The nature deficit - How children are losing touch with nature
Children's unfamiliarity with the natural world was first highlighted in 2002 by researchers from Cambridge University who surveyed a cohort of four- to eleven-year-old children in Britain. They showed the children pictures of common species of British wildlife and also fantasy creatures from the very popular Pokemon game. Pokemon was originally invented by Satoshi Tajiri in Japan as a way of giving urban children the opportunity to collect pictures of insect-like animals. Participants in the study were shown a sample of pictures and asked to identify the names of the Pokemon creatures and natural species. The results were striking.
Children aged eight and over were substantially better at identifying Pokemon creatures than natural species. The researchers published their paper in the journal Science. Their conclusions were unusually direct and forthright - reflecting the depth of their concern. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or man-made), ' they wrote, but they are presently more inspired by synthetic subjects than by living creatures'. They pointed to solid evidence linking loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children's links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know ... What is the extinction of a magnificent bird of prey such as the condor to a child who has never seen a tiny wren in their back garden or local park?'
Subsequent research has confirmed the Pokemon paper's broad findings. In their recent Bird Knowledge study, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) smartly shifted the focus, assessing basic knowledge of nature in parents rather than children. Of 2,000 participants, half couldn't identify a house sparrow, a quarter didn't know a blue tit or a starling, and a fifth thought a red kite wasn't a bird - but nine out of ten said they wanted children to learn about common British wildlife. Similarly, a survey by The Wildlife Trust found a third of adults unable to identify a barn owl, three-quarters unable to identify an ash tree - and two-thirds feeling that they had 'lost touch with nature'.
Most of us are likely to react to the results of these surveys with a mixture of consternation and insecurity. But it should hardly come as a surprise that awareness of the natural world is vanishing from children's consciousness, for nature itself is vanishing. The RSPB's most recent State of Nature report found Britain to be 'among the most nature-depleted countries in the world', with a 53% drop in numbers of what were once common British species - among them barn owls, newts, sparrows, and starlings. Despite the growing interest in this problem, even the names of some of the most common bird and plant species are quickly being forgotten. Where have these lost names gone and does their vanishing matter? If so, how might we invigorate what anthropologist Beth Povinelli calls 'a literacy of nature ' in ourselves and our children?
Improving people's literacy of nature will undoubtedly help in the struggle to protect our vanishing species. As the environmentalist George Monbiot wrote recently, 'words possess a remarkable power to shape our perceptions.' Without names to give it detail, the natural world can quickly blur into a generalised wash of green - a disposable backdrop like wallpaper. But the right names, well used, can act as a key into the world of birds, animals, trees and insects. Leaming their names can trigger a thirst for further knowledge, greater respect and a sense of wonder.
Clearly the lack of nature literacy - especially of local nature - is associated with the major developments that have occurred in countries such as Britain, where children are now more likely to live in urban environments. Online culture has boomed and screen time has soared In Britain, the roaming range (the area within which children are permitted to play unsupervised) has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years. Parental anxieties about traffic growth and the decrease of available green space are among the factors that have limited wild play and the knowledge it brings. "The children out in the woods, out in the fields, enjoying nature on their own - they're extinct, ' says Chris Packham, the presenter of the TV programme Nature Watch. The attention-grabbing headline of a recent report was that British children spend less time outdoors than prisoners.
Such headlines disguise a complex picture, though. Access to nature is hugely uneven across the population, with class, income and ethnicity playing strong determining roles. It's too easy to blame 'nature deficit', the gap in children's knowledge of the natural world, on the rise of technology, although that has certainly played its part. Technology is not an inherently bad thing, as it can provide a wealth of information for urban children who are disconnected from nature and help to generate further interest.
The RSPB's Connecting with Nature report, based on a three-year research project, sensibly recognised 'nature deficit' as a complex problem. Dismayingly, it found only one in five British children to be positively connected to nature. It emphasised 'nature connection' as not only a 'conservation' issue, but also one closely involved with education, physical health, emotional well-being and future attainment: what's good for nature is also good for the child.
Nature deficit needs structural and political fixes. Hearteningly, hundreds of organisations are striving to close the gap between childhood and nature, including working with schools to get more children regularly learning outdoors. Most of these organisations specifically aim to help children at risk of social exclusion, or who are otherwise unlikely to reach green places. There are promising signs presently visible in Britain and beyond.
