If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it. . . . You are what you do, not what you say. What you do makes me cry at night. . . . Please make your actions reflect your words.
— SEVERN SUZUKI
When she was nine years old, Severn Suzuki started the Environmental Children’s Organization (ECO), and when Severn was twelve, she and two other young members of ECO paid their own way to attend the United Nation’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While there, Severn gave a speech at the close of a plenary session, in which she asked the attendees: “Who do we think we are?” As the quote that opens this chapter shows, she challenged world leaders to do more than talk and debate. She urged them to act, and act now, and act in ways that we know will help animals and ecosystems, not continue to destroy them.
Whenever I watch this speech, tears of joy and deep concern come to my eyes. And I feel a huge surge of inspiration. How lucky we are to have passionate youngsters caring about the future of our planet. Youngsters are card-carrying “biophiliacs” who have an inherent love of life. They are intuitive, curious naturalists and sponges for knowledge. They are also our future leaders on whose spirit and goodwill we and the entire world will depend. It is vital that we teach children well — that we infuse their education with kindness and compassion and a deep immersion in nature, so that they do not grow up “unwild” and so their decisions are founded on a deeply rooted, reflexive caring ethic.
Severn Suzuki was right on the mark. She had reason to be upset and angry. For too long we have acted with no concern for future generations, who will inherit the innumerable environmental messes we leave behind. As Jane Goodall puts it, we are stealing the future of our children by wantonly decimating our planet today. Further, our education system itself needs to be rewilded, since the cumulative effects of technology, media, and our cultural alienation from nature negatively impact children just as much as nonhuman animals.
For instance, in March 2013, Valerie Belt, an animal activist and a grade-school teacher in Los Angeles, sent me an email about an experience she had in the classroom. She gave her students subtraction story problems that used animals as examples, and she asked the students to draw a picture to illustrate each problem. “For example,” she wrote, “rabbits on the grass in the forest, lobsters on the ocean floor, or killer whales swimming in a pod in the ocean. When I said this, one kinder student commented about the killer whales in the ocean: ‘I thought you could only find them at SeaWorld.’”
This story startled and profoundly disturbed me. It drove home that we can’t assume children automatically know even basic facts about nature and animals. We have to teach them, and we have to be role models. We have to create a world in which humane care and awareness of nature are givens. In fact, it shouldn’t be surprising at all that if youngsters don’t spend time in nature, and aren’t taught about the natural world, that they will suffer and remain ignorant. This chapter, then, looks at the negative impact of unwilding on children, at how to improve humane education, and at the need for more research in conservation psychology, so we understand our relationship to nature better.
Kids are a deep source of energy and inspiration, and I work with them every chance I get, such as with Jane Goodall’s global Roots & Shoots program. Clearly, youngsters connect easily with animals, and the compassion they show gives me hope for the future. In March 2011, I gave a talk in Idaho Springs, Colorado, about the emotional lives of animals. After my talk, there were many questions from both kids and adults about the fascinating lives of animals and deep concern about how we mistreat so many of them for our own ends. Just as I was wrapping things up and saying, “Thank you for coming,” a small boy in the back started waved his hand wildly. People were getting up to leave, but I asked them to stay for a minute so that I could answer his question. The boy stood, said his name was Luke, and very proudly and boldly asked: “Why can’t we just leave them alone?” Just about everyone in the audience applauded his courage to stand up and be heard. Afterward, I walked out with him and his parents, and I was really impressed with his commitment to save animals. Luke’s question summarized what it took me a whole book to articulate in The Animal Manifesto — namely, that if animals could talk, they would say to us, “Treat us better or leave us alone.” Kids get rewilding naturally, but it’s up to us to rewild the world in which they live and learn.
In 2005, Richard Louv coined the term “nature-deficit disorder” in his book Last Child in the Woods. Since then, the idea has caught on in both scientific and popular media. To me, nature-deficit disorder clearly includes what I call animal-deficit disorder. When youngsters and adults fail to get out into nature, they not only lose contact with landscapes and nature but also with the animals who live there.
