Brendon M. H. Larson, Bob Fischer, Susan Clayton

Abstract

  1. To most conservationists and many parents, it seems obvious that it is a good thing to teach children to value the natural world. Not only does connection with nature support their development and well-being, but it also supports ongoing efforts by humans to sustain the natural world.
  2. However, there are incontrovertible trends towards a diminution of the state of nature as a consequence of human activities.
  3. In this context, as a thought experiment, we address a rather grim question: Should we still encourage children to be connected to nature, to care for it and be concerned about it?
  4. We first consider the meaning of connection to nature in the Anthropocene, and then turn to a consideration of several ethical dimensions of this problem, including the potential trade-off between well-known health benefits of time in nature and the long-term psychological impacts of loss of nature (e.g., ecological grief and solastalgia).
  5. While there is no simple answer to our question, our analysis does highlight underappreciated ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene as well as the value of the local, urban forms of nature to which children around the world are increasingly exposed and engaging with in unprecedented ways.

A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

The end of nature probably also makes us reluctant to attach ourselves to its remnants, for the same reason that we usually don’t choose friends from among the terminally ill. I love the mountain outside my back door … But I know that some part of me resists getting to know it better—for fear, weak-kneed as it sounds, of getting hurt. … There is no future in loving nature (McKibben, 1989).

1 INTRODUCTION

On an evening in early spring, one of us (BL) brought his 5-year-old son to see two species of mole salamanders crossing a small road to travel from a woodland, where they overwinter underground, to a breeding pond. It was cool and rainy, so the conditions were salutary for salamanders, and father and son observed about 30 of them make their way. From our perspective as environmentalists and parents, this scene is a positive one because a member of the next generation was learning to value living beings and the natural world. At one point in the evening, however, upon finding a dead salamander that had been crushed by a car, the child broke down in tears. We cannot help but wonder whether his sorrow was outweighed by the benefits of this excursion, by the pleasures and wonder of a first-hand connection with these beautiful creatures (see Carson, 1998).

Our aim here is to pose a related question, although at a much larger scale: whether, in this era of mass extinctions and environmental degradation, children should still be encouraged to be emotionally invested in the natural world (and if so, why).

The prevailing view is not only that parents should encourage connection with nature, but that it is critical that they succeed. In his classic book, Richard Louv (2008) documented the growing disconnection of children from nature, with increasingly urban children spending less time outside and more time looking at screens (or capturing virtual Pokémon creatures outside; Dorward et al., 2017), and argued that it is essential to overcome ‘nature-deficit disorder’.1 More recently, Soga and Gaston (2016) reviewed the causes (i.e. loss of opportunity and orientation) and consequences (i.e. changes in health/well-being, emotion, attitude and behaviour) of the resulting ‘extinction of experience’, and proposed ways to reverse it. Accordingly, Abson et al. (2019) consider reconnection with nature to be one of three ‘transformational “sustainability interventions”’. This growing body of research has contributed to a veritable parenting movement to get children outdoors.

There is a curious disconnect, however, between this invocation to connect children with nature and the state of said nature.2 Nature has changed dramatically over the past several decades, and it continues to change, with many indicators revealing seemingly inexorable declines wrought by human activity (e.g. IPBES, 2019). It is the sum total of these human impacts, evidenced by certain geological markers, which has given rise to the proposal that humans now inhabit the Anthropocene epoch (Corlett, 2015).3 Although diverse commentators, poets and scholars are asking hard questions about how to face up to the Anthropocene (e.g. Bringhurst & Zwicky, 2018; Ghosh, 2016; Major, 2018; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2019; Wapner, 2010), most people generally proceed as though humans will figure things out and reverse the trends, despite the evidence of the growing challenge to doing so (e.g. IPCC, 2021; Jewell & Cherp, 2019; UNEP, 2019). People behave as if it were not the case that ‘around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history’ and the ‘average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900’ (IPBES, 2019). These changes are already creating sadness and anxiety among children (Chawla, 2020). Despite recognition that nature’s ‘baseline’ is changing (Soga & Gaston, 2018), parents go on parenting as though their children will inherit a world that looks much like the one they have known.4

