From Using Nature to Knowing It
A couple of days ago I began the first of 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 that 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.
Yesterday, 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 more satisfying than his solution. I don’t mean this as a harsh criticism. It is often easier to look back than to look forward, and Louv makes a truly important contribution to our understanding of where we have been. Still, I would like come away with some kind of overview of the path forward, rather than just a list of separate tasks and initiatives. I do value the catalog that Louv compiles of issues to address. But I would also like a simple, compelling picture of what we need to do and pay attention to.
I’m always happy to try my own hand at finding a perspective that opens up a bigger picture. In this case, the different angle on the problem comes from looking more closely at Louv’s sequence of three frontiers–the story of the ways that we have connected with nature over the last century and a half. I like Louv’s story–it is one of my favorite things about the book because, in its simplicity, it captures something important. But, like any good generalization, it makes sharp distinctions when things are, in fact, more muddled. Changes in attitudes did not really fall into neatly separated eras. Instead, children (and adults) mixed together old ways of engaging with nature with new ones.
For example, when Louv writes about his affection for Daniel C. Beard’s 1915 book–the one that shows children how to build shelters, shacks, and shanties–he sees the book as a classic example of the romantic view of nature, but he can also acknowledge that "the genre seemed to suggest that no self-respecting boy could enjoy nature without axing as many trees as possible."
Acknowledging that children growing up in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century carried along a great deal of the earlier "first frontier" attitude–using and consuming nature while connecting to it–is important because it opens up another way of seeing the problem. Even as children were developing a more appreciative, spiritual view of nature, they were still building forts and dams, fishing, hunting, and other things that involved direct, physical interaction with the out-of-doors. And then it all changed. What could have caused such a big shift?
This question puts the nature-deficit disorder in a somewhat different light. We are not just talking about a movement away from a romantic view of nature that was itself a transition from some earlier phase. Instead, we are talking about break from the whole notion of engagement through use–an idea that was with us since before the founding of this country. What might cause such a major change? If we can work out the general shape of an answer to that question, we might come away with a clearer idea of what needs to be done in order to reengage children and nature.
It seems likely to me that this transition away from all the old ways of connecting with nature does not stand alone. Instead, I would expect to find that a change of this magnitude is really just one part of some bigger shift.
The truly enormous transition that America began to work its way through at about that same time we were losing interest in Davy Crockett–two-thirds of the way through the century– was the shift from living in an economy based on making things to one based on knowing things. Up until the last third of the twentieth century we were primarily a nation that created value by growing a large part of the world’s food, manufacturing industrial equipment and consumer goods of all sizes and at all price points, building an enormous national infrastructure, and in other ways interacting with the world physically. That is no longer the case, not even here in Maine. Now we create value by knowing things and providing services. Fewer and fewer people "get their hands dirty" to make a living. More and more people process and manipulate information.
This suggests an alternate view of what was going on back in the fifties and early sixties, when Louv and I were children out in the woods. When we built tree-houses, made roads in the dirt, and built dams in streams, we were engaging nature through the kinds of activities that we saw going on in the "grown-up" world that surrounded us. The fact that we did this out-of-doors certainly helped us develop a relationship to nature, but the play didn’t start with nature. The play was driven by what we saw going on around us, nature was just the setting. The happy result was that, along the way, we developed personal connections to the out-of-doors.
This is just a small shift in perspective, but it leads to a more hopeful view of the situation than the one that I glean from Louv’s list of policy and program changes. The hope emerges because we are, as a nation, still finding our way through the early stages of this transition from a physical economy to a knowledge economy. A quick look at Ford and General Motors suggests that, as a people, we still have much to learn about this transition. So it should not be surprising that young people–still modeling what they see in the adult world–have no clear idea of how to relate to nature in the context of this new, knowledge-based existence.
Said another way, rather than being in some kind of terminal condition where the connection between children and nature has been driven away, perhaps we are in the middle of a transition. If that is true, the opportunity resides in managing that transition.
As I think about this in the rich context of examples and stories in Last Child in the Woods, I see a couple of things that we almost certainly should be doing differently or doing more emphatically. The first ties back to the "rainforest" quotation in yesterday’s article. It seems that "teaching children about the world around them" is sometimes understood to mean "teaching children about global issues." As an adult, I regularly hear about global warming, rainforests, and other matters having to do with natural systems that are either far away or are so large that they are hard to comprehend. I must confess that, even as someone who cares very much about the health of the environment, I don’t really "know" about these things–I can just say the words. What knowledge I have doesn’t go very deep and isn’t very personal.
Contrast this with what I know about the different kinds of pine, spruce, and fir trees that grow at different places, under different conditions, in Acadia National Park. I also know about the surprising evergreen ferns that return to being healthy and green, even in the middle of winter, as soon as we have a warm day. I know about the way the the ice forms in streams, and about how even on very cold days there can be running water seeping from underneath the rocks in the Park. I know about tracks in the snow, and can infer the fate of a mouse whose tracks suddenly end in mid-transit across an open road.
