Travel journal: No matter where we live, we need nature.

Where are we without nature? This question has struck me over the last week, spending time in the Canadian Rockies, far from city life and away from the usual distractions that keep life busy. It’s cold. There are mountains all around. It’s easy to walk ten minutes and feel in the middle of nowhere.

In a recent conversation about the importance of taking advantage of the present, a friend said “you could get killed by a bear on your run today,” I stopped at the reality of that sentence. Yes, I could get killed by a bear. I wouldn’t put it past the Canadian wilderness. There’s a sense of grounding in that reality.

I love being an urban dweller. But with a childhood of living in a hand-built house in the forest, there’s a part of me that needs the solace that can only be found in quiet spaces. Trade out the usual high density lifestyle for a few moments in mountain air and you’re immediately transported to a different mind space.

Nature fuels creativity, as is clear spending time at the Banff Centre for Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival. Our brains need time to disconnect, to readjust to a more natural rhythm, one that begins with a sunrise over the peaks and an afternoon of alpenglow. One where the sound of a raging river is ever present. One where clean air is a given. One where you take in the natural world, not because you choose to go out on an afternoon hike, or take a weekend drive to the country.

As Andrew Weil wrote in an article in Newsweek, “Human beings evolved to thrive in natural environments and in bonded social groups. Few of us today can enjoy such a life and the emotional equilibrium it engenders, but our genetic predisposition for it has not changed.”

I think often of author Richard Louv and his aptly coined term Nature Deficit Disorder. He is right in saying that “The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.” We need to find our balance, the balance that our bodies need and crave, and without, puts us on a path of modern physical and emotional pains. Stress and depression are all maladies of modern society.

Not that picking up your life, buying a cabin in the middle of the woods and settling down to write your memoir in a weathered leather journal by candlelight will solve all problems. Since we live in modern society, we must learn to function within its confines. To find a new balance, one that allows us to enjoy the amenities of urban life but that doesn’t keep us from forgetting how big of a force nature is in keeping us alive.

And not only alive, but fueled and inspired.

Images: Anna Brones

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Get child, put child outside, let child run around – why is this so difficult?

Near where I live in Brighton, England, there’s a country park called Seven Sisters. It’s magnificent. Seven arching, white-chalk cliffs elegantly crumbling into the sea with no regard for their own brilliance. When you stand up close to the cliff face from the pebbly beaches below, you can see the layers of sediment laid down over millions and millions of years, the subtly changing colors and composition chronicling times when sea levels were higher or lower or filled with tiny and abundant and now non-existent creatures. Take a group of inner city school children to see it, though, and the reaction is less awe and more ick.

The Sussex Wildlife Trust, a local conservation charity, runs school trips to various spots around the Seven Sisters. Volunteers with the organization regularly report students who don’t want to sit on the grass, who are distressed by the mud, who wobble along the cliff path trying desperately to avoid the sheep scat until they realize that this is impossible. One child from London, on being asked what he thought a pole-mounted kestrel nesting box was, replied that it was a speed camera.

They are funny stories useful for eye rolling and lamenting the youth of today, and of course someone who grows up in a dense urban area will have points of reference that are predominantly urban. But the routine for how we interact with the outside seems so instinctive and simple – get child, put child outside, let child run around – that its malfunction is deeply uncomfortable.

Widely reported problems with our increasing penchant for urbanization expand well beyond the economic and environmental, and issues ranging from increasing obesity to widespread depression and stress disorders have been pinned on our proliferation of concrete. Richard Louv’s best selling book Last Child in the Woods even attempted to link attention deficit disorders to what he calls nature deficit disorder.

On top of that, it leaves us with something of a conundrum. The future is supposed to be awesome and filled with energy efficient airships and lush urban farms, yet the present is filled with kids who are scared of grass. How can we convince these young people – tomorrow’s older people – to protect something they aren’t even engaged with, to suddenly wake up one morning and construct a vertical farm on the side of their concrete high rise? The path to the future may have been asphalted for easy access, but it seems we’re not tripping enough on the weeds that are breaking through.

“It’s not just children and young people. Obviously it comes from a society that’s increasingly city based and it’s adults as well who aren’t used to the great outdoors. And it’s not all, it’s a proportion,” says Nigel Flynn, head of education at the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

He points to the work they are doing to combat this phenomenon, such as promoting the innovative Forest Schools program and says just a little bit of contact with the outside world is all it takes.

“There was one particular village where the Parish woodland had become a dumping ground and was getting trashed. Several people got together and won a grant to clean it up and start activity groups. One weekend they would run a fathers and son group, another it would be mothers and toddlers, and it made a real difference. The respect came from contact.”

With more people now living in cities than not, the problems of urbanization are not going to go away any time soon (though there are equally abundant and promising opportunities for urban innovation), and it is perhaps this rigorous segregation that’s the problem; urban versus suburban versus rural. If we want to live in that green utopian future, then at some point they all have to meet and mingle. The young people of today are, in some respects, the most environmentally aware generation there has ever been. We can’t judge them for the cities they find themselves living in and their unfamiliarity with strange green places. We can help them out though and it starts with something very simple, a walk outside.

Image: Todd Baker

Editor’s note: This is Sarah Lewis-Hammond’s first article for EcoSalon. She reports from Brighton, UK.

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It’s time to reconceive environmentalism and sustainability and help them evolve into a larger movement.

*Author Richard Louv is the author of The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder and Last Child In The Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.

Martin Luther King Jr. taught us, by word and example, that any movement — any culture —will fail if it cannot paint a picture of a world that people will want to go to. As others have said, his speech was not called “I Have a Nightmare.”

For decades, our culture has struggled with two addictions, to oil and to despair. It’s pretty clear by now that we can’t kick one of those habits without kicking the other. Yet, for many Americans, perhaps most of us, thinking about the future conjures up images of “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max” or Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”: a post-apocalyptic dystopia stripped of nature. We seem drawn to that flame.

It’s a dangerous fixation. Think how children and young people must feel today, growing up in a time when so many adults seem to accept, with a shrug, only darkness ahead. The key question here is: How do we change our vision of the future? Where do we start? Here’s one suggestion: reconceive environmentalism and sustainability – help them evolve into a larger movement that can touch every part of society.

Here are seven reasons for a new nature movement:

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The day after Christmas is always a big shopping day here in New Zealand. So I wasn’t surprised a couple of years ago to see a picture of a packed shopping mall on the front page of the paper. But what I was surprised and even disgusted by was this comment by one parent after she was asked why she and her 4 kids were in the mall. She said “I didn’t know what else to do with them.”

Seriously. This is New Zealand. Christmas season falls during summer time. We are in a city where it takes less than 10 minutes to get to the beach, the mountains, the lakes or the rivers. And she couldn’t figure out what to do with her kids.

That’s when I realized that children today really are prime candidates for Nature Deficit Disorder. It’s a term coined by Richard Louv, author of the best-selling book, Last Child in the Woods and recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal for encouraging more contact between children and the natural environment.

Research has shown that interacting with nature is one of the best ways to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle. But other lifestyle changes – lack of time, concern for safety, the growth of technology – have resulted in an increasingly sedentary and indoor lifestyle among children.

Nature Deficit Disorder, while not a medical condition, will affect a child’s overall wellbeing. So reconnecting children and nature needs to become every parent’s priority. The steps are easy. Just start by opening the door.

For more information, check out this special report on Nature Deficit Disorder over at Education.com. It has comprehensive information on what it is and how to stop it happening to your kids.

Image: bhollar

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