Rediscovering the Geography of Childhood:
Reconnecting our Children and Ourselves to the Land
We need to return to learning about the land by being on the land, or better, by being in the thick of it. That is the best way we can stay in touch with the fates of its creatures, its indigenous cultures, its earthbound wisdom. That is the best way we can be in touch with ourselves. – Gary Paul Nabhan
While perusing the shelves of The Haunted Bookshop, a now defunct Tucson, AZ treasure trove of southwestern-themed books back in the mid-90s, I came across a book that would transform the way I thought about the origins of my own relationship to nature. The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, a collection of essays by Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, turned out to be seminal in how I thought about the work I was doing at the time and later had a strong influence on how I parented my own two children. The two co-authors, both naturalists, outdoor adventurers and fathers, make a case for the value for children of regular access to and immersion in nature. They decry the lack of opportunities in our modern techno-industrial world for urban, suburban and rural children to experience the natural world directly and get to know the plants and animals that exist near them. The book celebrates the natural affinity children have for nature, if given the opportunity, and urges parents to be active in facilitating those encounters and fostering that connection.
In creating a stage for our children’s stories, we make choices. We stake out the geographies of their childhoods in home landscapes, consciously or unconsciously. To do so attentively begins by thinking as a native of a region. We become part of a particular world of earth and plants and animals and humans. – Stephen Trimble
The origins of my own connections to the land did not originate with summers on the farm, camping adventures or trips into the wilderness. I was a suburban kid who just happened to have access to a large weedy field behind our home. There, my friends and I created trails, temporary ‘forts,’ imaginary battlefields, and excavations. There was a low excavated area which filled with muddy water in the spring, providing us with a swamp to explore. I was able to chase and net butterflies, nurturing a fascination with insects. We eventually drew maps of the area, with place names related to our adventures. This was also where we could go to engage in unauthorized behavior, such as gathering tinder for small campfires whenever someone had procured a pack of matches and to experiment with a first cigarette (it would be many years before I tried another). These sorts of accessible wild spaces, where children can play uninhibited by the watchful eyes of adults have been found to be not just preferred by young children as ‘playgrounds’ but essential to developing confidence, independence, problem-solving skills, and creativity.
A key impediment to children’s ability to access the wild areas immune from the watchful eyes of adults is, of course, the concerns about safety. In another important book that addresses this, Leave No Child Behind, by Richard Louv, he describes ‘nature-deficit disorder’ as a modern affliction of children deprived of the developmental benefits of regular time in the outdoors. In addition to the lack of suitable places and lack of opportunity, he cites the increase in screen time, the over-scheduling of play, and the fear factor. He argues that parental and societal fear, also known as ‘stranger danger,’ has wrongly confined children indoors, despite statistics showing that kids are actually safer outdoors today than in the past. He states that, “Yes, there are risks outside our homes. But there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgement and value of place…to their psychological and physical health.”
To counter the historic trend toward the loss of wildness where children play, it is clear that we need to find ways to let children roam beyond the pavement, to gain access to vegetation and earth that allows them to tunnel, climb, or even fall. And because formal playgrounds are the only outdoors that many children experience anymore, should we be paying more attention to planting, and less to building on them? – Gary Paul Nabhan
One of the ways that The Geography of Childhood influenced my professional life was that I became a passionate advocate for nature play. The public nature center where I worked, like similar places, had established trails that visitors were admonished to remain on and rules prohibiting collecting. The mantra, ‘Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but memories,’ derived from the ‘Leave no Trace’ wilderness ethics movement, was on our welcome signs and on printed literature. Our goal was to create a quiet, peaceful contrast to the hustle and bustle of suburbia, a place where nature’s needs were paramount and humans were visitors. While the site still pursues those goals and maintains a mission of preservation, rambunctious, curious children are no longer viewed as an impediment to serious nature study. Nature play, inspired possibly by The Geography of Childhood, but certainly by what was happening with youth education in many European countries, was emerging as a way to facilitate engagement by youth with the outdoors and natural environments. I was an instant convert, thanks to the writings of Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble.
