What does it say about us when one generation pities the next? While our children's
living standards are likely to be higher than ours and their lives even more filled with
flashy techno-gadgetry, many of us fear that their experience of nature will be thinner,
more constricted, and less fulfilling than our own. There are few people for whom a visit
to their childhood home is not a heartbreaking experience, because its connection to the
land around it has been broken. Sprawl and malls are filling in the vacant lots and
woodlands where we used to play; rivers and streams are culverted, channelized, and
barren; and the coasts, lakesides, and mountains are spotted with trophy homes and locked
gates.
In losing our contact with the natural world we are losing something precious. In a
way, we are losing part of what it means to be human. We evolved in nature, dependent on
its rhythms, inextricably connected to other living things. In an increasingly urbanized,
artificial world, our connection to that natural world is forged through our experience as
children. We learn and grow by climbing trees, catching tadpoles, picking flowers, making
mud pies, hiding under hedges. Playing outside every evening until called home by parents
and falling darkness, we develop a sense of our human community as part of the wider,
natural world.
American children are losing that connection. I grew up in the suburbs, but I walked to
school through the woods. My peers who grew up in the city went to the park after school.
Outgoing Sierra Club president Chuck McGrady runs a summer camp in North Carolina; these
days, he laments, his campers arrive with no special connection to the outdoors. And how
could they be expected to make one? Instead of exploring the world, they are chaperoned
from school to soccer field to music lessons and home again; they never have a chance to
find the hole behind the log where they can hide their special stuff, or the damp spot in
the meadow where the butterflies swarm in the summer. There probably isn't a log or meadow
within walking distance anyway, and kids don't walk home because their parents fear they
might get abducted.
No wonder that our kids are disconnected and alienated from the natural world, when
adults have decided that most places outside the car and the home are dangerous and that
every hour needs to be scripted. It's rarer and rarer for kids to have access to fields or
streams or woodlots or even decent city parks, so instead of joyfully mucking about
outside they're offered a physically safe world of video games and television. As a
result, nature and place are losing out to the virtual world. Who needs mud puddles when
your computer can provide you with dozens of imaginary planets full of gory combat with
scary monsters?
But computer screens don't teach you how to cooperate with your friends to get a boost
up to that next tree limb, to hop nimbly from rock to rock, or reveal the mystery of
tadpoles turning into frogs. Television still has its nature shows (mostly animals eating
each other, these days), but its primary lesson is about consumerism (see "Branding Baby's Brain," page 56). Even those kids who manage to
avoid the wall-to-wall commercials disguised as cartoons on Saturday morning are bombarded
by marketing at schools that force them to view Channel One, which now purveys
"educational" 12-minute newscasts-2 minutes of which are commercials-to one out
of four American teenagers.
We can teach our kids to be more than consumers. When we help get them out in nature,
they find that they love the real world even more than they love electronic games or
visits to the mall. Where schools offer outdoor education programs, they become the
centerpiece of the academic year-what kids plan for and look back at, how they measure
their own growing up. Shame then on politicians like California governor Gray Davis, who
for the second year in a row vetoed additional funding for outdoor education in low-income
school districts. Instead, underfunded schools get their environmental materials neatly
prepackaged for them from corporations like Exxon, Dow Chemical, and International Paper,
whose lesson plan is to teach that U.S. corporations are as environmentally responsible as
they could possibly be (see "Reading, 'Riting, and Ravaging," May/June 1998).
The Sierra Club is beginning to address the needs of children and young people, but
there's a lot more that we could be doing. Chapters and groups that have focused their
outings programs on family excursions report record sign-ups, but our Inner City Outings
for at-risk youth still need more volunteers. (If you'd like to get involved, call (415)
977-5628 or e-mail georgia.siebert@sierraclub.org.)
The Sierra Student Coalition is helping young people find dynamic ways to protect the
natural world-but now it's time for the Sierra Club to integrate its youth efforts more
closely with those of its chapters and groups. Finally, we all owe it to our kids to make
it possible for them to experience the same happy connection to the natural world that set
so many Sierra Club members on their present path. That doesn't necessarily mean an
ambitious backpack through alpine meadows or watching a mighty whale breaching at sea; it
can be as simple as observing a garter snake in the grass or the flight of a butterfly.
Nature's still all around us, and who knows? The Earth-defender of tomorrow might start by
making mud pies.
Carl Pope is the executive director of the Sierra Club. He can be reached by e-mail
at carl.pope@sierraclub.org.
