NATURE TIP #2: Venture into the Bubble

An essential ingredient of nature connection is learning to see animals, plants, and other life forms as subjects rather than objects. Young kids do this instinctively. Yet, unfortunately, most of us “grow out of it” during our middle childhood years. One of the best ways I know to maintain and foster this kind of attitude is the “soap bubble technique,” invented by German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Head outside and picture every creature surrounded by a soap bubble that represents its own individual sensory world. Now imagine being able to step inside the bubble of your choice—say, of a robin, earthworm, or butterfly. No matter what your selection, your world becomes transformed. Because all creatures have highly specialized senses, the experience of colors, smells, tastes, and sounds is very different in your chosen bubble world, as are your motivations. Encourage kids to find their favorite animal, enter the imaginary bubble, and experience this alternate world. To spur thoughts in the right direction, you might ask, “Why do you think that creature is acting that way?” Of course, the soap bubble technique is aided by some knowledge of the sensory world of the creature in question, but such understanding isn’t necessary. It’s the imagination that counts most. Best of all, by adding on new layers of knowledge, this approach can be used effectively with preschoolers all the way up to “university graduate schoolers,” offering an amazing outdoor educational tool. 

NATURE TIP #1: Engage the Senses

Whenever possible, head outside and explore the multisensory world of nature in all its glory. Too often these days, we are overly dependent on our eyes and, as a result, closed to luscious scents, birdsong, or the feeling of dirt between our toes. An emotional connection with nature is built on a foundation of firsthand experience that taps into the full sensory range. For kids, consider setting up a short outdoor rope course and invite them to navigate it barefoot and blindfolded, perhaps identifying landmarks along the way. Or ask them to close their eyes and name every sound they can hear at different points along a forest stroll. Nighttime walks, preferably in a natural place like a park, forest, or beach, are another magnificent way to engage neglected senses. For a bounty of other sensory-expanding ideas, check out books like Joseph Cornell’s “Sharing Nature With Children” (Dawn, 1998), or Jennifer Ward’s “I Love Dirt! (Trumpeter, 2008).

Denver-Bound

As a few of you have heard, next month I will be moving my life from the San Francisco Bay area to Denver, Colorado to take on the role of vice president of research and collections at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I am thrilled to be joining the DMNS, one of the top-ranked natural history museums in the country. At this pivotal moment in human history, museums of natural history have great potential to help heal the divide that separates humans from nature, and the DMNS is poised to take a leading role.

I have been serving on the DMNS board of trustees for a couple of years now, and thus have had a chance to get to know this remarkable institution and its leadership. The Museum has already committed itself to moving beyond the 19^th Century “cabinets of curiosities” approach. Rather than being simply a destination where people go to see old stuff and absorb information, the revolutionary new way of thinking entails two-way interactions with the community, and a much higher degree of relevance.  

When my good friend Kirk Johnson departed the VP role at the DMNS to take on the directorship of the Smithonsian Natural History Museum, he suggested that a move to Denver might be just the ticket, allowing me to pursue my passion of connecting people with nature. I came to agree wholeheartedly, and am honored that the Museum has chosen to bring me into their fold. Fortunately, along with heading up the research division, joining a talented leadership team, and working with the local community, I’ll have the opportunity to keep doing some dinosaur research and media work like Dinosaur Train.

So all in all, it’s a dream job for a kid who never quite grew up!

I hope to see you all in Denver as the DMNS embraces novel, exciting, and revolutionary ways to explore and reconnect people with the natural world!

(Note that the DMNS logo is a whirlpool of sorts. Coincidence?)

Top image Credit: dbetoday.com 

The Human-Nature Divide

 Every year, NY literary agent John Brockman asks a group of folks to answer the "Edge Annual Question." This year's query is, "What should we be worried about." Below is my answer, a blend of some recent blog posts plus a new idea or two. Hope you enjoy. And feel free to check out this answer and the many other responses on Brockman's Edge website. 

We should all be worried about the gaping psychological chasm separating humanity from nature. Indeed a strong argument can be made that bridging this divide deserves to be ranked amongst the most urgent 21^st Century priorities. Yet so far the human-nature divide hasn’t even made it to our cultural to-do list.

For the past several decades, numerous scientists and environmentalists have been telling us that we must change our ways and strike a balance with nature, or face catastrophic consequences. I myself have often participated in this echo chamber, doling out dire statistics in hopes of engaging people in action. The unspoken assumption has been that cold, hard facts are all that’s needed for people (including business people and elected officials) to “get it” and alter their unsustainable ways. To date, however, virtually all the key indicators—from greenhouse gas emissions to habitat and species losses—are still heading in the wrong direction. The blade of the “hockey stick” continues to lengthen.

The problem is, humans aren’t rational creatures. At least, not when it comes to shifting their behaviors. As marketing executives have long understood, humans are far more susceptible to emotional messages, especially when conveyed through imagery. Want to escalate sales of some new car model? Beautiful people driving through pristine natural settings are far more powerful motivators than statistics on horsepower and fuel efficiency.

But what emotion is needed to foster a sustainable shift in human behavior? In a word, love.

As the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould once claimed in an uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality, “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” The good news is that, thanks to a lengthy evolutionary tenure living in intimate contact with the nonhuman world, the capacity to form an emotional attachment with nature probably lays dormant within all of us, waiting to be reawakened (think E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia”).

The bad news is that, as a species, we’ve never been more disconnected from the natural world. Thanks to a variety of factors—among them fear of strangers and an obsession with screens—children’s firsthand encounters with nature in the developed world have dropped precipitously to less than 10% of what they were just one generation ago. The average American youth now spends seven to ten hours per day staring at screens compared to a mere handful of minutes in any “natural” setting. The result of this indoor migration is a runaway health crisis, both for children (obesity, ADHD, stress, etc.) and the places they live.

Science has been one of the primary forces driving a wedge between humans and nature, prompting us to see nature as objects rather than subjects, resources to be exploited rather than relatives to be respected. Yet science, particularly over the past few decades, has also empirically demonstrated our complete embeddedness within nature, from the trillions of bacterial cells that far outnumber human cells in our bodies to our role as newbie actors in the 14 billion-year evolutionary epic.

Do we need more science? Of course, and the general public must learn the necessary facts, dire and difficult though they may be. We’re also going to need all the technological help we can get to help us navigate a sustainable path into the future. Yet knowledge and technology without emotional connection simply won’t cut it. The next generation of humans must learn to see their relationship with the natural world in ways that will seem alien to our current anthropocentric, reductionist, and materialistic perspective. 

Nature Tips

We humans have a rather bizarre relationship with nature. We seek out nature to stroll, run, bike, rollerblade, climb, swim, skydive, surf, sail, commune, birdwatch, whalewatch, and stargaze, spending billions of dollars a year gearing up for and traveling to these activities. While there, we might collect bugs, rocks, driftwood, fossils, counts of bird species, or, most commonly these days, photographs. Closer to home, we grow nature in our gardens, place it in pots that adorn our living spaces, cherish it as pets, and hug stuffed manifestations of it to our sleeping bodies. Increasingly, we also consume digital versions—books, documentaries, movies, and videos—that allow us to travel to wild places without so much as stepping beyond the front door.

On the flip side, we also kill nature for sport and place it in cages for our amusement. We rip it from mountainsides, scrape it off the ocean’s bottom, harvest it for raw materials, befoul it with various toxins, and destroy it in vast quantities to accommodate humanity’s sprawl. Most fundamental of all, we chew up and swallow substantial amounts of nature daily simply to fuel our bodily selves.

How can we possibly eat nature and love it too (beyond the taste, that is)? More to the point, how exactly do we go about connecting with this thing called nature?

The heart of the answer, I’ve come to think, is embodied in a simple question. Do you think of yourself as inside or outside of nature?

Our present dominant worldview places humanity outside and above nature, reducing it to mere resources. This “denaturing” has been ongoing for thousands of years, driven by such forces as agriculture, science, and technology. If we’re going to develop a true compassion for nature—a matter of urgent importance for this century—we must understand that the human-nature divide is a delusion. Cutting edge science now demonstrates that we are fully embedded within nature, and also that nature is embedded within us. All life forms on Earth, it turns out, are our kin.