Assume, for the purpose of this thought experiment,5 that dramatic climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental harms are largely irremediable, so the state of nature will continue to precipitously decline. We strongly hope this assumption is false, yet we are interested in exploring its implications. In particular, we ask an important—albeit unsettling—question for anyone invested in raising and educating children6: Should we continue the common practice of trying to connect children to nature? If so, why? The environmental crisis is likely to impose all sorts of costs on children already. Should we at least minimize the emotional burdens associated with the decline of nature?7

We approach these questions as nature-loving parents ourselves, parents who feel that the lives of our children would be much, much diminished with fewer connections to the natural world. We cannot help but recoil in raising this question. Nonetheless, insofar as views about raising children have been shaped by prior, pre-Anthropocene ways of thinking, conventional wisdom may need to be overturned in the Anthropocene (e.g. Hamilton, 2017; Head, 2015; Latour, 2018; Lövbrand et al., 2015). For example, although some readers might consider our argument to be anthropocentric given its focus on human well-being rather than the well-being of other species, our thought experiment begins with the assumption that it is too late for many of those other beings—and the very concept of anthropocentrism is being challenged giving the prevalence of human impacts in the Anthropocene (see Hamilton, 2017). We approach these questions in the spirit of promoting better dialogue among conservationists and naturalists, parents and educators, all of whom are wrestling with questions about how to raise children and teach them about nature and its value in this new epoch.

Ultimately, we argue that several of the reasons people might offer for connecting children with nature are weaker than many might be inclined to suppose, at least given the assumptions we make here. Still, some notable reasons remain: first, as a way for people to connect with their children; second, as an attempt to slow the inevitable; and third, as a way to live out our own love for nature.

2 CONNECTION TO NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

We begin by clarifying the meaning of ‘connecting to nature’ in the Anthropocene.8 Connection to nature is generally considered to include an emotional and a cognitive component. The emotional component is something like loving nature, which comprises both deep appreciation and affection for the object of love. The cognitive component involves developing a self-concept that incorporates an interdependence with the natural world—by locating oneself in relationship to nature. A visual analogue can be seen in the ‘inclusion of nature in the self scale’ developed by Schultz (2001). It asks people to rate their connection to nature by identifying the appropriate distance between two circles, one of which represents the self and one of which represents nature.

But what, exactly, is it that environmentalists want their children to connect to? The idea of connecting to nature is contentious (Fletcher, 2017; Zylstra et al., 2019), mainly because a number of scholars have argued that it is untenable to define nature as a realm distinct from human influence (e.g. Clayton et al., 2017; Fletcher, 2017; Hamilton, 2017; Lorimer, 2012). Consequently, we are not focused here on nature in terms of a wilderness ideal, but on nature in its diverse manifestations, from more or less urban regions through to more ‘wild’ landscapes (e.g. Caro et al., 2011). It is important to recognize that—although connection to nature can be both activated or suppressed among adults—the foundations for connection are laid in childhood, and children who have early experiences with wild nature are more likely to experience that connection (Chawla, 2020; Hosaka et al., 2017).

As this last point suggests, connection to nature occurs along a continuum. At one extreme, imagine a child who rarely leaves the center of a metropolis, whether Mexico City or New York or Tokyo, a child whose connection to nature is largely limited to interactions with a few trees, the occasional bird and glimpses of sky. Soberingly, on a global scale, such a child would often inhabit a slum, whether Khayelitsha in South Africa or Neza in Mexico City, and the visible parts of nature would be filtered through smog. Moving towards the other extreme, a child may be commonly immersed within a natural space (whether a lakeshore, a savannah, or a forest), although these landscapes will vary in the degree to which they have been impacted by humans. Obviously, not all families live in places that have been damaged equally in the Anthropocene—nor are their abilities to connect to nature equitable. For simplicity’s sake, we focus on children raised in relatively urban locations, as this will be the normal experience for children given global trends (UN, 2018).

Connection to nature is also both particular and selective. It is particular in the sense that, at least when children are young, they do not connect with something as abstract as the entire natural world, but instead with particular flowers, trees and charismatic megafauna—or even bees, snakes and worms. They may also have little concern for abstractions that matter to adults. Genovart et al. (2013), for example, found that Spanish adolescents are better able to recognize exotic species of mammals and fish than native ones, probably because they encounter them more frequently.

