How to Reconnect City Kids with Nature

Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods (2005, Algonquin Books), has triggered unprecedented awareness of how spending time outdoors is vital to children’s health and development. Contrasting personal narratives of naturalists with children’s descriptions of nature as something to fear or to rumble through in all-terrain vehicles, the book highlights environmental educators, whose affection for the California landscape with its animal and plant life is contagious.

Louv weaves in results of a series of studies showing benefits of spending time in nature for children’s cognitive and social development. He addresses key problems facing children today: distance from natural areas, obesity, parental fears, and structuring of free time, building a convincing case for why we should make environmental education a national priority.

How do we create experiences for children, particularly in cities, that foster awareness of the natural world? The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Celebrate Urban Birds project, available in Spanish and English, promotes greening and helps connect families to nature right outside their doors. Art projects bringing together random parts of their environments may help kids become keen observers of the peculiar collisions between the natural and unnatural worlds in cities. Attention to habitat focuses on how wildlife and people survive.

To reach out to families who are disconnected from nature and introduce them to the outdoors, perhaps we have to move outside traditional natural history gateways and deliver opportunities right to their doorsteps or apartment stoops. It is possible, even likely, that a new generation of techno-naturalists will document their outdoor experiences not with paper and pen but with electronic data, digital images, and video, creating new communities of action and meaning. Celebrate Urban Birds is exploring these ideas while remaining grounded in the real world. It is our overriding belief that spending real time in real nature, with its rhythms, sights, smells, and sounds, may be facilitated with technology but cannot be fabricated!

—Janis Dickinson, director of Citizen Science

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu