“Close your eyes for a moment and picture a place from childhood that’s extremely meaningful,” directed Opening Session keynote speaker Dr. Scott Sampson. “Imagine what it looks like, feels like, who you’re there with, what the smells are.”
By an almost unanimous show of hands, Dr. Scott, host and science advisor of the Emmy-nominated PBS KIDS television series “Dinosaur Train” and author of How to Raise a Wild Child: The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature, illustrated how, for a large number in the audience, that extremely meaningful childhood place involves the outdoors. The audience largely consisted of Baby Boomers/Generation Xers who remember enjoying abundant, unstructured outdoor playtime as kids. For many of today’s youth, those childhood places will look much different.
We all know the importance of connecting children with nature and the outdoors. But, we hear it so often that, like “global warming” or “climate change,” the reference begins to lose its urgency. With that simple opening exercise, Dr. Scott deftly laid out the “crisis” that the world is headed toward if we don’t get kids and communities connected to nature. Imagine 25 years from now, he posits, how many hands would be raised in response to the same question about a meaningful childhood place involving the outdoors. “If people don’t spend any time outside, why are they going to care about their local places let alone the national parks in the distance,” he asked.
Dr. Scott suggests that “urban rewilding” in our cities and town is what’s needed to head off this crisis. Rewilding is a term usually used in connection with reintroducing an apex predator into an ecosystem in an attempt to restore balance. A familiar example of this top-down approach to restoring balance would be the efforts to return wolves to Yellowstone Park. Urban rewilding is a bottom up approach that starts with the simple act of planting mostly native plants. They are critical to attracting native insects, which in turn attract birds and various animals back to the local ecosystem. And, if we do urban rewilding right, cities could become places where nature is welcome. And once that happens, we need to help children develop NEW eyes to see nature: to notice it, engage with it — play is an important way for kids to engage with nature and it also allows them to gain some experience with risk-taking, while developing a sense of wonder about it.
This movement to “rewild” or “wild” children touches on all three NRPA Pillars — Conservation, Health and Wellness and Social Equity. However, it’s a movement that requires big thinking about what we want the future to look like and for each community that future will look different. It also will require deep collaboration among multiple organizations that bring their various areas of expertise, each doing their part to achieve the end goal of successful, thriving communities. “We’re at a juncture where the decisions we and the next generation make will determine the course of this planet for thousands of years to come,” Dr. Scott noted. He then challenged us to go out into our communities and think about what those collaborations could be, look like and grow into, and to think big because “that’s where success resides.”