Connection to nature is selective in the sense that positive emotions are not typically linked to all parts of nature equally. Nature, of course, is not all beautiful vistas and majestic megafauna.9 It is, in addition, hurricanes and cancer and animals dying of thirst during droughts. Additionally, it is extinction events and climate change—both of which can have natural causes, although the recent examples of concern are obviously anthropogenic. The point is just that when people talk about wanting their children to connect to nature, they generally have in mind the parts of nature that somehow serve their interests, whatever those interests may be—aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and material. They are less keen on the parts that are actively harmful; children who became overly concerned that coronaviruses were going to be eradicated might be a cause for concern. Most people have no objection to their children being attached to nature selectively; indeed, it seems like a good thing. Appreciating the selectivity matters, though; in order to inculcate connection to nature, we must be more precise about what, exactly, children are being connected to.

Returning to the main thread: Parents may have several motivations for wanting to connect their children to nature. On the face of it, this seems reasonable, both relative to the values of individual parents and from a more general environmental perspective. If parents do not connect their children to nature, those children will likely care less about it and be less aware of its continued deterioration, and thus be less likely to pass along these values to their own children, etc. This could undermine the basis for conservation efforts. As Kahn et al. (2009) observed, ‘It is hard enough to address environmental problems, such as global climate change, when people are aware of them; it is all the harder when they are not. Thus, the problem of environmental generational amnesia may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime’. Psychologists have indeed found that parents’ environmental values have a strong influence on those of their children (e.g. Casaló & Escario, 2016) and that time in nature as a child (rather than knowledge per se) is one of the strongest predictors of ‘environmental citizenship’ as an adult (e.g. Asah et al., 2018).

Nonetheless, adults have to consider the extent to which our reasons for connecting children to nature, including the desire to share our values with them, hold up in the Anthropocene. Our argument here turns on recognizing that nature is no longer stable in the way we have come to assume in the Holocene, and that it will continue to change—perhaps more and more rapidly—even under the most optimistic scenarios. Strikingly, for example, children are currently receiving education about a world that is arguably fading away: a world with polar bears and orangutans and rhinos. The pioneering work of Glenn Albrecht et al. (2007) was the first to describe a new form of psychological distress people may suffer: ‘As opposed to nostalgia—the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home—solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’. This is a particular form of distress for those who are connected to nature—one echoed in the quotation from Bill McKibben that opens this paper and in the commonplace observation that environmentalists inhabit ‘a world of wounds’. And it merely compounds more widespread versions of environmentally inflected psychological burdens, such as climate change depression, climate change anxiety and ecological grief (see Burke et al., 2018; Clayton, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).

Perhaps, then, promoting a love for nature is a bit like promoting a yearning for the Roman Empire. There is no real possibility of recovering that world, and a child who values it may be both dissatisfied with, and unfit for, modern society. Likewise, if there is no real possibility of recovering the natural world that people have so long valued, a child who acquires those values may simply inherit a nostalgia for a world that is no longer available.

With all that in mind, perhaps it is better to prepare children for a future that is increasingly likely rather than for a past for which adults feel nostalgia. Again, we say this not as technophiles who wish to escape to the stars, but as nature-loving parents who are considering how best to navigate our unfortunate present.

3 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Does it make sense to raise children differently given the severity of the environmental crisis? How might this question be addressed? The most obvious way to approach it is to ask whether it is good for children to have certain values. This leads us to examine the nature of human well-being. There are several theories that philosophers have developed about what makes human lives go well—that is, about what is good for individual human beings, rather than what is good for society, the environment or anything else. Two of the most prominent theories are hedonism and the objective list theory. We consider their implications in turn.

3.1 Hedonism

Hedonism is not the view that people crave sensual pleasures. Rather, it is the view that positive and negative affective states—pleasures and pains, happiness and unhappiness—are the only things that contribute to someone’s well-being. All else equal, hedonism says that your life goes better insofar as it has more positive affective states; it goes worse insofar as it has more negative affective states. Given this theory of well-being, the question of whether it is good for children to have certain values boils down to this: does having those values produce more positive versus negative affective states?

