“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
— James Gustave Speth
[This is part two of The Social Side of Climate Change.]
I’d like to return to the idea, in part one, that connecting our children with nature is key to unlocking both the passion and creativity to address the environmental (and perhaps social) issues facing us today.
I would argue that our disconnection with nature has paralleled a disconnection with ourselves and one another. We do see this in the ways we relate to one another, very often through screens. Previously our schools, workplaces and families were places to grow in relationship. Critical spaces to test what’s permissible and possible within our relationships. The petrie dish, the first battleground is the family, something I’ve witnessed first hand. Difficult children need more time, more guidance. They need to make trouble in order to learn where and when to stop. This can’t be done if children are more attached to screens (much easier for parents!) than arguing around a board game. We have one child in particular who is very painful to play board games with – they are now in their teens – but we persist. With every argument I remind myself that this is their chance to learn social skills. The siblings often get the worst of their brothers or sisters, but they are all learning and it’s the parent who is most connected to be able to guide them.
That’s a hard task, not for the faint of heart, the tired or the distracted. Things I and us all have been. And we’re allowed to be. That’s their chance to learn to give space.
So the social nature of relationships is challenged by our current social cultures.
Our nature-relationships are also challenged.
Whereas, once before, outside play made up most of the domain of the young, here they are again constricted from very early ages to an outdoor space the size of a pen. If they walk outside those boundaries they hold hands and cross roads in straight lines, sticking to concrete paths and adult guidance. Gone are the days where mum and dad sent the children of the neighbourhood off together in a group down to the creek to fish with home made rods and hooks, maybe even a bow and arrow slung over a shoulder. Even playing cricket on a nearby oval, away from adult supervision, is a rare thing.
This disconnection from nature doesn’t allow a child – who becomes an adult – to develop an intuitive sense of the natural world, to observe its rhythms and subtle and intricate interlinkings, to witness the relationship of the wind to the bugs to the birds to the foxes to the rabbits to the pollen to the grass heads to the leaves as they drop in autumn. They don’t see the old wombat hole overgrown with blackberries or the new burrow in the bank of a river.
They don’t observe how the beautiful Orchard Swallowtail butterfly is the adult of the exquisite, scented caterpillar eating most of the lemon tree’s leaves. They can’t connect that the prolifigation of Painted Lady butterflies is a direct result of the nettle plants that were left to self seed over winter.
They don’t realise that the answer to the mouse plague is to tolerate the snakes that come up from the nature reserve. They don’t observe to recognise that the snake is more scared of them than they are of it, and it’s more interested in the mice than the human. They don’t see the birds dying in their nests because of the poisoned mice now running from the homes where bait is used to attempt to control the plague.
If they don’t see this, they don’t get the chance to care. They don’t develop the memory of seeing a sickly bird crouching in its nest, eyes opening and closing slowly as it quietly waits for death to come; or watching a smooth, silky snake swallow a mouse hole before sliding away again; or seeing a fat, brown wombat’s bottom wiggle into the hole it is digging out from under it. Then, as an adult, the plight of the poisoned bird, or the decline of butterflies in a suburb dominated by artificial grass, is so separate from the person as to seem to not even matter to our existence – when this is far, far from the fact.
A child can quickly become attuned to the balance and imbalances of nature, if we just let them. The chance to sit back and observe nature in action can create children who are able to take stock, put pieces of a puzzle together, be quiet in their own thoughts and allow true creativity to arise – almost spontaneously from the rich hummus of thought that has been allowed to compost in a child’s heart and mind.
One book I read about this connection spoke of a child in a daycare centre who’s “special place” was sitting, hidden in the one bamboo copse in the corner of the daycare yard. Even in a citified surrounding the child naturally gravitates toward that copse. Not only that, but it was the “special place” of most of the children in that centre.
In this there is a clue that, building nature-care is as simple as including some wild places in our children’s lives, whether it’s the smallest plot of bamboo, a veggie garden, even a worm farm or a wind chime or an oval on which to watch the clouds. Bringing nature into our children’s lives should be at the forefront of any future-focussed person. Love and instinctive care of the natural world is where any sustainabile living needs to start if it is to be wholistic in scope and effective in practice.
Tulitha King 