The human-nature disconnect is a cross-cultural phenomenon, blind to skin color and household income. It applies to urban, suburban, and rural families. Today millions of people are aware that we must reinsert nature into our lives, and especially those of our children. But, in this time of increasing urbanization, helicopter parenting, and digital obsession, parents and educators don’t know how to begin the process, let alone foster a lasting nature connection in children. A critical first step, then, is to map out the signposts common to this journey wherever it is undertaken.

Several years ago, I came to the realization that re-establishing a strong emotional attachment with nature was critical for the health of our children and the places they live. Given all the organizations that profess to be connecting people with nature—among them natural history museums, botanical gardens, zoos, planetariums, aquariums, science centers, nature centers, and schools—I assumed that the process of nature connection must be well documented. What I found when I went out to search for answers, however, was an abundance of disparate articles and research papers, but no general audience summaries. So I’m now in the midst of writing a book on nature connection intended for parents, teachers, and anyone else seeking to connect themselves and others with nature.

Yet, rather than waiting for the book’s publication to reveal the process of nature connection, I’ve decided to launch a Facebook site that will, among other things, serve as the home of weekly “Nature Tips” during 2013. These tips, typically posted on Thursdays (just prior to the weekend), will provide direct advice for connecting kids and adults with nature. My sincere hope is that you will find them useful in your own nature-bonding efforts. Of course, please feel free to share them with anyone else that you think might benefit.

Ultimately, nature connection comes down to developing new habits of interacting with the other-than-human world, habits of body and mind that encourage us to experience natural wonders firsthand.

So I cordially invite you to check out the inaugural Nature Tip, all about engaging the senses, on my new Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/DrScottSampson. And, of course, feel free to share with others who might be interested!

I sincerely hope that you enjoy Nature Tips. And may 2013 be a banner year of nature connection for you and others in your life! 

Scott Sampson

Learning Bird Language

Arriving at our backyard “sit spot,” Jade and I didn’t have to wait long before the familiar chickadee duo appeared in a nearby thicket and began chirping happily. A male robin patrolling his territory wasn’t far behind, his pulsing crimson breast pumping out a gorgeous melody. Next to emerge, seemingly out of thin air, was a pair of song sparrows, who began a staccato of “seep-seep” calls. “I’m here.” “Yes, I’m here too.”

Suddenly, like a lighting strike, the calm morning was upended. The chickadees flew to a higher branch. All the birds switched to high-pitched alarm calls, echoed by other birds previously unseen. A host of avian eyes peered downward, searching. Somewhere in the underbrush, a predator had arrived . . .

Three years ago, I began work on a book about connecting people with nature. I must confess that, at the beginning, I felt a certain sense of self-satisfaction, convinced that a lifetime of outdoor play, hiking, and camping—including, cumulatively, years spent living in tents in remote places while digging dinosaur fossils—had forged within me a deep bond with nature. But researching this book destroyed that perception. Instead, I found that, like most of us, I was quite oblivious to the natural goings-on around me. Indeed I often impacted these events in negative ways.

My insights came in part from reading about “bird language,” the acquired skill of understanding the meaning of local animals’ calls and movements. Championed by expert naturalist, tracker, and mentor Jon Young, bird language offers a powerful tool to heighten our awareness of, and connection with, nature [1-3]. Throughout almost all of human history, people were fluent in the local dialect of bird language because it was a matter of life and death. A bird’s call might lead you to your next meal, or prevent you from becoming some other animal’s meal. 

Earlier this year, I decided it was time for me to learn bird language, and my ten year-old daughter Jade decided to join in on the fun. Our guide for the journey was Jon Young’s excellent 2012 book, What the Robin Knows [1]. By the end of the first month of regular visits to our backyard sit-spot, Jade and I were beginning to see the neighborhood differently. For one thing, those nameless little feathered creatures chirping in the trees were transforming into distinct species, each with a unique voice and character. Our journals soon included such entries as, “Pair of chickadees singing in thicket to west,” and “Four European starlings sitting in Monterey Pine to the south.” Through diligent awareness (aided by a pair of binoculars and a birding app on my iPhone), we were beginning to see and hear more.

