(From the San Diego Union Tribune, 14-May-2000 Sunday, Page A-3, The Future's Edge. Fourth in a series on the changing relationship between humans and other animals.)
In the mid-19th century, a boy ran along a beach with his gun, handmade from a piece of gas pipe, mounted on a stick. The pipe was loaded with gunpowder and slugs made with “gleaned pieces of lead,” as the boy recalled later. The boy aimed, a companion “applied a match to the touch-hole,” and he “fired at the gulls and solan-geese as they passed.” Today, such activity might be cause for time spent in Juvenile Hall, but for young John Muir, shooting sea gulls was just another way to connect with nature.
“Whenever I read Muir’s description of shooting sea gulls to my students, they’re shocked. They can’t believe it,” says David Sobel, director of teacher certification programs at Antioch University’s New England graduate school and co-director of the Center for Environmental Education. Muir, of course, was responsible for saving the mountains surrounding Yosemite Valley from development by helping to establish Yosemite National Park, and was the father of modern environmentalism.
Sobel tells this story to illustrate just how much the interaction between children and nature has changed. Practitioners in the new fields of conservation psychology (focused on how people become environmentalists) and ecopsychology (the study of how ecology interacts with the human psyche) say that, as Americans become increasingly urbanized, their attitudes toward animals move in paradoxical ways.
To urbanized people, the source of food and the reality of nature are becoming more abstract. At the same time, ironically, urban folks are more likely to feel protective toward animals – or to fear them.
The good news is that children today are less likely to kill animals for fun; the bad news is that children are so disconnected from nature that they either idealize it or fear it – two sides of the same coin. Indeed, it’s a truism: Humans tend to fear or romanticize what we don’t know.
Sobel
focuses on “ecophobia,” which he defines as fear of nature.
In its older, more poetic meaning, the word means fear of home. That older
definition
carries special poignancy in Southern California, a region rich in ecological
diversity, which is rapidly being paved over and sliced away for development.
But, for a moment, set aside such apocalyptic
visions. “My
contention is that it’s psychologically essential for a child to bond
to the natural world,” says Sobel. He says urbanization makes that difficult,
but adds that many educators, with good intentions, are making matters worse.
“Just as ethnobotanists are descending on tropical forests in search of new plants for medical uses, environmental educators, parents and teachers are descending on second- and third-graders to teach them about the rain forests,” Sobel writes in his slim but eloquent volume, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. “From Brattleboro, Vermont, to Berkeley, California, schoolchildren... watch videos about the plight of indigenous forest people displaced by logging and exploration for oil. They learn that between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than 10,000 acres of rain forest will be cut down, making way for fast-food, ‘hamburgerable’ cattle.” In theory, these children “will learn that by recycling their Weekly Readers and milk cartons, they can help save the planet” and they’ll grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth, “voting for environmental candidates and buying energy-efficient cars.” Or maybe not.
“My fear is that just the opposite is occurring,” says Sobel. “In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots.” Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder. “If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation.” He offers this analogy: In response to physical and sexual abuse, children learn to cut themselves off from pain. Emotionally, they turn off. “My fear is that our environmentally correct curriculum similarly ends up distancing children from, rather than connecting them with, the natural world. The natural world is being abused and they just don’t want to have to deal with it.”
To many environmentalists and educators, this is contrarian thinking – even blasphemy. But some hunting and fishing organizations make a similar case; they point to the rising average age of hunters and, consequently, falling financial support for conservation through hunting and fishing licenses. Yes, they say, fishing and hunting are messy – morally messy – but removing that experience from childhood will do neither children nor conservation any good. The movement to stop hunting and fishing, they say, is led by people who have little direct contact with nature; anti-fur Hollywood stars, for instance– perhaps the last weasel they met was a casting director.
“You look at these kids (in the animal rights movement), and you largely see urban, disaffected, but still privileged people,” says Mike Two Horses, a former San Diegan who now lives in Tucson. Two Horses is the founder of CERTAIN (Coalition to End Racial Targeting of American Indian Nations). His organization supports native people such as the Northwest’s Makah tribe, traditionally dependent on whale hunting. “The only animals the young animal rightists have ever known are their pets,” he says. “The only ones they’ve ever seen otherwise are in zoos, Sea World or on whale-watching (now whale-touching) expeditions. They’ve disconnected from the sources of their food -- even from the sources of the soy and other vegetable proteins they consume.”
Sobel isn’t defending hunters, fishers or Indian groups; he’s just concerned about spreading ecophobia. “Children are studying the rain forest, but they’re not studying their region’s forests, or even just the meadow outside the classroom door,” he says. “It is hard enough for children to understand the life cycles of chipmunks and milkweed, organisms they can study close at hand. This is the foundation upon which an eventual understanding of ocelots and orchids can be built.” Sobel contends rain forest curriculum is developmentally appropriate in middle or high school, but not in the primary grades.
Some educators won’t go that far, but they do agree with Sobel’s basic premise – that environmental education is out of balance. “This is also the fundamental crux of the curriculum wars, particularly in the area of science,” says Dennis Doyle, assistant superintendent in the Chula Vista Elementary School District, who has worked for years to increase students’ direct experience with nature. “The science frameworks bandied about by the state have swung back and forth between the hands-on experiential approach and factoid, textbook learning.”
Rasheed Salahuddin also sees wisdom in Sobel’s thesis. As principal of the San Diego Unified School District’s one-week outdoor education program on Palomar Mountain, he sees ecophobia every day. “Too many kids are associating nature with fear and catastrophe, and not having direct contact with the outdoors,” he says. But don’t just blame education. “This is also part of the way the media portrays everything, in end-of-the-world terms.”
Salahuddin brings sixth-graders to the mountain and shows them the wonder. “Some of these kids are from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They view the outdoors, the woods, as a dangerous place. They associate it with war, with hiding, or they view it in a solely utilitarian way, as a place to gather firewood.” Inner-city, Hispanic and African-American kids show similar responses. “Some have never been to the mountains or the beach – or the zoo, even though it’s within sight of their homes. Some of them spend their entire childhood inside an apartment, living in fear. They associate nature with the neighborhood park, which is controlled by gangs.
“What does this say about our future? Nature has been taken over by thugs who care absolutely nothing about it. We need to take nature back.”
Richard
Louv is the author of Fly-Fishing for Sharks: An American Journey (Simon & Schuster),
from which some of this article is adapted. He is also a columnist for
The San Diego Union-Tribune, from which this article is reprinted. For more
information
about his books, go to www.richardlouv.com
He welcomes your thoughts and can be reached by fax, (619) 293-2148; mail,
P.O. Box 12091, San Diego, CA 92112-0191; or e-mail, rlouv@cts.com