Insofar as a child who is connected to nature values experiences in nature and thus is more likely to pursue those experiences, it is possible that the experiences do indeed produce more positive versus negative affective states. After all, there appear to be many important benefits to such experiences (see Children & Nature Network, 2021). Consider this summary from Kuo (2015):

Contact with nature has been tied to health in a plenitude of studies. Time spent in and around tree-lined streets, gardens, parks, and forested and agricultural lands is consistently linked to objective, long-term health outcomes. The less green a person’s surroundings, the higher their risk of morbidity and mortality – even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other possible confounding variables. The range of specific health outcomes tied to nature is startling, including depression and anxiety disorder, diabetes mellitus, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), various infectious diseases, cancer, healing from surgery, obesity, birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal complaints, migraines, respiratory disease, and others … Finally, neighborhood greenness has been consistently tied to life expectancy and all-cause mortality.

However, we caution against drawing unduly optimistic conclusions from these studies. Insofar as children have limited access to nature, valuing and enjoying it may be a source of frustration rather than various benefits. This is, of course, the main concern that drives our paper. Promoting love for nature makes sense if children will have access to what they love. But if the object of love is lost, promoting love of nature seems like a way of making children vulnerable rather than happy (Chawla, 2020).

There is also a risk of overstating the significance of the research on connection to nature and various health outcomes. What many of these studies show is that there are appreciable benefits associated with being around trees and running water; they do not necessarily show that human beings benefit from extensive wild nature per se, and certainly not the kind required to, say, conserve many of the species that are currently being lost. Although some research has demonstrated the importance of greater biodiversity for human mental health and a great deal of research shows the importance of healthy ecosystems for physical health, much of the research on nature’s psychological benefits uses fairly minimal standards for nature—a view out a window, a plant in an office, or even a painting on a wall (Aerts et al., 2018). It seems plausible that some of these health benefits could be explained by factors not inherently tied to nature, much less to the kind of nature that is at issue in the environmental crisis. One can imagine, for instance, creating artificial environments that are less stressful and have superior air quality, which may well have the same effects as the natural environment. It is also the case that greenspaces can be preserved without our managing to preserve polar bears or coral reefs; even if there are benefits from being around trees per se, that does not necessarily mean being around native trees, or extensive biodiversity, or what have you (although see Lev et al., 2020).

So, while there may be a sense in which experiences of nature benefit children, it would be cold comfort to environmentalist parents if the ‘nature’ they experience is simply a manicured park. This strongly suggests that while environmentalist parents probably do want to benefit their children by teaching them to love nature, it is a particular sort of nature they want their children to value. The target is not ‘whatever provides certain psychological and health benefits’, but rather the rich biological and ecological diversity that, of course, is now so severely threatened.

3.2 The objective list theory

Consider a second theory of well-being. Objective list theorists say that some things are good for you even if they do not produce more happiness. For instance, it may be good to know certain truths about the world, even if they are not comfortable or encouraging. In the current context, for instance, there are the truths about the ways in which people are damaging the natural world: on balance, any particular individual might not get any pleasure (and indeed, might experience some significant psychological discomfort) when staring down the fact that they may soon live in a world with no Great Barrier Reef. Still, you might think that it would be bad for that person to put their head in the sand—not just because they thereby ensure that they will not be some small part of broader solutions, but because they are less in touch with reality as a result of not knowing. It is bad for them, not just bad for the world.

This view is sometimes developed by appealing to the idea of eudaimonia or flourishing. According to ancient Greek thought, beings achieve eudaimonia when they are operating as they ought to operate, when they are living out their natures and being the best versions of the kinds of things they are. On such views, things can be good for you without affecting your affective state. It is often thought that when humans achieve eudaimonia, they will have a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as personal autonomy and feelings of connection (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a sense of connection to nature is associated with this particular approach to well-being (Cervinka et al., 2012).

Even if we grant the objective list theory of well-being, though, we do not yet have an argument for the importance of loving, or connecting to, nature, but only for knowing things about nature. To get that stronger claim, someone might insist that it is good for us to love things that are valuable; and, since nature is valuable, it is good for us to love nature—even if it is sometimes costly, in hedonic terms, for us to do so.10 This is sometimes how people think about appreciating art. The view is something like: it is good to be the sort of person who experiences awe in front of masterpieces, as that means you have developed the ability to be sensitive to—and richly appreciate—certain forms of value.

