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"The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we all belong. We bear the universe in our being even as the universe bears us in its being." Thomas Berry, The Dream of Earth (1990, Sierra Club Books)
We are becoming an indoor culture, more comfortable in malls than on city streets. For many of us, the outdoors are becoming simply a passageway, to be hurried along through, or viewed, often sealed from us by car windows. The outdoors are not integral to our experience, or a destination to enjoy for itself. When we do spend time outdoors, it is usually for task-oriented enjoyment such as skiing or an outing to a park — a consumable event rather than a collection of simple pleasures. Is there really much cause for concern? After all, much of what goes on outdoors can happen indoors. The answer is yes, the harm is real. Our development as human beings is stunted without wide experience in the natural world. How can we become wise or spiritual without understanding our ecosystem and our place in it? How can we have sensory experiences without an outdoor life and an appreciation for hot, fragrant, resilient, or rough and smooth states of matter? How can we become physical and develop a sense of freedom without exposure to wide open places to run and leap and climb? Continued
Millions of children are only allowed outdoors with close supervision. In many areas, even the backyard or front stoops are viewed as perilous. Many children come home from school and watch television and may learn more about nature from television shows such as “Survivor” or “Gilligan's Island” than from the workings of their own backyard: that marvelous ecosystem teeming with life. They may know more about exotic animals on the Discovery Channel or farm animals on PBS than the snails, squirrels, birds, worms, and bugs that live outside their windows. Daniel Janzen, the world’s foremost tropical biologist writes (Gallagher, 1994, p.206): “Here's, what nature does for us no matter who we are or where we live... human animals carry around this big brain, this big device for processing input. Part of our ability to use that device depends on the complex stimuli that challenged it throughout our evolution. Nature — whatever is out there, from a single tree to a whole forest — provides a big wad of the possible information that we can process. If you diminish nature, you diminish the diversity of those stimuli. When we don’t get input from nature, we don’t end up having much sense of smell, hearing, or vision. Television becomes our reality. We can survive on that and do, but it is not nearly as complex…When we diminish nature, we turn off lots of things in our own heads…Over the past ten or fifteen years, I’ve been bothered by the fact that Americans think that they’re getting nature through TV — all those shows that bring the elephants and tigers right into the living rooms. This Musak nature destroys the reality of people’s experience outdoors. When they are actually in nature, it’s disappointing, because the big spectacular stimuli aren’t coming as fast as they do on television...”(Gallagher, W. The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, Actions. NY: Simon and Schuster. 1993 p.206). Whether your child learns to love the outdoors boils down to priorities and will. The purpose of life is, after all, to inhale and to live it fully and reach out eagerly without fear for new experiences. Our children deserve our effort.
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