forests and the forestry industry. Typically, the agreement with the landowner allows the school to alter the environment beyond what’s permitted through allemansrätten—for example, by marking trails, making fire pits, building shelters, putting up signs, and, in some cases, even cutting down trees.
Outdoor learning is an old tradition in this part of the world. Swedish physician and biologist Carl Linnaeus, who’s mostly known for organizing all living beings into families and classes, a system that’s still used internationally today, championed the idea in the eighteenth century. “If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too,” he famously wrote. Even if his goal to map out all of nature proved overwhelming (by the time Linnaeus died, in 1770, approximately 20,000 species had been classified; today the number is close to 1.5 million, with more being discovered every year), his spirit of nature exploration and education lives on.
As late as a hundred years ago it was mandatory for Swedish schoolteachers to take their classes tree planting for a day, and forest excursions were a common component of the biology curriculum. Today, many teachers in Scandinavia use the school yard and nearby nature areas to teach math, science, history, and other subjects on a regular basis. The concept of teaching students outside of the classroom is called udeskole, or “outdoor school” in Danish, and isn’t just a hands-on, cross-disciplinary approach to learning traditional academic subjects. It’s also seen as a way for students to build a relationship with their environment and get in contact with nature during the school day. “Studies show that if you alternate outdoor and indoor learning, and the teacher is prepared, you get good results,” says Anders Szczepanski, director of the National Center for Environmental and Outdoor Education at Linköping University, Sweden. “There are certain parts of the brain that are stimulated when we move around and have fun in a varied environment. We turn on our intuition when we go outside—and we need to do it more often.”
The school forest that Nora’s preschool uses is located in a typical Swedish pine forest, where the hilly ground is dominated by boulders, blueberry bushes, mosses, ferns, and a few fallen trees. When I accompany her class to the forest one day, the children gather on logs around the fire pit for a quick sandwich and fruit; then, after a game and some songs, they disperse for free play. Nora immediately claims the only suitable climbing tree and quickly scurries up the branches until she is about eight feet off the ground. Several other girls gather in a circle by the fire pit to take a closer look at a beetle that is dragging another, seemingly dead, beetle around on a rock. Nearby, a group of four or five children climb up on a boulder and pretend to be pirates on a big ship, swinging sticks like gangly swords.
“Are you going to a different country?” Marit, one of the preschool teachers, asks them.
“No, we’re going to the store!” one of the boys on the rock yells excitedly.
“Here comes the mayor!” shouts another boy, whose imagination sees no problem with the combination of Jack Sparrow and a local government official buying groceries together.
One thing that strikes me is that these children all seem completely comfortable and at home in the woods. In fact, when Barbro points out that we can see the lake glimmering through the trees below the hill, Julia, a four-year-old girl, exclaims, “That’s my lake!” Julia lives right by the water not too far from the street where I grew up, and I know exactly what she means. Children in Sweden have a deep sense that nature belongs to them and they belong in nature, a feeling that follows them into adulthood.
Many thinkers in the children-and-nature movement believe that in order to develop this type of affinity for nature, children need to engage with it hands-on, using all their senses. And when they do, they don’t always comply with the leading American outdoor code of ethics: Leave No Trace. Leave No Trace was originally developed as a guide for recreating responsibly in the backcountry and has been crucial to protecting heavily used and particularly vulnerable areas from getting loved to death. But when the principles are interpreted literally and applied indiscriminately, they also have some unintended consequences for children, who are typically experts at leaving traces everywhere, from muddy footprints on newly cleaned floors and random holes in the yard, to small rocks and various debris in the washing machine. Not because they have any malicious intent, but because that’s just how kids roll.
I’d noticed in the US that some adults had taken the Leave No Trace principles to an extreme and sometimes lectured children for infractions as small as collecting rocks or picking common flowers, telling them that “the flowers are food for the bees” and asking the classic question, “What would happen if everybody picked a rock?” Some researchers believe this strict interpretation of Leave No Trace can limit children’s opportunities to make meaningful connections with the natural world and may even exacerbate the perceived separation of humans and nature. Thomas Beery, an assistant professor in environmental science at Kristianstad University, Sweden, is particularly interested in children’s fascination with collecting things. He says that collecting natural objects can foster play
and creativity as well as knowledge about the outdoors. In one study, he showed that over 80 percent of college students had collected items like rocks, shells, or insects, or foraged for food in nature when they were younger, and that the collectors in the group perceived themselves as more connected to nature than the noncollectors.
Collecting is technically a violation of Leave No Trace, which says that you should “leave what you find” in nature, but Beery believes that it can be done responsibly and lead to a dialogue about environmental stewardship. “For example, when we collect tadpoles from the pond, what’s our responsibility to keep them alive and get them back where they belong after we learn a bit about them?”
Similarly, at Nora’s preschool, the children sometimes bring things back from their outings, and the teachers usually see their curiosity as an opportunity for learning. “If the children collect things, we encourage it, but of course you can’t bring home the whole forest,” says Barbro. “We had one little boy who was really interested in rocks and he would fill his pockets with them. Once we got back to the preschool we would count how many he had and maybe sort them by size. I think that’s something very positive.”
Beery, who has taught Leave No Trace in the US, thinks having an outdoor code of ethics is a good thing, but he also believes that it needs to allow children more freedom in their interactions with nature. “Of course if we’re talking about an endangered species that has a very fragile habitat, that’s a place where we don’t play. There are places where we don’t build our forts. That’s a given. But I think we’ve started overusing the idea of Leave No Trace in the context of children’s play spaces in nearby nature.”
There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather Page 12