Note, however, that there are at least three problems with this argument. First, even if it is good for us to love things that are valuable and nature is indeed valuable, the objective list theory does not imply that it is good for us to love nature all things considered. After all, the objective list theory agrees with hedonism that happiness and unhappiness are relevant to well-being; it simply disagrees with hedonism that they are the only things relevant to well-being. If the hedonic costs of loving nature are high enough—as, we worry, they will be for many children—then it is not good for them to love nature all things considered, even if it is good for them in one respect.

Second, while it may be good to love things that are valuable, it does not follow that it is good to love everything that is valuable. It may be that there is only so much room in a life to devote attention and effort to the things that are loved. This suggests the need to be selective in terms of the values that adults promote in our children. Additionally, there is a significant difference between loving nature and appropriately appreciating its value. We are raising the possibility that adults should not teach children to be enamoured with nature, not that they should not teach them to see its worth. This is akin to discouraging children from being enamoured with Jackson Pollock’s paintings, although it may still be important for them to see why they are valuable as works of art. You can appreciate the value of a thing without being depressed by its loss, as demonstrated by most people’s ability to watch the news without descending into despair. Again, promoting love for nature may be a bit like promoting love for the Roman Empire, rather than an appreciation for the way it advanced some people’s interests at the time.

Third, this argument for loving nature depends on nature having intrinsic value. For those already enamoured with the environment, this may be an attractive view. But it is worth wondering how it could be defended. After all, it is notable that many environmentalists retreat to instrumental defences of nature in public fora: they appeal to ecosystem services (but see Dempsey & Robertson, 2012). This may be some indication that the arguments for the intrinsic value of natural systems are less persuasive than they may at first appear (see Newman et al., 2017). Moreover, even in private, conservationists would likely acknowledge that the view that nature has intrinsic value has some unpalatable implications if not carefully qualified: recalling the earlier points about coronavirus extinction, very few of us want to say that all dimensions of nature are valuable.

3.3 What is good for parents?

Perhaps we have taken too atomistic of an approach. We are writing as environmentalists, so our reasons for wanting our children to love nature are not simply about promoting the good for our children. Compare: if we love classical music, we might want our children to love it as well simply because we think that classical music is worth valuing. But we also might want our children to love classical music because having shared values makes them people to whom we can relate. Shared values can enhance our relationship in a way that divergent values may not. It is like passing along a culture, and thus extending our legacy. Many Indigenous peoples, for example, describe relationships with the natural world and experience this as a component of health and well-being. If children were to reject this worldview (as they were sometimes forced to do by colonizing forces), it might be seen as a disturbing rejection of those cultural values.

Granted, people often fail to pass on their values. When these values are not central to our identity, the differences between us and our children can be occasion for celebration—we learn their unique contours as individuals. But when these values are more central to who we are—when our children reject our religious tradition (or our lack of one), when they are not concerned about the causes we hold dear—such differences can create distance. In many cases, that is not the end of the world. But the gulf is no less real for that.

In any case, some people may find themselves emotionally constituted such that, if their children were not to have certain values with respect to the environment, they would find it hard to relate to their children. So, even if it is not good for our children to have certain values with respect to the environment, we may well find ourselves determined to pass these parts of ourselves along. In so doing, are we acting selfishly? Very possibly. And yet it is hard to criticize selfishness in this context, as it is in service of sustaining the relationships that are most central to our lives. Many people would find it difficult to shrug off their values with respect to the environment as simply one of the many differences between generations. To the contrary, these values feature prominently in their identities as environmentalists and nature lovers. So this may be one of many cases where who we are has an enormous influence on what it makes sense to do.

Obviously, this is a far cry from the defence of environmental parenting we might have wanted. If the best we can say is that we are trying to connect our children to nature so that we can connect to our children, then while we will have a perfectly understandable rationale, it is no longer a rationale that is really about nature. Nature is, on this view, just one more means to an end—an attitude that, of course, is part of what led to the environmental crisis in the first place. Obviously enough, this charge could be levelled just as fiercely against the previous attempted justification, the one that tried to explain the aim of connecting children to nature in terms of their own well-being. Still, we have indeed found a reason to encourage our children to love nature, and that is notable. Can we, perhaps, strengthen that reason with some additional considerations?

3.4 What is good for nature?

At this juncture, the obvious move is to revert to more traditional arguments about creating the next generation of environmentalists for nature’s sake—not ours or our children’s (even if they also benefit). The thought might be that teaching children to love nature is the best protection against the myriad cultural and economic forces that promote a purely instrumental view of nature’s worth.