Not everyone likes these terms, but I do not know anyone who would disagree that kids need to get off their butts and play outside more for their own physical and mental health. Numerous researchers and psychologists have traced how our childhood interactions with nature and animals influence our development, in positive and negative ways; for instance, see The Human Relationship with Nature by Peter Kahn Jr. Why the Wild Things Are by Gail Melson, and The Significance of Children and Animals by O. E. (Gene) Myers. Today, it’s a plain fact that kids experience nature less and less. In 2010 it was reported that kids in the United States spend an average of eight hours a day watching television, surfing the Internet, playing video games, and consuming media, and few parents place any rules on how much time their children spend on these activities. In March 2012, the BBC reported that children in the United Kingdom are “losing contact with nature at a ‘dramatic’ rate, and their health and education are suffering.” The renowned Swiss naturalist and educator Louis Agassiz once famously said: “Study nature, not books.” I agree.
Childhood has changed the world over, becoming more sedentary and less wild, and not just because of the rise of media and communications technology. In July 2011, I had the pleasure of attending an incredible international meeting in Wales called “Playing Into the Future — Surviving and Thriving.” Around 450 delegates from fifty-five nations spoke on the importance of play and why it’s decreasing or sometimes altogether missing in children’s lives. One point I made is that today there simply are far too many of us; higher population densities lead to reduced play among nonhuman animals, particularly where resources like food and shelter are limited, and the same dynamic occurs with us. Others noted that seriously ill children often don’t play because they can’t or because mothers or caregivers may stop them to conserve their energy. Many parents and families can’t afford time to play because the children must work, or families curtail play because there aren’t any convenient, safe places outside the home to go. These issues obviously affect poor neighborhoods and countries, but affluent neighborhoods and areas also suffer from less free play outdoors.
A recent survey of children’s books provided another indication of this ongoing “unwilding” trend. After looking at 8,100 images in 296 award-winning children’s books published between 1938 and 2008, researchers charted a clear decline in the representation of nature and animals. Over this seventy-year period, it was found that the primary environments changed dramatically. Built environments grew from about a third to over half of the images in that period, while natural environments declined from about 40 percent of the images to roughly 25 percent. This same decline was true for images of wild animals and domestic animals, leading one survey author, Al Williams of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, to write: “The natural environment and wild animals have all but disappeared in these books.”
All of these findings are bad news in many ways. As I noted earlier, unwilding translates into less concern about the environment and a lack of connection with nature. Whether this amounts to a bona fide “disorder” is debatable. As many have pointed out, the term “nature-deficit disorder” is descriptive, as are my terms “unwilding” and “rewilding”; they are metaphors, not a diagnosis or accepted medical condition. As Wendy Russell, a senior lecturer in play at the University of Gloucestershire, notes, the interrelated issues of nature, play, technology, and health are complex. She writes:
The binary opposition of nature and technology, outdoor and indoor, is a false one and is leading to an oversimplification of the issues at stake. This was summed up beautifully by one of our postgrad students posting online a photo of his teenage son and friends, up a tree, on their iPhones. Online, for some children and young people, is the only space they can find that is relatively adult-free; perhaps the message from this is less that we should be taking children outside to do adult-supervised worthy play activities and more that we should think seriously about how the public realm is organised in such a way that children won’t or can’t play there without adult supervision. We need to stop trying to organise children’s play and start thinking about the conditions that support it.
In a similar vein, Joe Zammit-Lucia wrote to me: “I am also concerned by the construction of terms such as ‘nature-deficit disorder,’ as this implies some sort of ailment/maladjustment. Is this really the case or is it just a function of a changing world? Is it merely the equivalent of saying that I have paper-and-pencil-deficit disorder because I do all my writing on a computer? A friend of mine relates a story where a father took his teenage daughter on a long and ‘wonderful’ hike ending in a spectacular waterfall. On arrival, the daughter’s reaction was, ‘Dad, is this why you made me walk all this way? If I wanted to see a f***ing waterfall, I could just have gone to the mall!’”