Spring Valley Nature Center today boasts an immensely popular nature playground, where children are encouraged to run, climb up into towers and onto faux rock cliffs, splash in a shallow sandy-bottomed stream, dig and play in a large sand pit, and create with natural materials. Removed from the nature playground, along the nature center trails, are several ‘play pockets’ which provide more unique natural settings for nature play, movement, and creating with mud, sticks, etc. As an engineered, manufactured play space, the new nature playground gets lots of attention, but I always had a preference for the play pockets where kids rubbed up against the ‘real world’ of streams, mucky ponds, brushy woods, and large logs to climb and balance upon.
As parents, we can take our children with us to the land. We can be there with them as they climb on rocks, play in streams and waves, dig in the rich soil of woods and gardens, putter and learn. Here, on the land, we learn from each other. Here, our children’s journey begins. – Stephen Trimble
It has occurred to me often over the years, that while encounters with the natural world are especially important for children’s development, they remain important for ALL of us throughout our lives. They serve as a salve for our emotions, our intellects and our spiritual well-being. They help us remain grounded and, if we nurture our curiosity and desire to learn, the land can serve as a book with endless fascinating stories to discover. Even a passing familiarity with the terrain, flora, fauna, and weather of the place we live provides us a sense of place and belonging. These encounters with wild nature don’t require that we live next to a national forest, head off into the mountains on a multi-day trek or raft down a wilderness river. They are available in the tall reeds at the margins of a local pond, in the brushy woods at the end of a dead-end street, in a weedy urban lot, in the back forty, or the trails in a county park. While these sorts of places don’t always possess the scenic grandeur we often seek out when we travel, they are easily accessible, which make them available for everyone, on a daily basis. Indeed, they can be found in our own backyards if we allow a little wildness to make a home among our cultivated lawns and neatly trimmed hedges. Living a life where these sorts of encounters are relished and sought out, even occasionally, benefits our mind and spirit in a way that keeps us coming back for more. Busy adults and harried parents especially, need these respites to help relieve stress and get grounded.
Farmers must learn patience, the patience of waiting for crops to grow. A naturalist’s immersion in wildness by observing birds, bugs, or mammals requires patience, too—a virtue learned through even a small dose of experience with the natural world…Children building forts, poking around ponds, climbing trees, and hiding in tall grass understand this. – Stephen Trimble
The Geography of Childhood was written at a time before technology, cell phones, online gaming, and social media had captured the minds of American youth (and adults). Nonetheless, the authors described alienation of modern youth from the land, mainly resulting from a lack of opportunities. Certainly, they would view our current circumstances with even greater alarm. All of us carry with us the geographies of our childhood, whether that was an inner-city neighborhood, a city park where we frequently played, grandma’s farm during summer visits, or a weedy suburban field. Just a few generations ago, those geographies were mostly rural and unchanging for our ancestors. Most people remained in or near to the communities where they were raised. One of the challenges of modern life is that so many of us move around so much that we always feel uprooted and disconnected to any particular landscape or community. This makes it even more imperative that we make a conscious effort to set limits on our screentime—especially for our children—and insist on spending time outdoors, walking through our neighborhood, meeting our neighbors, digging in the dirt, smelling the changes of season in the air. Their/our health and the health of our society depend on this. The landscapes created as settings for video games and now increasingly by artificial intelligence, where many children spend inordinate amounts of time, are no substitute for the real world.
The Earth enfolds people in storm or warm sun, in the glory of light filtering through the canopy of deep woods, or in the eddying flow of rivers—without regard for whether we say the right words, wear the right clothes, or believe the right dogma…the land releases us from competition. Such acceptance restores us for the social fight. – Stephen Trimble
I firmly believe that it is never too late in life to establish a relationship with the land. Not having these experiences as part of your childhood does make the introduction as an adult more challenging but not impossible. After all, many adults find it much harder to make new friends than they did as children. This is a helpful way to think of this. Once the circle of acquaintances derived from fellow parents fades after the kids are grown or from the workplace after retirement, many older adults often choose to involve themselves in community groups or volunteer endeavors as a way of meeting others their age. Think of the natural world as the old friend you lost touch with in adulthood, or maybe never really got to know well earlier in life. That friend is ready to join you on your next walk and welcome you into a deeper relationship.