There are two problems with this. The first is that if this really is an era defined by foregone environmental conclusions—if humans are past the point of being able to prevent numerous species losses, climate change and the loss of various ecosystems—then it will be harder to defend teaching children to love nature for nature’s sake. Many of the valuable things people would hope to preserve simply cannot be preserved. Likewise, it will be difficult to defend teaching children to love nature for society’s sake. After all, the ultimate reason why conservationists want certain values to be common in society is because those values can, in the aggregate, make a difference to the environmental crisis. If humans can indeed avert that crisis, then it makes sense for parents to do their part and raise their children accordingly. But under the assumption that this crisis cannot be averted, then parents’ reason to do their part evaporates.

Second, and rather bleakly, it is not clear that children would be making a mistake in having a more instrumental view of nature’s worth—or, at least, an instrumental view of the worth of the nature that they will inherit. To appreciate this point, imagine a beautifully maintained classic car, perfectly detailed and lovely in all the ways such a vehicle can be. Now suppose that this car is used and abused to the point where all its aesthetic virtues have been lost; it is only good for short trips to and from the grocery store. In such circumstances, there is no mistake in having an instrumental view of the car, even if it would have been a mistake not to have appreciated it differently in its former glory. Likewise, if much of nature’s value is bound up with its beauty, diversity and complexity, then it may not be a mistake—or much of one—to devalue an uglier, more homogenous and flattened natural world.

3.5 What is good—Revisited

There may, however, be some better arguments for encouraging children to love nature. First, from a nature-centric perspective, it is generally accepted that people who feel connected to nature are more likely to act on its behalf. While it is certainly true that humans cannot completely prevent species loss and ecological degradation at this point, we recognize that it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Even given the assumption that radical change is inevitable, people may still be able to slow it, thereby increasing the longevity of what evolution has wrought—both for its own sake and for those who will be able to enjoy it. Teaching children to feel a connection to the natural world will, we hope, make it more likely that larger steps are taken to protect it. This pushes the problem back, of course: our children may not be able to run this argument for their children, or at least not for their grandchildren. But we are not looking for reasons that will last until the end of time; we are looking for reasons that can guide parents making choices in the present.

Second, from an anthropocentric point of view, connecting to nature does seem to have benefits for people. The biophilia hypothesis proposed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (1984) suggested that people have an instinctive tendency to connect to the natural environment. Ecopsychologists and others have interpreted this to mean that such a connection is necessary for mental health (Kahn & Hasbach, 2012). As stated above, there is evidence that a connection to nature is associated with indicators of psychological well-being; and exposure to natural scenery appears to enhance people’s social relationships and not just their individual well-being (Castelo et al., 2021; Cervinka et al., 2012; Olivos & Clayton, 2017). It is unclear how much nature, and what kind of nature, is necessary to establish a connection, but establishing a connection to nature appears to have benefits beyond merely a positive mood.

Finally, promoting love for nature can be important as an expression of our own love for nature, where the odds of success are largely irrelevant to whether we act on its behalf. For those of us who are already environmentalists, the destruction of the natural world is a vision of hell. Accordingly, we continue to raise our children to love the natural world in the hope that our actions will make a difference, even if the odds are very long (e.g. Bain & Bongiorno, 2019; Ojala, 2017; Pihkala, 2017). This is the view that is expressed powerfully in an arresting exchange in Barbara Kingsolver’s (2012) novel, Flight Behaviour, between Ovid, a scientist studying monarchs and Dellarobia, the protagonist:

Ovid: ‘Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction’.

Dellarobia: ‘So you’re one of the people that can? … Watch an extinction’.

Ovid: ‘If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?’

Dellarobia: ‘You do everything you can … And then, I guess, everything you can’t. You keep doing, so your heart won’t stop’.