There are many ways to react to this story. One is to respect and honor the resilience of children. They can adapt and thrive despite immense challenges and despite our worries that they won’t. Many seem to find their own way, and it may be different from previous generations’. I guess that’s what they mean by a generation gap. But the story also illustrates just the sort of disconnection from nature rewilding seeks to heal. Nature is not a fad that goes out of fashion, nor is it an “old technology” that has or will become obsolete, the way rotary phones and typewriters are now museum pieces. In fact, nature is the original; it’s what mall fountains are imitating.
If children lack an appreciation for being in nature, if falling water is all the same no matter where it happens, then that represents our collective failure as a culture and a society. We need to figure out how to foster a love of nature and other animals so that every generation sees this connection as precious and vital and worth nurturing. We must be inspirational role models. There is no doubt that kids do indeed suffer when they don’t spend time outdoors and interact with other animals. Unwilding affects them. As Richard Louv notes, “Nature experience isn’t a panacea, but it does help children and the rest of us on many levels of health and cognition. I believe that as parents learn more about the disconnect, they’ll want to seek more of that experience for their children, including the joy and wonder that nature has traditionally contributed to children’s literature.”
Better a broken bone than a broken spirit.
— PLAY WALES
There are many reasons why children need to play, just as young animals need to play. We need free-ranging kids. They must be allowed to get dirty, to learn to take risks, and to negotiate social relationships that might be complicated, unexpected, and unpredictable. I love the slogan of Play Wales, a Welsh charity promoting children’s play, “Better a broken bone than a broken spirit,” attributed to Lady Allen of Hurtwood. We should all embrace it with all our heart.
And we should all embrace the notions of “wild play” and “green play.” Can we ever play too much? I don’t think so, or at least I don’t see it as a significant worry. Play embodies rewilding on so many levels. It’s the simplest and most natural thing to do.
Mark Hoelterhoff, a psychologist at the University of Cumbria, has written about the importance of “green play” for mental health. He notes that playing outside reduces the symptoms of ADHD better than playing indoors and that playing outside is good for developing self-discipline. Hoelterhoff states it concisely and correctly, “Nature and children are natural playmates — they’re both wild and messy, unpredictable and beautiful. Kids just don’t play out like they used to.” Psychologist Susan Linn notes, “Time in green space is essential to children’s mental and physical health. . . . And the health of the planet depends on a generation of children who love and respect the natural world enough to protect it from abuse and degradation.”
Further, a study published in Conservation in 2012 showed that “spending time in nature without computers, phones, and other electronic devices makes people more creative.” It is still not known if the “cognitive advantage” or “creative bump” was due to increased exposure to nature, decreased use of technology, or other factors. However, because an increased exposure to nature and decreased use of technology usually go hand in hand, the authors write, “They may be considered to be different sides of the same coin.”
Separate from developing a connection to nature, social play is extremely important in and of itself. Since I have studied social play behavior in various animals, particularly dogs, wolves, and coyotes, teachers and child psychologists occasionally ask me, “What can we learn from the way in which animals play that will help us gain a better understanding of human play?” Spontaneous social play is indeed critical, and many people are rightfully concerned that it is happening less and less among today’s youngsters. The study of play behavior in animals tells us a lot about what human children need. Basically, the range of benefits includes social development and socialization, physical exercise, cognitive development, and also learning the social skills of fairness, cooperation, and moral behavior (or what my colleague Jessica Pierce and I have called “wild justice”). Play behavior in animals mimics aggression and competition, but in fact play is defined by displays of cooperation, empathy, and compassion. For example, the basic rules for fair play in animals are as follows: ask first, be honest, follow the rules, and admit you’re wrong. When the rules of play are violated between animals, and when fairness breaks down, so too does play.
