CHILDREN LEARN BY EXAMPLE. THEY WATCH PARENTS AND QUICKLY pick up attitudes from their actions. In spite of the vast expanse of wilderness in this country, most Canadian children grow up in urban settings. In other words, they live in a world conceived, shaped, and dominated by people. Even the farms located around cities and towns are carefully groomed and landscaped for human convenience. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but in such an environment, it’s very easy to lose any sense of connection with nature.
In city apartments and dwellings, the presence of cockroaches, fleas, ants, mosquitoes, or houseflies is guaranteed to result in the spraying of insecticides. Mice and rats are poisoned or trapped, and the gardener wages a never-ending struggle with ragweed, dandelions, slugs, and root rot. We have a modern arsenal of chemical weapons to fight off invaders, and we use them lavishly.
We worry when kids roll in the mud or wade through a puddle because they’ll get “dirty.” Children learn attitudes and values quickly, and the lesson in cities is clear—nature is an enemy; it’s dirty, dangerous, or disgusting. So youngsters begin to wall themselves from nature and to try to control it. I am astonished at the number of adults who loathe or are terrified by snakes, spiders, butterflies, worms, birds—the list seems endless.
Yet for 99 percent of our species’ existence on the planet, we were respectful of and dependent on nature. When plants and animals were plentiful, we flourished. When famine and drought struck, our numbers fell accordingly. We remain every bit as dependent today; we need plants to fix photons of energy into sugar molecules and to cleanse the air and replenish the oxygen. It is folly to forget our dependence on an intact ecosystem, but we do so whenever we teach our offspring to fear or detest the natural world. The message urban kids get runs completely counter to what they are born with, a natural interest in other life-forms. Just watch a child in a first encounter with a flower or an ant—there is instant interest and fascination. We condition them out of it.
I see it when my ten-year-old daughter brings home new friends and they recoil in fear or disgust as she tries to show them her favorite pets— three beautiful salamanders. And when my six-year-old comes wandering in with her treasures—millipedes, spiders, slugs, and sowbugs that she catches under rocks lining the front lawn—children and adults alike usually respond by saying, “Yuck.”
I can’t overemphasize the tragedy of that attitude. For inherent in this view is the assumption that human beings are special and different and that we exist outside nature. Yet it is this belief that is creating many of our environmental problems today.
As long as we have cities and technology, does it matter whether we sense our place in nature? Yes, for many reasons, not the least of which is that virtually all scientists were fascinated with nature as children and retained that curiosity throughout their lives. But a far more important reason is that if we retain a spiritual sense of connection with all other life-forms, it can’t help but profoundly affect the way we act. The yodel of a loon at sunset, the vast flocks of migrating waterfowl in the fall, the indomitable salmon returning thousands of kilometers—these phenomena of nature have inspired us to create music, poetry, and art. And when we struggle to retain a handful of California condors or whooping cranes, it’s clearly not from a fear of ecological collapse, it’s because there is something obscene and frightening about the disappearance of another species at our hands.
If children grow up understanding that we are animals, they will look at other species with a sense of fellowship and community. If they understand their ecological place, the biosphere, then when children see the great old-growth forests of British Columbia or the Amazon being clear-cut, they will feel physical pain because they will understand that those trees are an extension of themselves.
When children know their place in the ecosystem and see factories spewing poison into the air, water, and soil, they will feel ill because someone has violated their home. This is not mystical mumbo-jumbo. We have poisoned the life-support systems that sustain all organisms because we have lost a sense of ecological place. Those of us who are parents have to realize the unspoken, negative lessons we are conveying to our children. Otherwise, they will continue to desecrate this planet as we have.
It’s not easy to avoid giving hidden lessons. I have struggled to cover my dismay and queasiness when Severn and Sarika appear holding a large spider or when we’ve emerged from a ditch covered with leeches or when they have been stung accidentally by yellow jackets feeding on our leftovers. But that’s nature. I believe efforts to teach children to love and respect other life-forms are priceless