4 CONCLUSION

These arguments are tentative, and leave out a great many important issues. For instance, even if adults should try to promote connection to nature, there remain difficult questions about methods. Our children may connect to nature quite differently than past generations, not only because of the shifting-baseline syndrome (Soga & Gaston, 2018), but also because their lives are caught up in swirling socio-cultural and technological changes that remain (and will remain) foreign to most parents (Clayton et al., 2017). It is possible, for example, that digital games and screen time may help connect children to nature, although that is hardly clear (e.g. Edwards & Larson, 2020; Fletcher, 2017). There are also hard problems about how children’s connection to nature should be informed by the need to engage with issues of justice. How can children engage in conservation that ‘takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics’ (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019)? As children engage with nature in the ways of the future, it may be even more important for parents, and other involved adults, to facilitate other ways of knowing and to actively encounter ‘the paradoxical tension between endings and possibilities’ (Moser, 2019) and the mourning (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017) demanded by the times. As parents and also as teachers and as a society, we need to investigate ways to provide children with the tools that will give them emotional resilience in a time of existential crisis (Baker et al., 2021; Ojala, 2017; Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019).

Our aim here has not been to provide definitive answers to fraught questions about whether and how to promote connection to nature among children. Obviously, individual parents will have to apply their own wisdom to the unique experience of raising each particular child. We have instead tried to prompt a more systematic conversation about these questions — a conversation that, as parents and environmentalists, we hope our children will eventually join.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We appreciate comments on the draft manuscript from Rachael Edwards and Clare Palmer and from the editors and reviewers, including Thomas Beery and Dave Kendal.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS

B.M.H.L. conceived the project; B.M.H.L. and B.F. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All three authors contributed to revisions and have approved the manuscript for publication.

ENDNOTES

  • 1Our edition of Louv’s book concludes with a ‘field guide’ containing ‘100 actions we can take’. 
  • 2Although it is perhaps not such a curious disconnect if one recalls the proportion of humanity that has little regard for nature and its value; for a brilliant satire on this point, see Chapron et al. (2018). 
  • 3We adopt this term with awareness that it is controversial; for discussion, see Bilgrami (2020), Hamilton (2017), Haraway (2016) and Tsing et al. (2017), among many other commentators. We are also wary of our question being interpreted as an apologia for the destruction of nature, which we wish to unequivocally declare that it is not. 
  • 4Other scholars have considered the reasons for our denial and inaction as well as the inertial and psychological reasons we assume for the best (e.g. Hulme 2009; Hamilton 2010; Norgaard 2011). 
  • 5For a related, entertaining and thoughtful engagement with ‘despair’, see McMurry (2018). 
  • 6One might think that this would be all of us, although many commentators take a decidedly less optimistic view of the human race–not to mention the decision many couples have made to not have children. 
  • 7Someone might object to the very question. They might say that if we are going to change the way we encourage our children to relate to nature for the sake of their well-being, then why would not we change the way we encourage them to relate to other things for the sake of their well-being? For instance, it is awful to lose pets and romantic partners. Should we discourage our children from loving pets and people, in the interest of preventing them from suffering loss? By way of reply, we should note that parents sometimes do discourage children from loving too much; they recommend maintaining perspective on the objects of their affection. For example, some parents may have had pertinent conversations with their teenagers about high school relationships. Accordingly, something similar may be good advice when it comes to nature. The obvious difference is that, at some point, we hope our children will form lasting bonds with people (and perhaps other organisms, too). If that is the aim, then there comes a time when reserve is inappropriate. At some point, most romantic relationships require you to be ‘all in’. Our partners expect us to invest in our relationships in ways that assume their longevity. But your relationship with nature is not like that: nature itself has no expectations. 
  • 8Although we focus on the concept of ‘connection to nature’, our argument could alternatively be couched in terms of the ‘extinction of experience’. Using the classification of Gaston & Soga, 2020, we are considering whether, to some extent, reduced childhood interactions with nature may be adaptive at this point in human history. Note that we are not promoting the absolute extinction of these interactions, although perhaps shift emphasis to interactions with living organisms as opposed to wild nature [which Gaston and Soga (2020) refer to as a ‘broader’ view]. 
  • 9E. O. Wilson’s (1984) biophilia hypothesis, notably, implies that a negative emotional response to some aspects of nature can also indicate a connection, albeit not the kind most relevant here. 
  • 10We can get a similar result via an indirect route. People might think that it is good for our children to develop a sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity. And they might think that one important way to do that involves promoting love for nature. In that case, it might be good for them to love nature even if loving it involves some hedonic costs: the price of a sense of wonder is being saddened by the way that nature is being damaged, but wonder is worth the price. 

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Published by David R Cole

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