Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

Observing nature requires quiet contemplation. The practice of studying nature is calming.

In his 1993 memoir The Thunder Tree, ecologist Robert Pyle coined the term “extinction of experience,” and since then many researchers have jumped into the fray. There are bodies of work on the demonstrable decline of kids’ contact with nature, as well as the negative impacts of this trend—most alarmingly captured in Richard Louv’s 2005 Last Child

The pandemic rubbed our noses in that reality by taking away so much that we’d taken for granted. Of course, impermanence has always been the norm. Friends move away. Family members die. Social media communities dissolve. We leave our hometowns for school or better jobs. As our communities repeatedly splinter, we’re forced to engage in a lifelong r

Until the moment I became a father, I never felt truly and absolutely responsible for anyone. Becoming a parent is an epiphany: You’re up! As part of my responsibilities to my children, I knew that I was wholly responsible for teaching them everything I knew about being a human who feels at home in nature.

I do still suffer guilt for not having taken greater precautions to protect my son from Lyme disease. We were lax about insect repellent that day and I hadn’t tucked his pants legs into his socks to prevent ticks from crawling out of the grass and up his legs. I didn’t check him thoroughly when we got home. That goes for myself, too. In many ways,

This idea that the world is perpetually going to hell seems hard-wired into our psyche. There’s a thought, often misattributed to Socrates, that Garson O’Toole (aka the Quote Investigator) traced to the 1907 dissertation of an otherwise unknown Cambridge student named Kenneth John Friedman. It laments the intergenerational discord in ancient Greece

When I say looking up at nature, I’m referring to a more contemporary perspective that regards nature as being more pure or beautiful than ourselves. This perspective holds that nature is somehow diminished through human involvement, even when that involvement is responsible and well-meaning. In environmental circles, this perspective is often desc

When you allow yourself to become enthusiastic about the natural world around you, your enthusiasm will be infectious to your children. It won’t all be a picnic. Your kids may roll their eyes at you, or worse. The whining and fighting during that two-hour car ride to the lake may make you want to bag the whole trip. No matter what, though, stick wi

What birds visit your home habitat? Buy a bird identification book and install a birding app on your phone. (The Sibley Guide to Birds is a phenomenal book; the region-specific Eastern and Western North America books are even better. For apps, try eBird, which was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.)