Although birds are nearly ubiquitous outdoors, rarely do we stop and consider what they’re doing, or why they’re doing it in that spot and not another. Because we’ve forgotten what it’s like to hunt or be hunted, our implicit assumption is that birds are a lot like us, moving about almost randomly. But for most animals, predator and prey, random behavior offers a fast track to premature death. If you’re a North American songbird, predators come in various shapes and sizes, and threaten from multiple directions. Foxes and cats prowl the ground. Raccoons and ravens raid nests in trees. Hawks and owls attack from the air. Most feared of all, it seems, are accipters like the Cooper’s hawk, a common but rarely seen assassin befitting the title, “Death from Above.” Cooper’s hawks are experts at killing birds on the wing, diving fearlessly into trees and thickets.

No surprise then that most birds have small territories that they know intimately, and tend to follow the same paths through these spaces. Along with understanding local geography, those robins, wrens, and ravens are fluent in bird language. Always vigilant, they listen continually for alarm calls, and not just from their own kind. A robin will react to the alarm of a song sparrow and vice versa. For the same reason, squirrels and rabbits know bird language too. The end result is a vast web of awareness that generates a local, ever-shifting “mood.” If the mood is relaxed, “baseline” behaviors such as feeding and song dominate. If things turn tense, alarms will sound, silence may ensue, and animals often flee. Although we tend to ignore our neighborhood avians, it turns out that the birds know us, and our pets. Why? Because it’s a matter of life and death. Local birds even react in predictable ways to our behaviors. We simply fail to notice.

But Jade and I are starting to take note. We’ve learned that the way we walk to our sit spot—slow and relaxed instead of hurried—can greatly reduce the time it takes for the birds to resume their baseline behavior. The biggest challenge in becoming adept at bird language, we found, is getting to know this baseline for a variety of local birds. Each species uses several different vocalizations, from melodious songs and subtle companion calls to boisterous territorial squawking and, in the case of hungry babies, impatient screams. Only by gaining firsthand understanding of this background behavior can one begin to detect disturbances that might indicate a predator’s presence.

Yet, even with just a few weeks practice under our belts, Jade and I found our awareness expanding, and with it our sense of appreciation and even empathy. When familiar birds are absent during our sit-spot sessions, we wonder what they’re up to. And we find ourselves slowing down more often as we enter and exited the house, listening for signs of the neighborhood “mood.” Wildness just outside the front door is helping us deepen our bond with nature. These interactions, I have come to realize, are essential to nature connection. If we are going to foster in our children (and ourselves) that all-important sense of internal wildness, we must first have abundant experience of external wildness.

Jade and I are looking forward to becoming more fluent in bird language in the coming year, and using these new skills to identify and actually catch sight of local predators.

What will you do in 2013 to connect yourself and others with nature?

Notes and References

1. Young, Jon. 2012. What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York.

2. Young, J., E. Haas, and E. McGown. Coyote’s Guide To Connecting With Nature, Second Edition.   OWLink Media, Shelton, WA.

3. Website: http://birdlanguage.com/

Image Credits (top to bottom)

1) Coffee Creek Watershed Preserve

2) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

3) www.ronrink.com

Falling in Love With Nature

Yesterday, I discovered a remarkable TED talk by David Roberts. Roberts is a blogger who writes about energy and politics for Grist. His aim in this 15-minute presentation, remixed with music and extra imagery, is to summarize and simplify the science of climate change. Just the facts ma’am. Now, I study fossils, not climate, so I’m not on a first-name basis with all the relevant data. Yet, given my understanding of current climatological consensus, Roberts has his facts straight.

His core message is, to put it bluntly, terrifying. On our present trajectory (“business as usual”), the forecast for the end of this century is at least a 4-degree Celsius increase in global temperature, generating rampant coastal flooding, inland desertification, and human suffering on a vast, unfathomable scale. A couple of centuries after that, we may be facing a scorched Earth, unlivable for humans in many regions.

For me, the exactness of such projected increases in global temperatures, habitat loss, and species extinctions is not the issue. If you accept the scientific method as valid, and respect the strong consensus of the world’s top scientists, we’re on the fast-track to Hades, with less than a generation to make a major course correction.

This, of course, is not exactly breaking news. For the past few decades, scientists and environmentalists have been telling whoever would listen that we must change our ways and strike a balance with nature, or face catastrophic consequences. I myself have often participated in this echo chamber, doling out dire statistics in hopes of engaging people in action. The unspoken assumption has been that cold, hard facts, the kind the Roberts offers us, are all that’s needed for people to “get it” and alter their unsustainable ways.