Obviously, this dynamic applies to humans. Kids learn these same rules and lessons when they play. In fact, play researcher and scholar Bob Hughes feels that play has had an evolutionary benefit. Hughes coined the term evolutionary playwork (in his book of the same name) “to reemphasise that the growing body of scientific evidence confirming a direct relationship between play, evolution, and brain growth, demonstrated that playwork should never have been viewed either as a social engineering, a socialising or citizenship tool, but rather as comprehensive support for deep biological processes — expressed through mechanisms like adaptation, flexibility, calibration, and the different play types — that enabled the human organism to withstand the pressures of extinction.” Thus, Hughes writes, “playwork was about helping the species to survive extinction and adapt to change, by ensuring that wild adult-free play in diverse environments was still a choice for its children.”
Play is essential for the psychological well-being of the child, and not just any type of play, but social activities that are unscheduled, unplanned, and unmanaged by adults. As an evolutionary biologist, I see Hughes arguing that play is vital to thriving, surviving, and reproducing. In evaluating the effectiveness of various types of play, Hughes lists what he calls “bio-outcomes.” Bio-outcomes include “an increase in brain size and organisation, an increased ability to roll with the punches, improvements in resilience and optimism, greater mental flexibility in problem solving, the development of cortical maps, and an increase in successful adaptive strategies.”
Hughes is very clear about the type of play that doesn’t work: “If the activity is bounded by adult rules, if it is stiff, formalised, and dominated by the need to score points and flatter one’s ego; that is not play, it is something else.” Play contains risk. Echoing Play Wales, Hughes notes, “Play, like life, is not safe, and if it is, it is not play,” which is why “a broken arm now might save a life later.” In my studies of animals, I always like to say that play is fun but it’s also very serious business.
I agree with Hughes, and I love the way he puts the issues. Practicing with “small” risks is how we learn and polish our survival skills. Along these lines, I would add that play is training for the unexpected. In earlier research, my colleagues Marek Spinka, Ruth Newberry, and I have proposed that play functions to increase the versatility of movements and the ability to recover from sudden shocks, such as the loss of balance and falling over. It enhances the ability of animals to cope emotionally with unexpected stressful situations. To “train for the unexpected,” animals actively seek and create unanticipated situations in play and actively put themselves into disadvantageous positions and situations.
Near the end of his book, Hughes writes, “So my wild playing child, as a representation of everything human that has gone before, is as ancient and ageless as the land; the wise sage and the awestruck newcomer; the timeless survivor and the passionate explorer.” Oh how true this is! Unsupervised social play in nature is not just what the doctor ordered, it’s an expression of our evolutionary heritage in which we develop the very attributes of empathy and compassion we most need today.
A significant part of rewilding our society involves focusing on future generations and rewilding education. How we educate children about nature, nonhuman animals, and our shared home needs to change. As my colleague A. G. Rud says, we may need to “unschool” youngsters, since too often “school” means sitting at a desk indoors, reading and repeating facts, taking written tests, and worrying about grades and status. Rewilding education means learning about nature firsthand — while outside — and it would involve meaningful play, in which who you are and what you do are as important as what you know.
Today, much of this falls under the umbrella of what’s called “humane education,” which often incorporates conservation education. Humane education focuses on teaching moral intelligence and reverence for all life, following the significant contributions and suggestions of Albert Schweitzer. It strongly encourages coexistence, compassion, and peaceful relationships among all beings. It also focuses on the learning environment and seeks to foster curiosity over rote learning, as well as social intelligence and respect for others. I would add that rewilding education would also mean a greater focus on animal studies and, in the field of anthrozoology, the study of human-animal relationships.
In 1996, Howard Gardner, the champion of the notion of multiple intelligences, added “naturalistic intelligence” to his original list of seven intelligences as one of the main types of intelligence all people, to one degree or another, possess. According to writer and educator Kendra Cherry, Gardner has suggested that “individuals who are high in this type of intelligence are more in tune with nature and are often interested in nurturing, exploring the environment, and learning about other species.” Everyone, however, learns through nature to some degree, and Gardner’s theory makes a compelling case that schools should use time in nature as a teaching tool and environment. Some children will be best served in this way, and all will have their learning enhanced.
