As today's youth grow increasingly out of touch with the outdoors, programs strive to introduce the Chesapeake Bay to its future stewards

By Lara Lutz

Wayne McCollough teaches biology in Lock Haven, PA, near the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, a rural area with abundant forests and farmland. Each year, he spends about two weeks studying watershed science with his students. The study peaks with every ninth-grader—about 350 students—enjoying daylong field studies at their nearby “wonderful, underused nature center.”

There, students explore the living dimensions of classroom concepts such as water quality testing and wetlands ecology. But there are other first-time experiences as well.

“Some of these kids have never turned over a rock to catch crayfish or find stoneflies and mayflies,” McCollough said. “You’d think rural kids would be familiar with these things, but they aren’t. They spend a lot of time indoors with their computers and PlayStations.”

Many educators, like McCollough, increasingly find that today’s students are more removed from their local watersheds—and nature in general—than ever before. Not only have they stopped playing in streams, they are less likely to bait a hook, pitch a tent or undertake any other outdoor activity than previous generations.

“We’re seeing a population of people who weren’t necessarily exposed to the outdoors like those generations ago,” said Don Baugh, vice president for education at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “Across the decades, we have seen a growing need to connect students to nature—not re-connect, because they haven’t been connected in the first place.”

The Chesapeake Bay Program, with hopes of rearing a new generation of stewards and leaders for the Chesapeake and its watershed, has called for all students within the watershed to have a “meaningful” Bay or watershed experience by the time they graduate.

That goal may be more important, yet more elusive, than ever.

U.S. childhood has literally moved indoors, according to Richard Louv, author of a new book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.” The tongue-in-cheek title points to the unintended consequences of raising indoor children more familiar with plugged-in pastimes than a free-form romp in the creek.

Children are missing the many benefits of unhurried play in natural settings, writes Louv, author of seven books on family, nature and community, and a visiting scholar at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, as well as an adviser to both the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World program and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child.

Children who find joy in “natural” play quite often develop a deeper, lasting connection to the environment, along with a stewardship ethic that carries through to adulthood. Current trends are eroding these connections, Louv argues. As a result, the Bay watershed could find itself without the stewards, leaders and voters whose values are grounded in such experiences.

Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, said the Bay Program’s meaningful watershed experience initiative was driven by that concern.

“There was a clear recognition that the Bay restoration is a very long-term effort, and we need generations of people who understand the challenges and the solutions,” she said. “Getting out and seeing the Bay is a motivational force. Based on statistics we were looking at, it just wasn’t happening for most kids in the watershed.”

Less time outdoors, especially unstructured time, also robs children of more direct, developmental benefits.

Louv cites research demonstrating how outdoor experiences, both through free play and organized educational settings, build self-esteem, creativity and problem-solving skills.

In schools, environment-based education motivates learning in all subjects, and test scores go up.

Often, intimate experiences with nature help children to become calmer and more grounded. Spiritual awareness developed in these settings can serve children for a lifetime.

And, outdoor play is usually active play, which leads to healthier bodies.

Today’s children are increasingly without these opportunities. Louv writes that children are “so disconnected from nature that they either idealize it or associate it with fear.”

“We work with fabulous teachers who get the kids outside as much as they can, but it can be hard without third-party assistance,” Baugh said. “So we’re often on the front line, seeing kids make these kinds of connections for the first time.”

Luckily, the youth who encounter CBF education programs, or other field experiences in their own communities, have teachers or parents who encourage close encounters of the natural kind. Many are not so lucky.

Both the interest and opportunity for time outdoors are waning. Free time outdoors is even rarer.

Technology is one culprit in the shrinking outdoor universe, but not the only one. Louv believes that the United States has undergone a collective, generational break in its connection to the natural world. Parents are no longer leading the way for children.

“Baby boomers…may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water,” Louv writes. “Many of us now in our 40s or older knew farmland or forests at the suburban rim and had farm-family relatives…For today’s young people, that familiar and cultural linkage to farming is disappearing.”

Overcrowded schedules also reduce the amount of time both parents and children spend outside. According to the University of Michigan, the average school week has increased to 32.5 hours, 7 hours longer than 20 years ago. Children and teens are spending almost two hours less a week on sports and outdoor activities, and those activities often take place in organized sports leagues.

The National Sporting Goods Association found that more self-directed activities have declined. Bike riding has dropped more than 19 percent for U.S. youth since 1994. Fishing has fallen by more than 10 percent for elementary-age children and more than 26 percent for teens. Camping and park visits have taken a notable hit, with parks often experienced as “windshield tours”—scenery viewed from the car, rather than explored on foot.

New technologies also add to sedentary, indoor time. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that most school-age children play video games for 20-32 minutes a day. Teens typically use the Internet for 45 minutes a day, tending toward one to five hours a day for older teens. This is in addition to the 14 hours a week that the average child spends watching television.

While rural children, like those in McCollough’s classes, spend less time in the landscape, others simply lack places to go, especially on a regular basis. Urban neighborhoods are in desperate need of natural areas, including those that can be used for play. In more suburban areas, liability concerns often steer communities away from outdoor play areas. Where they exist, carefully designed play equipment provides clean, safe boundaries. This puts many minds at ease, but Louv still finds things out of balance. Fewer opportunities exist for kids to explore meadows, streams, and trees—and less chance to discover the joy that comes with it.