The problem is, humans aren’t rational creatures. At least, not when it comes to shifting their behavior. If you doubt this claim, look at the tactics used by the true experts in behavior modification.

Marketing executives have long understood that humans respond to emotional messages, especially through imagery. Want to persuade a lot of people to buy a new car? Beautiful, scantily clad bodies in pristine natural settings are far more powerful motivators than horsepower or fuel efficiency statistics. So what’s the emotion we need to foster if we’re to shift human behaviors in the direction of sustainability? In a word, love.

As the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould once claimed [1], “We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature—for we will not fight to save what we do not love.” The good news is that, thanks to a lengthy evolutionary tenure living in intimate contact with the nonhuman world, the capacity to fall in love with nature lays dormant within all of us, waiting to be reawakened [2]. Embracing this emotional need, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recently launched a “Love, Not Loss” campaign [3], arguing that we must replace the standard doom-and-gloom message with one of love. (Check out their powerful video here.) Our goal, they say, must be to help humanity to once again fall in love with nature. I could not agree more.

And the best time to initiate this love affair? Childhood.

Today, few kids escape the frightening barrage of bad eco-news, frequently learning about our rampant environmental destruction early in elementary school. And the stunning images they see—polar bears standing on shrinking chunks of ice; Amazon rainforest leveled under a mechanized onslaught—too often generate fear rather than love, numbness rather than action. Here I concur with David Sobel [4], who argues that, when it comes to education, there should be no disasters before fourth grade.

So how do we turn things around and help people fall in love with nature? Well, a growing mountain of evidence suggests that the best place to start is wherever you happen to be—that is, your local place. Plenty of firsthand, multisensory experience, together with a healthy dose of wonder, are essential ingredients, especially for children. Learning about the history and workings of your local environs are also critical.

In contrast with traditional approaches, place-based learning is all about hands-on, inquiry-driven, often outdoor activities [4, 5]. Going beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries like math and social studies, emphasis is placed on integrative projects that transform communities into classrooms.

Far from being parochial, learning in place simply begins in local landscapes and migrates outward. Better to understand that nearby oak or fir forest before trying to comprehend (let alone care about) the Amazon rainforest. Many are surprised to learn that a place-based approach to learning fosters not only a stronger connection with local nature, but heightened academic performance across the board. And it isn’t just for schoolteachers. To fully take root, parents, caregivers, and informal educators must embrace this revolutionary approach.

In short, falling in love with nature begins at home, preferably as children, in our local communities, inspired by wonder. A strong sense of place rooted in emotional connection reveals the beauty of the natural world, the truth of our embeddedness within nature, and the goodness inherent in caring for one’s home ground. It provides the foundation for Aldo Leopold’s land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Don’t misunderstand me. If we are to navigate a sustainable path out of our current predicament, we have to be honest with ourselves and learn the facts, difficult though they may be. And we are going to need all the technological help we can get along the way. Yet knowledge and technology without emotional connection are simply not going to be enough. That’s why helping children fall in love with nature deserves to be an urgent international priority, on par with reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving species and wild places.

References

1.    Gould, S. J. 1993. Unenchanted evening. Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, New York. Quotation from p. 40.

2.   Sampson, S. D. 2012. The topophilia hypothesis: Ecopsychology meets evolutionary psychology. Pp. 23-53 in P. H. Kahn and P. H. Hasbach (eds.), Ecopsychology: Science Totems, and the Technological Species. MIT Press, Boston.

3.http://www.iucn.org/about/union/commissions/cec/cec_how_we_work/love__not_loss_/

4.   Sobel, D. 2004. Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities. Orion Society, Barrington, MA.

5.    Sobel, D. 2008. Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators. Stenhouse, Portland, Maine.

Image Sources (from top to bottom)

1. http://junkscience.com/2012/06/14/sun-runs-obligatory-northern-summer-stranded-poley-pictorial/

2. http://nowastewednesdays.com/2011/04/27/

3. http://www.thenaturalcapital.com/2009/10/getting-kids-into-nature-great-websites.html

4. http://studio3music.com/things-to-do/less-tv-what’s-a-parent-to-do/