In other words, playing outside at recess is not enough. We need to guide students to have direct, intimate experiences with nature and other animals — those deeply emotional “aha” moments that Joanne Vining and Melinda Merrick call “environmental epiphanies.” Schools must incorporate “nature time” into the curriculum as part of the main school day. This can take the form of gardens, nature walks, reading outside, and youngsters telling stories about their experiences with animals and the outdoors. Two good books that can help are Companions in Wonder, edited by Julie Dunlap and Stephen Kellert, and A Kids’ Guide to Protecting & Caring for Animals, by Cathryn Berger Kaye.
Another compelling reason to teach children to value other animals, so they do not think nonhuman animals are “less” than us, is that recent research shows that our attitudes about animals influence how we feel about humans. Brock University psychologists Gordon Hodson and Kimberly Costello have discovered that when children think animals are of lesser value than humans, this feeling of human superiority can lead to racial prejudice and other forms of discrimination. This includes dehumanizing attitudes against individuals of what are called “outgroups,” including immigrants. This dehumanization predicts prejudice in adults. Valuing animals, then, is a win-win situation for all.
Examples of what it means to rewild education are everywhere. For fifteen years, I have taught a course at the Boulder County Jail that offers an opportunity for the inmates to begin to rewild with nature. We have frequent discussions about human-animal relationships and what the men would like to do when they get out. I know these discussions have made a difference because some of my former students have told me so: The course changed how they view and value nature. Similarly, the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Washington, has a composting program that also gets inmates to reconnect with nature and learn about science. As one former prisoner said, “I went into prison and came out a scientist.” We can also help to rehabilitate and rewild troubled youths and at-risk kids in programs such as those offered by Big City Mountaineers.
Ultimately, for me, rewilding education has three main goals, whatever shape it takes:
• Gaining knowledge about our interrelationships with animals puts our own impacts in perspective. Learning about who animals are and the threats to their existence helps us see the consequences of human actions and society.
• Learning about nonhuman animals drives home how much we depend on them and the vital role they play in our daily lives. Coexisting with and caring for other animals is a necessity. Knowing about how their well-being and ours are closely tied together will help guide our decisions so we foster respect and coexistence.
• As children learn how sentient, intelligent, and even moral many animals are, they will naturally want to treat them better and more compassionately, for the animals’ own sake. This moral imperative to be compassionate to others is certainly central to human social development, and it can be expressed and experienced very directly with animals.
These are practical, positive benefits of rewilding education and learning more about nature and the human-animal bond, and they make some the most urgent reasons for developing humane education programs.
When Psychology Today readers question what my animal columns have to do with human psychology, I have two answers. One is to remind people that humans are also animals. The hearts and minds of other animals relate to us, and understanding nonhuman animals improves our understanding of how the hearts and minds of humans evolved and developed. But also, and more to the point, what we know, think, feel, and believe about animals, and the way that we treat them, tells us lots about human psychology.
As I often say, it is rarely a lack of knowledge and concrete data that result in the harm we cause to animals and ecosystems. Rather, losses to biodiversity are typically due to the inability of humans to come to terms with the notion of biodiversity or to understand their place in the ecology of Earth. Inadequate protection of the animals in our care is typically the result of human indifference and arrogance, to the belief that humans are superior and that other animals don’t understand or deserve better treatment. Therefore, it is critical to address the important psychological, social, and cultural issues that support our poor stewardship of animals and their habitats and to take down the psychological barriers that prevent people from facing and addressing these complex, frustrating, and urgent human-induced problems. It is going to take a wide-ranging social movement to get us out of the incredible messes for which we are responsible.
