Kids and Nature I believe that children need nature and that nature needs kids to be in it in order for our world to survive.

My family spent a good deal of our spring vacation (yes, I wrote this a while back and am only getting around to posting it, sorry) on Vancouver Island and every day we visited a beach.

Beaches are magical places.. You can roll back rocks, you can build forts out of driftwood and you can explore tide pools at low tide.  So much ocean nature is evident when the tide goes out.

Our friend Paul, a biology teacher, taught us that you should only flip back rocks the are smaller than the size of your head. That way you don’t hurt what’s underneath.  He showed us pisaster starfish (they’re purple), baby eels and crabs.  It was amazing!  My son keeps telling people that he’s seen an eel (and, six months later, he’s still doing it!).

He also loved getting his feet stuck in the mud on Parksville beach, wiggling in the soft mud up to his ankles and playing with a kite that our friend Tim was flying.

I think that thing that made this so special is that we did these activities together.  As the Child and Nature alliance has been saying over the past year “if you want kids to get in to nature, take them outside.”  Kids learn by example and, if you show them that you like being outside with them, so will they!

Not a day goes by when my son won’t ask me to take him outside.  We’ve tried to make the indoors boring and the outdoors exciting.  We can have fun in the backyard, in the forest, in the local park and, sometimes, even on a beach!  Nature is everywhere and, together, we make it fun.

Last week was the Children and Nature network’s Grassroots Gathering.  One of the keynotes was Claire Warden.  Here is a link to her talk – it’s great!

When I was in my early 20s I spent a couple of summer helping young people experience the wonder of nature by canoe.  We would spend 10 days travelling by our own power, at a slow pace, covering only fifty of one hundred miles.  We really explored and disconnected from the world.

I got to thinking about that because, as I wrote this, I was travelling on a plane flying over the area when I used to paddle.  It’s amazing that, over a decade later, I can still make out the lakes and the rivers that I explored those summers during the late 90s.  Artery lake stands out as a cross on the Bloodvein River, Aikens lake, with it’s crater at the source of the Gammon.  I couldn’t make out Scout lake or “Bing’s Death Swamp” but I know they’re down there.

During those summers, we didn’t have cell phones or email at the base camp.  Landline telephone service was limited, so we wrote a lot of paper letters.  Life was very slow.  I got excited to even see another person and would spend time getting to know the little details of their lives over the past week on the trail and crossing paths with another canoe trip was amazing.

With that kind of slow life, you really connected with the people around you.  You created a tight knit community.  You learned about each other and enjoyed each other’s company.  You could do that because you slowed down and paid attention to the little things in life.

We used to occasionally see planes overhead.  We even had radios to contact them if there was an emergency.  I used to really resent seeing them – they represented the outside world.  I couldn’t imagine that one day I would be flying on one of them, looking down at the landscape that had become a part of me in the past.

If we are to connect more people with nature we need to slow down and remember that we need to create community. We need to know our neighbours.  We need to trust each other.  If we’re able to do that we will be able to spend time going for walks in the woods.  We’ll be able to let our kids play with each other and we’ll be able to let them explore without our intervention.

We need to have the courage to know on our neighbours doors, to say hello and to sit in the park.  We also have to have the courage to slow down and take the time to really get to know each other.

There is a certain power of spending time in natural light. Seasonal affective disorder is well documented and is thought be caused in part by a lack of natural light during the winter months.

It’s not a terrible stretch to think that our moods could improve if we just spent a bit of time during each day outdoors in the natural light. I know it certainly works for me. If I spend just a few minutes outdoors in the sunshine, it will put me in a better mood and I will feel noticeably more alert.

Beyond that, we now know that the blue light of sunshine has a particular effect on eye health and may be one of the reasons why we are seeing more nearsighted children. The indoors may be hurting our children’s eyes.

I’m not going to say that, for kids with depression and genetic eye damage that the outdoors will cure them but we don’t want to cause damage by keeping kids indoors.

Remember that something as simple as a walk at lunchtime will get you out and you will have the added benefit of getting a bit of exercise, something we can all use.

So get out and enjoy the sunshine and let’s see all of our moods improve just a little bit.

I was in a conversation yesterday when someone asked me a tough question. If I could do one thing to get more teenagers into our outdoor based program, what would it be? That’s a very tough question because there isn’t one single silver bullet. Teenagers have a very good lie detector built in and want to get what you tell them they’re going to get. They want adventure. They crave risk. These are the things that have moved humans, as a species, forward. The risk part literally saved humanity during the ice age, when some teenagers said to their parents, see you later old guys, we’re getting on the ice floe to look for new adventures elsewhere. Those are all important things, but they weren’t what I settled on – I settled on trust and doing things with their friends.

Teenagers want to be trusted and they want to do things with their friends. More importantly, they can be trusted to do things with their friends. If we want to get more teenagers through the doors, we need to create opportunities for them to do these things.

The organization that I work for has a provision for older youth (11 – 14 year olds) to camp without adult supervision. I did that when I was that age. We set up duty rosters, we bought and cooked our own food and we learned from our mistakes (at age 14, I had a love of Cajun seasoning, my friends didn’t). Most importantly, we didn’t get in to trouble.

When I was 16, I joined the older program and, although all the camps we wanted to go to required an adult advisor to be present, we didn’t have one available most of the time. We would recruit an adult from one of the other groups to take responsibility for us and we would camp without adult supervision. We camped this way for thirty or fourth days out of each year, in all seasons. We never got in to trouble and most people thought that one of us was a young looking adult, but they could never quite figure out which one of us it was. We never got into trouble and our group grew from six the first year to thirty in the next.

These sort of opportunities seem to have disappeared in the 21st century. We think that our world is too dangerous (it isn’t) and that our teenagers can’t be trusted to do the right thing (they can) to allow this sort of thing to happen. We need to recreate opportunities that allow teenagers to learn how to do things without adult supervision, be trusted to do so for extended periods of time and know that they will do the right thing. Those sorts of experiences made me the man that I am today. People trusted me to do the right thing. We can trust today’s teenagers to do the same and, if we allow them to do so, we will build the next generation of community leaders and nature lovers.

There is nothing so natural than kids and the beach!  We took my son up to the ocean for the first time in a few years (we do live in a landlocked province, so it’s not entirely our fault), and he immediately started playing in the mud,looking for shells and visiting with other kids.  I heard them yelling to each other about what they’d found in tide pools and about the fun of having mud between their toes!

He learned about getting stuck in the mud, about tides and about beach creatures – fish, birds and an abundance of sea life.  I defy anyone to tell me that wasn’t education!

He ran and ran and ran, threw handfuls of mud, got his boots and the rest of him all wet and cried when it was time to go home.  He went right to sleep when it was bedtime, actually asked for bedtime!

A perfect afternoon!