My point is that, especially for children, knowing has depth and personal meaning when it is rooted in things that you can see and touch. It is this kind of knowing, not the knowing about destruction of rainforests or about global warming, that can create a connection to nature and to place. Those other kinds of knowing can come later, once the child has a connection with nature and cares about it. But they are not the knowing that creates the connection.
This leads to my second observation, one that Richard Louv brings to life through the words of Elaine Brooks, biologist, oceanographer, and teacher.
One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.
Louv also notes that "people are unlikely to value what they cannot name." What I am suggesting here is that rather than focusing on broad principles and big concepts such as "evolution" or "ecology," we should instead first teach students to see and recognize things, which is to say that they should be able to name them. I am not focused here on the particulars of the name or on naming just for the sake of naming. Shakespeare had it right: "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." The point of naming is to know something as itself, and not something else. If a child does not know the difference between a spruce and a pine, then all that the child can see is just trees in the woods. But if he or she can name them and see them for what they are, the door is opened to questions and wonder. Why are there so many Jack Pines on top of Schoodic Head? Why is it that as you walk along the road up to Schoodic Head, all you see is Red Spruce, Cedar, and Balsam Fir–and no Jack Pines– until you arrive at the top? To ask such questions is to begin to know a place.
What I am suggesting–a focus on the particular and on first-hand experience rather than a focus on abstractions and generalizations–emerges directly from the realization that what we are struggling with here is the transition to a knowledge-based economy and society. Knowing what we are up against–that it relates to kinds of knowledge rather than just to nature–suggests that we might turn to the discipline of knowledge management for insight into the nature-deficit disorder.
A cardinal distinction in knowledge management is the differentiation between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, and it is the distinction that I am talking about between a child’s first hand knowledge of Acadia National Park–or of an open field near his or her home–and knowledge of rainforests or global warming. Tacit knowledge is personal, difficult to codify, and gained through experience. Explicit knowledge is what you get out of a book or from Google. Tacit knowledge is the foundation for insight and innovation. It is the basis for belief and for personal action. It is the knowledge that is hard to come by and that opens new insights and opportunities. Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is a commodity.
My "big picture" view, then, of the problem that Louv presents is that children are disconnected from nature because the old ways of connecting–building things, shooting things and so on–no longer make sense in our culture. The question that we need to address is not how to allow kids to return to building tree houses or to shooting things, but is instead focused on what kinds of engagement makes sense in the context of a society based on knowledge rather than production.
It is interesting, and encouraging, that this line of thinking ends up pointing in some of the same directions that emerged for Louv as he talked with hundreds of children and families to learn how kids do engage with nature. He found that the focus should be on the specific, not on the general. It should be on personal knowing, on knowing by doing, rather than on knowing by reading or listening. Explicit knowledge is tremendously important–don’t get me wrong–I buy and read dozens of books a year and use Google every day. But it is not the way to build connection and engagement. Engagement starts with tacit knowing–with getting kids out in the woods and into the inter-tidal zones–with picking things up and looking and wondering.
For example, Louv tells the story of Carlos, the husky six-foot tall teenager with a shaved head and earrings–Louv calls him one of the "Boyz in the Woods." Carlos made his connection with nature through close observation, sketching plants and animals in notebooks, watching animals stalk game, and listening to the sounds of the forest. Similarly, Louv describes a walk with a friend whose four-year old son had learned to pay attention to where rattlesnakes might hide as he walked off the trail. On that same hike, this child and Louv’s own son learned how to recognize slippery places on rocks near a stream by the different color of the stone’s surface. All of this is the stuff of tacit knowledge, the kind of knowledge that is personal, creates sense of connection, and serves as the foundation for learning more and learning more deeply.
These are not, of course, crisp distinctions. There is no single best program that will create engagement for all children. There will still be kids who want to build tree houses.
My difference with Louv is only one of emphasis. The solution to the problem that he identifies and expresses so well is not, I believe, one of looking back to what we did as kids, but one of looking forward to new engagements with nature that make sense in a changed world. The nature-deficit disorder is really part of the larger problem of figuring out how to move from a society that values production to a society that values knowing. The reason that this insight excites me is that it suggests a kind of compass bearing for us to follow as we move beyond the nature-deficit disorder. We need to look first at the kind and the quality of the "knowing" that we encourage as we lead kids back into the woods.
I will close by noting that this problem and this solution falls squarely within our concerns here at Acadia Partners for Science and Learning. The path back to engagement with nature builds on specific, detailed knowledge of individual places. Our organization was created to enable a deeper, more complete knowing of Acadia National Park. We exist to help people who are interested in and committed to this park know the names of things, understand the history of things, and become more engaged in the nature of this place.