Acadia Partners Blog

“Play that is good for kids, and presented as such–by best selling authors, by teams of experts, by parents–doesn’t strike me as all that playful. It sounds like eating your peas.”

So writes Walter Kirn in an article titled “Boys Gone Mild” in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Kirn is responding to the popularity of the recently published Dangerous Book for Boys, a book that encourages boys, and their fathers, to get out and do stuff–stuff ranging from coin tricks and tying knots to hunting and cooking a rabbit.

Over the past couple months I have been working with teachers and other people involved in education across Maine on the question of how we can do an even better job of teaching science. Everybody that I talk to agrees that we should be giving kids the tools and know-how to think about whole systems, rather than just knowledge about a bunch of scientific facts. Everybody also agrees that teaching about systems means teaching about change. Unfortunately, everybody also agrees that this is hard. Perhaps the way to get started is with a “vocabulary of change.”

It’s 7:30 a.m. Saturday morning and I’m having breakfast with my 11 year old son, Gabe, (well I’m having coffee…Gabe’s having the Big Special [two eggs, bacon AND sausage, pancakes, home fries and hot chocolate]). The breakfast is a bribe to get up early on a Saturday and participate in a pilot program at SERC — the DOWNEAST ECOLOGY PROGRAM.

A majority of scientists studying the changes in species diversity have concluded that we are in the early stages of the sixth “mega-extinction” – a massive die off of species that will radically transform life on earth. Over the last 550 million years, we know of only five other large scale mass extinctions. Evidently, we live in interesting times. The surprising thing is that we don’t seem to know it.

How can we be living through a mass extinction and not be aware of it? Bringing the Biosphere Home is Mitch Thomashow’s exploration of this question and of its implications for education. In this slim but important book, he asks what we can do to provide young people with tools that enable them to perceive global change. In this essay I look at Thomashow’s book as well as its implications for teaching about global change here at Schoodic.

A couple of days ago I began a series of three short articles about Richard Louv’s important book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. In the first article, I described Louv’s compellingly simple story about how Americans have changed the way that they relate to nature. Currently, it appears that children are growing up disconnected from nature. In the second article I summarized some of Louv’s thinking about how we got into this spot and about what it might take to get out of it. I ended with the observation that Louv’s description of the problem is simpler and more compelling than is his solution. Today I try own hand at finding a perspective that opens up a bigger picture and some insight toward reconnecting children and nature.

First–up until the end of the 19th century–we set out to use and conquer nature. Then, with much of the conquest behind us, we romanticized our view of nature and decided to protect some of it, setting aside the National Parks as an inspiration to future generations. But the surprising dilemma is that the future generations aren’t paying attention. The iconic images for children are no longer cowboys and Indians or Davy Crockett out on the frontier, but rappers on the city streets. For most children growing up today, nature is simply not relevant. So … what do we do now?

Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder is an engaging read that speaks to the future health of children and of our National Parks. The book is about the way that young people connect to nature–or, more accurately, connect to it less and less. As Acadia National Park superintendent Sheridan Steele has noted, continued support for conserved places depends on engaging children with nature and getting them into the parks. Louv’s book shows us that we are failing to create that engagement.