Must we really a) Take b) Children c) Out Into Nature?
22 February 2023 - Hubert Mansion
My love of the law has given me the habit of analyzing one by one the terms of the injunctions imposed on us every day. When I see a sign saying "It's forbidden to walk on the lawn", I immediately wonder what is meant by "forbidden" (what's the penalty?), "walking" (can you lie on it?) and "lawn" (where does it start and where does it end?).
I hear more and more well-meaning people saying that "children must be taken out into nature". But what exactly does this banal phrase mean? It seems to me that it implies some very debatable things.
"We must"
I'll pass quickly over the "must". There are so many "musts" that, if they were all respected, we wouldn't have time to enjoy life. It's precisely this pleasure that the “must” attacks, by presenting contact with nature as an obligation. Associating nature with punishment is the best way to disgust everyone, and if recommendations of this kind were to have any effect, they should have been dropped a long time ago. We'd all have been obeying them for decades.
Besides, do children really need to be forced to go out? Research tells us it depends on age. Until early adolescence, the natural environment holds an innate fascination for children, and their main need is to be left in peace. Their later relationship with nature depends to a large extent on the anchoring they have acquired in childhood: the first priority is to enable them to enjoy the living world for as long as they feel like it. Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly rare, for the following reason.
"Take"
Why, indeed, do we recommend taking children out into nature? Because there isn't any nature around them. If primary and secondary schools, if day-care centers, if ministries of education had the slightest knowledge of the impact of nature on children's health and designed playgrounds resembling something other than a parking lot, there would be no need to move them to let them enjoy living things.
What's more, it's to be feared that the generalization of such an injunction will serve as justification for more asphalt, more irresponsible urban planning and even less concern for the fate of our fellow human beings: what does it matter if there are nature reserves 50 km away that we go to once a year?
In this view, nature lies elsewhere. You have to set up organized trips, hire buses and prepare zero-waste picnics if you hope to encounter it. In other words, children would be "cut off" from nature.
But what about the sky? What about the air they breathe? The trees in the city? The vegetation, the rivers, the wind, the urban birds and mammals? If this isn't nature, what is? What we're really being led to believe is that nature is a distant paradise, a possible leisure activity, not our environment: this is the philosophy of "naturalism" denounced by Philippe Descola, and which has led to our disconnection from the natural world.
What's more is that will never be enough to take groups of underprivileged children to natural places to resolve environmental inequality or build a sustainable world. How does a poor child feel when he returns to the concrete and ugliness after a walk in the forest? Has it made him happier or more desperate? Does he feel closer to the beauty of the world, or further away? Does he feel included or excluded? If I were him, I'd want to break everything...
"Children"
Who, after all, is going to take these children? Schools? The vast majority don't. There are many reasons for this: additional administrative burdens, lack of time, lack of resources, parental reluctance, etc. A YouTube documentary on the Amazon rainforest is infinitely easier to watch than a rural landscape. A few scattered cases of schools in the forest should not hide the immense disconnection of the school environment from nature.
Parents? 72 million American parents say they're too busy to get out in nature with their children. They spend an average of 11 hours a day in front of screens and, in the West, spend just 2% of their time in natural environments.
So why focus on children, who necessarily depend on an adult to get around, instead of really encouraging adults to get out and about, which would solve everyone's problem. After all, it comes down to one of two things: either we consider contact with nature to be essential for public health - and then we need to implement public health policies like we did for sport, for example; or we consider it to be just another leisure activity - and then why force children to do it, and not leave them to their own devices on TikTok?
"Into Nature”
Finally, what does the word "nature" mean in this sentence? Regardless of what the term refers to, and the connotations I've just mentioned, it's usually in culture that children are taken on these so-called nature expeditions. The aim is always to teach them something: to surpass themselves by "confronting the elements", to nurture a team spirit or to become aware of the perilous state of our planet - all of which are much more a matter of relating to our society than to nature.
Nature then serves only as a backdrop or pretext for transmitting values. The primary value being one that is highly debatable: that it's more important to learn than to feel.
In short, the injunction to "take children out into nature" adds to the burden of individual obligations without addressing those responsible for the problem. It displaces far away a problem that needs to be solved nearby, addresses people it doesn't help, and reinforces a culture we should perhaps get rid of - that of the supremacy of the cognitive, which is an insult to our own nature.
Hubert Mansion is the cofounder of l’Université dans la Nature.
Philosopher and writer, he is notably the author of Réconcilier, vers une identité environnementale (Nullius in Verba, 2023) and presents the series La nature et les mots (Youtube).