Louv also points to another factor at work: fear. Many parents don’t believe their children are safe in the outdoors. They fear crime, disease from ticks and mosquitoes, sun exposure, air pollution and any number of potential accidents. Louv notes that some California Girl Scout camps don’t even allow scouts to climb trees.

Back in the Bay watershed, “Many parents want to know who is watching their kids—the gate, the security alarm, and so forth,” said Steve Heacock of the Hashawha Environmental Center in Carroll County, MD. He meets regularly with parents of students who will spend a week at Hashawha for environmental studies. “They ask about cleanliness and food allergies, poison ivy and Lyme disease. It’s important to have answers for those questions.”

More than ever, building meaningful connections to the Chesapeake Bay means first helping children find meaningful connections to their own backyards. That, according to many leading educators in the Bay watershed, is where the work starts.

High school teacher Alan Hammond knows this first-hand. Hammond received the 2005 Teacher of the Year award from the Chesapeake Bay Trust and teaches in Cumberland, an industrial riverfront town nestled in western Maryland mountains, far from the Bay. The area is known for dense forests, rolling farmland and trout streams. Hammond sees a disconnect with nature here, too, even though students have an expanse of resources at their feet.

“Kids don’t get off the concrete much, and their parents don’t either,” he said.

In 1992, Hammond launched an environmental science program that has become the most popular course in the school. It begins, he said, by “starting where we are.”

“The whole program is based on the watershed concept, but we have to start where we are, with local stream and flow patterns,” Hammond said.

His students map local watersheds and explore them on foot. Their map grows, following feeder streams to the Potomac River and then to the Chesapeake Bay.

Hammond also engages students in hands-on projects that promote the health of the Bay watershed. They collect acorns that the state nursery grows into seedlings for streamside forest buffers. They spend three days canoeing a nearby lake, testing water quality and planting trees along the shores. They also join in other local restoration projects as needs and opportunities arise.

In the spring, Hammond takes about 25 students to an island in the Bay. Spring 2005 marked his 15th trip.

“All of these projects are to develop stewards,” Hammond said. “The content is there, but it’s the hands-on stuff that achieves it—the trips and the projects. Kids come back to me after graduation, and it’s the first thing they talk about. They want to know if we’re still doing the trips, and if we need any chaperones.”

Some of Hammond’s students have become involved with community environmental issues outside of school. Alumni include science teachers, forestry professionals, a Washington lobbyist and a doctoral student in environmental science.

Fred Wilson, who teaches at the Huntingdon Area Middle School in central Pennsylvania, also finds that environment-based education inspires local citizenship, especially when it is integrated with other subjects.

Wilson has developed a team-teaching curriculum that integrates environmental studies with math, language arts and social studies. His students have applied their learning through many ambitious restoration projects, including one that secured a quarter-million-dollar grant to repair a local sewage problem, and a stream assessment that won a Presidential Environmental Youth Award in 2001.

“Where the environment is connected to other disciplines and communities, the kids are really responding,” Wilson said. “They see a connection to the Bay, but they don’t do it so much because of the Bay. They do it because they want to give back to their community.”

Increasingly, experiences that build meaningful connections to the outdoors come by way of programs like these, through schools and nature centers. Despite the worrisome cultural backdrop, Louv said these are far from false antidotes.

“These kinds of programs are extraordinarily important,” Louv said. “We have a generation of young parents coming up who didn’t have much experience in nature at all. It will take institutions to help rebuild the connections.”

Within those institutions, leaders are needed to create, deliver and promote excellence in environment-based education.

“Environmental educators are on the front lines,” Louv said. “Supporting these programs will be a stretch unless we can communicate how important they are, both for behavioral changes and academic improvements.”

Louv also challenges teachers and parents to take measure of the joy in children’s outdoor experiences and to avoid heavy messages of environmental doom.

“How much fun are they having?” he asked. “Are they really getting their hands dirty and their feet wet? Can we give them the kind of joy that comes from immersion in nature?”

Fortunately, some educators in the Bay watershed find that joy and learning come hand in hand.

“They say to me, ‘This is so much better than being in school!’” said teacher Bill Bechtel of the students from Selinsgrove, PA, whom he takes onto the Susquehanna River. He says that living in a riverside town helps to open students’ eyes—but only after he gets them in boats.

“The river really helps, but you’d be surprised how many people here have never been in it,” Bechtel said.

His students map the path of rainwater from their houses to the Bay. A Bay-themed holiday party, featuring crabs and steamed oysters, “stinks up the whole science wing.” In the spring, every student completes a personal Chesapeake Bay Action Project of their choice. This task has generated such projects as stream cleanups, bluebird houses and stream assessments. Two boys floated a local creek into the Susquehanna and mapped the places where farm animals have direct access to the stream.

“What really helps is getting outside,” Bechtel said. “We’re fooling ourselves if we think kids are going to remember the worksheets we do on watersheds, but if we take them out on a canoe, they’re going to remember that the rest of their life.”

At one time, awakening “upstream” communities to their downstream connections appeared to be one of the most vital and challenging jobs in restoring the Chesapeake Bay.

Today, Bay advocates face a related but more insidious challenge: restoring joyful connections between all children and nature. The next generation of Bay stewards may depend on it.

“Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” by Richard Louv, is published by Algonquin Books and is available through most booksellers or through on-line sellers via www.algonquin.com .

Lara Lutz is a writer and editor who lives on the South River in Mayo, MD.

Reprinted With Permission from Chesapeake Bay Journal, October 2005 Issue.

10/7/2005