Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002

Peter H. Kahn, Jr. and Stephen R. Kellert (Editors)

Are other primates capable of a sense of wonder? Consider the following incident described in the first chapter of this volume:
…in the middle of a summer day the entire chimpanzee colony gathered around a female called Mai. All were silent and stared at Mai’s behind, some poking a finger at it and then smelling the finger. Mai was standing half upright, with her legs slightly apart, holding one hand between her legs. An attentive older female mimicked Mai by cupping her hands between her own legs in the same way. After about ten minutes Mai tensed, squatted more deeply, and caught a baby in both hands. The crowd stirred, and Atlanta, Mai’s best friend, emerged with a scream, looking around, and embracing a couple of other chimpanzees next to her, one of whom uttered a shrill bark. (p.17)

Frans de Waal, who originally reported this fascinating incident, noted that the chimpanzees appeared as much interested in the birth process as the outcome, their behavior being motivated by a socially contagious empathy and a “genuine sense of wonder associated with witnessing the arrival of a new life in their midst” (p.17). It is gems like this that make the book a worthwhile acquisition for anyone wishing to learn about the relationships between our species and others in the broadest sense.
The editors have embarked upon an ambitious task and recognize the magnitude of it. They point out that the field is multidisciplinary, little studied, and that, consequently, no single volume could adequately cover it: “...nonetheless the chapters herein provide a start” (p. xviii). And this, to be fair, is in itself a worthwhile achievement. In collecting a dozen papers representing fields as disparate as evolutionary biology and political science, the editors have attempted to impose structure by providing a clearly written “Introduction” seeking, with modest success, to describe common themes and issues linking the contributions. The collection, however, falls short of being a coherent volume in which the contributions fit together as a logically connected whole. The reader is left, rather, with a series of independent papers reflecting several understandings of what constitutes “Nature.”

The authors seldom cite each other’s work; when they do, it is usually -- and not surprisingly -- an investigation from their own or a closely related discipline. Perhaps the editors might have been able to develop a more cohesive work had they encouraged the contributors to read and reflect on each other’s chapters before publication. Notably, too, the contributors almost wholly represent American, and certainly Western, conceptions of both children and the natural environment. There is little reference to cross-cultural perspectives beyond a brief discussion of the Menominee Indians in a chapter dealing with folkbiology, the cognitive processes used by people in understanding and classifying animals and plants. Certainly, the book would benefit from much more extensive consideration of cross-cultural perspectives such as the relationship with the land and nature experienced, for example, by North American indigenous peoples.

Several authors refer to “a love of Nature,” a simple phrase calling for some qualification: Nature is neither benign nor malevolent but, rather, neutral and amoral. Cancer cells are natural, chimps hunting and eating monkeys is natural, and the extinction (even mass extinction) of species is natural. Verbeek and de Waal and, notably, Kellert, refer to Wilson’s (1986) construct, biophilia, as providing a framework to help describe our adaptive cognitive and emotional relationship with the natural world. They speculate that the rules and associated learned behavior subsumed by the construct may be conceived of in a similar way to our “natural ability” for language and culture. Although several of the contributing writers discuss biophilia, it cannot be said to represent a theme that consistently links this series of essays.

A significant omission is a full discussion of the role of agriculture (neither “farming” nor “agriculture” appears in the index). Several authors appear to assume implicitly that rural environments are somehow more “natural” than urban ones, that forests and grassland, transformed by human activity, can awaken a deep bond between the individual and Nature. For example, in a chapter arguing that adolescents refer to nature as a template in reflecting on their own development, Thomashow writes of a teenager’s reaction to the loss of a lot adjacent to her suburban house:

This deep sense of loss uncovers a profound love for the natural world in which Tracy found solace, a place to think and separate from the confusion of everyday life. She bonded so thoroughly with the “wooded” area that having it leveled felt like a personal violation. (p. 265)

Rural environments frequently represent an exploitive transformation of wilderness no less than that of sprawling cities. Last year, I visited a forest of Norway pines in Australia, planted where native eucalypts previously flourished. The introduced trees, spaced equally apart, blotted out the sun, and the forest floor was bare and free of undergrowth. The place was eerily silent; no birds, no insects, no animals of any kind lived there, the trees growing strong and healthy in the absence of any natural enemies or parasites. Yet, I suppose that place was as “natural” as the vast tracts of former prairie given over to grain crops in North America.
Although Children and Nature raises many interesting points and provides thoughtful discussion of children’s relationships with living things, I found it fell short of its goal, perhaps because its editors attempted too much and did so from a cultural perspective that was predominantly American and urban. The cultural beliefs and values shared by most of the contributors assume a separation between humanity and Nature, not that humankind is part of Nature. Also shared, to some extent, is a tendency to view humans as in conflict with Nature and to romanticize the rural world as if it somehow were free of the contamination of the city.

Children and Nature is a thought-provoking effort to bring a wide range of perspectives to bear on an extremely complex set of issues. It is a worthwhile beginning.

Note
* Alan D. Bowd, Lakehead University, Canada


Reference

Wilson, E. O. (1986). Biophilia: The human bond with other species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

For Abstracts of all issues, including the most current, click Article Abstracts

To order Society & Animals Journal, go to our secure online ordering page

You can Search the online issues of Society & Animals, as well as the entire Society & Animals Forum (formerly PSYETA) website,
for topics and keywords of your interest: