The Nature Imperative

With all the talk about “Nature-deficit Disorder,” screen-tethered youngsters, and glazed-eyed teens, parents and teachers are fully aware that children today are more cut off than ever from the sights, sounds, and smells of the natural world. Omnipresent screens lure children and grownups alike away from the real world in favor of the virtual. At the same time, wild areas to explore are rapidly disappearing. When undeveloped woods, rivers, or hills do exist nearby, worried parents often label them “no go” zones, restricting further their children’s access to wild places.

At the same time, we are increasingly aware of pressing environmental issues that threaten the delicate ecological balance of our planet. Shrinking wilderness concerns us. Species threat and even extinction, hastened by habitat loss, remain a crisis. It’s evident that today’s children are tomorrow’s stewards of this fragile planet. We want them to care about wild places and the life within them. We need them to care. Yet, children’s access to nature continues to narrow.

The good news is that children are developing a moral code—we might call it a “nature imperative”-- that expresses youthful concern about and commitment to conservation, habitat protection, and other ecological issues. The emerging research reveals such a moral code unfolding among urban as well as rural children, in developing as well as highly industrialized countries. Even young children, in the preschool years, value nature, care about animal welfare and want to protect the environment. For example, in studies led by Prof. Peter Kahn, Jr., at the University of Washington, over 90% of seven and ten year olds interviewed felt it was an important value to protect natural settings and their species. Moreover, when pressed to explain why this was important, children revealed sophisticated reasoning. Many children used what Kahn calls “biocentric” reasoning, which attributes to the natural world moral claims apart from those of humans. An example of this might be the following explanation: “It’s bad for a species to become extinct, because those animals are living beings and deserve to live.” Kahn also found another type of reasoning, which he calls “anthropocentric” reasoning. This too is a value stance in favor of environmental protection, but its justification rests on human welfare alone. An example of this kind of reasoning is the following: “Polluting water is bad because then the water is not safe for people to drink.”

Kahn found both types of reasoning among children interviewed about ecological concerns, such as species extinction. However, anthropocentric reasoning was more prevalent among seven year olds than among older children. By age ten, it appears that children are more and more expressing how they value nature for its own sake. It’s important to note that both types of reasoning justify environmental protection. Biocentric reasoning, however, underlies a more robust ecological stance. For those children (and adults) who think biocentrically, even when humans don’t benefit from some aspect of nature protection, and even might incur some costs, it remains an important value. This is the heart of the “nature imperative.”

Now we know that children are not indifferent to environmental threats around them. They do care. Can their concern be mobilized into action? Children need pint-sized ways to feel that they are doing something to make their world better. They want to align their values with their actions. School and community gardens, family and school recycling programs, curricula centered on local ecology—all build information and skill onto the foundation that the Nature Imperative establishes.

Parents can do more to connect their children with nature. Grownups, after all, are the ones to demand accessible wild places. Leaving a patch of woods undisturbed within a housing development brings a small but rich ecosystem of plants and animals within easy reach.

Adults have much to learn from the Nature Imperative that children express. Too many policymakers are indifferent to environmental threats, arguing (incorrectly) that protecting habitats and species costs jobs and hurts the economy. Even when influential stakeholders lobby for environmental protection, they do so largely using anthropocentric reasoning. They argue that our human wellbeing is threatened by climate change; so we need to take action. The biocentric idea that wild places and wild species have a right to exist and prosper, regardless of impact on humans, is too seldom heard. Let’s listen to our children and make their Nature Imperative ours as well.

Source: pinterest.com