Paddy Woodworthreports on a new movement in the US to counter childhood obesity and reconnect children with the great outdoors.
It was a remarkable statement: "When kids stay out in the country for a while, they suddenly find they don't need to take their Ritalin," Lavinia Schoene of the Burgundy Center for Wildlife Studies told a packed session at a recent ecology conference in San José, California.
The session theme was "No Child Left Indoors: Ecologists Linking Young People with Nature". A wide range of speakers reflected growing concerns that an unprecedented drop in contact between children and the environment is at the root of many psychological, social and even physical problems.
All the way back to the days of the Frontier, the great outdoors has always been part of the American dream. US parents have traditionally taken their lead from rugged adventurers such as John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club, and fought for the creation of national parks such as Yosemite in California, partly to provide a healthy playground for the nation's youth. For generations, camping, hunting, hiking and fishing, either with their parents or at summer camps, was part of the experience of growing up for many young Americans.
"Going outdoors was a no-brainer," said one teacher at the conference. Field trips were an essential part of education, the smell of the woods was part of adolescence.
Today, the US national parks are in crisis, with a 25 per cent fall in admissions since the beginning of this century. Meanwhile, ever-increasing numbers of US schoolchildren are being prescribed medication such as Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Obesity is blighting the lives of many more, despite a significant rise in organised sport in US schools.
Richard Louv, a journalist with the San Diego Union-Tribune, began to suspect that what he calls "Nature Deficit Disorder" was intimately linked to the pervasive unhappiness that was clouding the nation's children. And while he supported the 2002 No Child Left Behind federal initiative to beef up the basics in American education, his research suggested that its rigid regime of tests was further squeezing the little time available in the curriculum for outdoor or spontaneous activity.
"I knew something profound was happening to the relationship between children and nature, a 'disconnect' that has no precedent, I believe, in human history," said Louv. He found that children watching a classic outdoors movie such as Lassie thought the young protagonists were "as weird as Martians". Indeed, Martians were probably more familiar, thanks to the fantasy elements in TV shows and computer games. And while he does not dismiss the advances in natural history education through new technologies, he fears that we are shifting to a culture where "we carry nature in our laptop briefcases, and not in our hearts".
He makes no apology for an appeal to the emotions. "Almost every person my age [ he is in his 50s] had a secret place in the woods which became part of them, and which they carried in their hearts throughout their lives. We need to reintroduce children to those places."
The result of these reflections is his seventh book, Last Child Left in the Woods (published by Algonquin Books, 2005), which he "confidently expected would fail like all its predecessors". Instead, this self-effacing and gently witty man found that he had authored a bestseller, now translated into six languages.
More importantly, he had struck a major chord in the heart of the US public, with strong echoes in the teaching profession. He now chairs the Children and Nature Network, which campaigns internationally to reintroduce children to the outdoors in areas as diverse as education, architecture, urban design and conservation.
He insists that this new movement is not inspired by nostalgia or hand-wringing, but that it has given new hope for the future at a time of great and widespread fears, ranging from ecological catastrophes to concerns over sexual abuse, which are forcing parents to keep their children indoors.
Louv does not underestimate the realities underlying these anxieties. But he argues that we have to take on board the concept of "comparative risk", and that the risks of keeping children away from nature are much greater than the risks of abduction by strangers, or of misadventure in the wilderness.
He accepts, however, that in this new atmosphere, parents and teachers must take much more time and trouble in accompanying and introducing children to outdoor experiences.
The benefits of the "No Child Left Inside" movement, the conference heard, are not limited to nebulous areas of character and spiritual development. The conference heard educators cite a number of recent studies that show that time spent outdoors, at play and at study, improves children's performance at academic tests, even though they may be spending less time in the classroom.
New and imaginative programmes involving collaboration between academic scientists, local ecologists and naturalists, teachers and school students seem to be mushrooming.
David Oberbillig, a high school teacher who involves staff from the University of Montana in his classes, said that the movement was also helping to dissolve a "knowledge gap" between academics and secondary and primary teachers. He stressed the rewards for both groups of taking children outside the structures of the classroom and into the open air, under surprising themes such as "Up in Flames: Burning up the Schoolyard".
"What better way to attract kids than by torching something?" he asked, though this is only an option when the local environment includes prairie remnants, which benefit from a fire regime involving periodic controlled burns.
Carlos de la Rosa, from a conservation organisation on Catalina Island off the California coast, talked of the importance of allowing children to discover their own personal "A ha!" moments, occasions of surprise and joy in the presence of their first fungus, lizard or redwood tree, to kick-start a relationship with nature that can last a lifetime.
Several speakers agreed that ecological restoration projects, where children could be actively involved in clearing alien invasive plants, replanting native ones, and monitoring the results over several years, were especially successful in creating long-term engagement.
Perhaps the most surprising suggestion came from Louv: "Climate change is an opportunity as well as a crisis. It is going to create jobs that never existed before. It gives young people a chance to participate in the building of a new environmental civilisation as ecosystems change around us."
He may be over-optimistic, but that is certainly a more effective message to get kids involved in environmental issues than doom and gloom.
How does his overall message sit in Europe? "When I wrote the book two years ago," he said, "I praised Europe, but now I keep getting e-mails telling me the problem is more or less the same there. That's something I have to look into for the next edition."
For further information on No Child Left Inside, see www.cnaturenet.org