This is the focus of the new and emerging field of conservation psychology, which includes conservation social work. Conservation psychology is defined as “the scientific study of the reciprocal relationships between humans and the rest of nature, with a particular focus on how to encourage conservation of the natural world.” This is the “human dimension,” and it includes why and how humans do some of the unconscionable and destructive things we do, as well as the constructive and positive actions we take. Why, for example, do people override their feelings of biophilia? Why do humans break appropriate regulations and laws to harm nature? What leads some people to develop particularly deep and compassionate connections to nature, and how can we inspire this in everyone?
In many ways, conservation psychology is the scientific face of what I mean by rewilding. A summary of research in this field can be found in Susan Clayton and Gene Myers’s outstanding book called Conservation Psychology: Understanding and Promoting Human Care for Nature and Susan Clayton’s The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology. Changing our attitudes and beliefs about other animals really is a social movement, and Nick Cooney’s book Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us about Spreading Social Change also shows how our beliefs inform our actions. For those who want more, Thomas Ryan’s Animals and Social Work: A Moral Introduction is also an excellent book. If rewilding is to develop into a wider social movement, the ideas and lessons of conservation psychology will guide it.
Of course, people choose to harm nature for a wide variety of reasons, some of which have to do with personal survival, not a lack of compassion. Plus, the usual collection of selfish motivations and differences can lead people to devalue animals and nature: financial gain, professional status, laziness, willful ignorance about the damage we cause, genuine disagreements about the extent of the threats facing us, and so on. At the local level, laws are often broken because there is a complete lack of awareness of existing regulations. When communities are impoverished, and survival leaves them no choice but to value their own welfare over their ecosystem’s, then social justice goes hand in hand with ecological welfare.
We must discuss the loss of animal species directly and openly as part of our wider discussions of social justice, human welfare, and ecological damage. We must face how human attitudes about nature and animals are a major influence. People may disagree about the exact extent of human impacts on species declines and extinctions, but the facts show clearly that those impacts are real. And there are many more losses than those to which we pay attention. Melanie Challenger rightly points out in her book On Extinction that we are not only losing species. Languages, cultures, and ways of life are disappearing as well. We have really made some huge messes.
So, what do we need to do? We need an inclusive and cohesive social movement that attracts the attention and hearts of academics and experts across all disciplines —— biologists, ethologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, philosophers, historians, lawyers, artists, writers, and more. Everyone can make a difference in their own area and across spheres, and these spheres support one another. On the one hand, getting animal issues on political agendas is critical for reaching a wide public audience, but widespread public attention and concern is also one effective way to inspire politicians to act. (For more on animal and conservation politics, see recent books by David Meyer, David Johns, Denise Russell, and Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka.)
A developing field of study called conservation social work at the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver can also play a large role in helping to smooth and improve our interactions with other animals. Social workers typically do not focus directly on nonhuman animals in their work, but by expanding their work to focus on the well-being of all family members, human and nonhuman, they can play a large part in the rewilding social movement. In Animals and Social Work, Thomas Ryan sums this up nicely: “This dependency [of animals on their human companions] demands human responsibility for their welfare and well-being. . . . Social workers have a special responsibility to the weak and vulnerable of all species; once it is acknowledged that animals are part and parcel of the moral fabric, the sooner we shall come to see that we have duties and obligations that extend beyond the confines of our own species. Indeed social workers of a century hence may well come to view with incredulity the fact that their predecessors ever failed to extend respect to sentient creatures, or chose to remain morally indifferent to their plight.”
The notion of rewilding clearly is a great meeting place, a unifying concept with a broad agenda that can really have a significant social impact if we allow it to. We need to move ahead with less hubris and more — much more — humility and recognize just how powerful we are and how our well-being is closely tied into the well-being of other species and our planet as a whole. Rewilding will have effects at different scales, but we really do hold the future of the planet in our hearts, heads, hands, and tools. We are the only species that can really change things for the better. We are that powerful, and in that sense, we are that exceptional.