Outdoor Nation

When I think back to now to my own childhood in a rural mining village in Warwickshire, it strikes me how much of it was enjoyed outdoors.

One of my earliest memories is playing hopscotch on the badly laid, uneven pavement outside our house. Not long after I recall tramping off with friends into the woods to build a dam in a local stream. A few years later, on holiday, I was learning to fish in rockpools with my dad, perched patiently on the slippery rocks hoping to get a bite.

Playing outside was something my generation did, and we were better for it. Certainly there were times when we came home with cuts and bruises – or even broken bones – but when we did we brought something else back with us: a lesson about the world.

If you fell out of a tree, it hurt. But it taught you either what not to do next time or that tree climbing was not for you. It gave you a healthy respect for the physical world around you, what risks you could reasonably take and what to do differently next time.

Subsequent generations have it seems gradually been deprived of that connection with the outdoors and the education that it afforded them.

When I speak to employers they often tell me that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find young people to take up apprenticeships who have the physical or mechanical aptitude of people they would have interviewed 10 or 15 years earlier. They haven’t built a go-kart to race down a local hill, or repaired a puncture on their bike.

In HSE, we are focused on health and safety in the workplace, but it is clear that attitudes to risk are formed long before young people enter the world of work. Play – and particularly play outdoors – teaches young people how to deal with risk. Without this awareness and learning they are ill equipped to deal with working life. Our health and safety system in Britain requires workplace risks to be managed, not eliminated, and gives people responsibility for their own wellbeing. We simply cannot afford to exclude outdoor play and learning from our children’s education.

Young people are curious, and they learn quickly. We should not deny them the opportunity to learn by taking risks. Seeking to protect them from every conceivable hazard, rather than sensibly managing the genuine risks they face, ultimately leaves them in harm’s way, not to mention robbing them of memories that last a lifetime.

By Judith Hackitt CBE, Chair of the Health and Safety Executive

There is a substantial and growing body of evidence that children’s psychological and emotional development requires a meaningful connection to nature and natural spaces and this is being championed by the National Trust amongst other organisations.

I write this as a Clinical Psychologist with over twenty years experience of working with adults and children, as an unashamedly obsessive amateur naturalist, and also as a parent of very young twins; in them theory and practice have converged, at times in the most unexpected of ways.

I have worked with some of the most dangerous offenders this country has ever produced; and many victims. In this context my own connection to Nature and the outdoors has been my antidote. This is partly because it is restorative, ‘getting away from it all’, and also because it can be exciting, uplifting: noticing, for example, a sparrowhawk dive-bombing pigeons, or stumbling across badger cubs at play, sets my heart racing and takes me out of myself. There is also something more fundamental that takes place. I need my connection to the natural world, it grounds me as nothing else can: it earths my current.

So when I became a father, it was important for me to encourage my children’s relationship with nature. In the debate about how we go about doing this, it seems to me all too often the solution seems to involve going somewhere, to the ‘Great Outdoors’, or plants and animals that are striking, eye catching. This view quite literally misses the trees for the wood. Nature is everywhere, in every nook and cranny of even the most concrete of jungles. There is no need to go looking; it can start with the obvious, the ordinary, the seemingly mundane.

In my children’s everyday environment are bees, ladybirds, butterflies, spiders, birds, and, though it irks me to admit it, I have even come to value the contribution of the grey squirrel. These are all within most children’s grasp no matter where they live and my children have taught me that any animate object holds an inherent fascination.

If you raise chimps and human babies in exactly the same way the first sign of divergence is that human babies point and vocalise at the same time; the first attempts at language use. So as parents we have named and pointed out all these animals, we have made sightings matter; in response the children continually point them out back to us. Within no time every encounter with a ladybird, often the same one over and over again, was met with excited proclamations of “daybee, daybee”. I have been amazed that even before they were eighteen months old, they had different ‘names’ with which to distinguish an array of creatures and how quickly they started noticing them before I did. And in that process of noticing and naming, their relationship with those animals has been fundamentally altered.

I hope my children’s fledgling fascination with nature will blossom into much more. I hope that as they get older this will act as a counterbalance to the largely sedentary and housebound worlds of television and computer games. I also have a vague sense of something much more fundamental going on here because through it all I am constantly surprised at how little encouragement they need. Facilitating their relationship with the natural world not only helps them locate their place within nature but also helps them become aware of the nature that is within them. Because within the blink of an evolutionary eye, their very survival would have depended precisely on these connections they are making. In order for them to be who they are, or to become who they are capable of becoming, it seems vital to me that they are encouraged to express and understand all of their natural instincts.

Elie Godsi

Consultant Clinical Psychologist

On the face of it it’s a no brainer – should children be exposed to the countryside, have the freedom to explore and marvel at nature’s colours and diversity and great trees to climb, do it with friends, get the exercise and come back covered in mud bearing stories of insects and with light in their eyes?  The answer is of course yes….we know it by instinct, by thinking on the generations that have done it before and often on reflecting on our own childhood and what we really enjoyed.  Compare it with the arid uniform grey landscape often found in the cities.   It is a good idea on so many levels  – not least connecting us all to the land on which we depend and from which we have come.

And is it healthy?  Well we know exercise is good for you at any age – and in children it helps develop stamina, balance, strong bones and burns off those calories and all that pent up energy.

Children feel better about themselves when they exercise and are a healthy weight.  Lack of exercise leads to low stamina, low energy and being overweight.  We are now officially the fattest country in Europe and children get far too little exercise especially with many schools having sold off their playing fields.  Furthermore obese children have a higher long term risk of future disease especially diabetes and are probably more prone to low moods and even being depressed (we know in adults that exercise is both protective against and helpful with depression.)

Exercise also promotes the formation of strong bones and the bulk of bone formation is during childhood.  Furthermore sunshine gives us vitamin D which is needed for bone formation and how important this is may be reflected by the increasing awareness of just how many people are  vitamin D deficient.

Finally there is the aspect of children being able to play without fear.  So often in the concrete environment there are concerns and the countryside is a relatively safe environment where children can explore and be adventurous – qualities that should be developed to help build their confidence.

So for all these reasons, get your children out into nature – especially when the sun is shining!

Derek Chase FRCGP

General Practitioner, London

If you are interested in finding out more about how getting healthy is also good for the environment then please take a look at the NHS Sustainable Development Unit website where you can find out how the NHS is doing its bits for the environment/planet.

Few things lodge quite as firmly in the mind of a child as a snake silently sliding along your left thigh during a game of hide and seek. I had never seen a snake outside a zoo, let alone touched one, but I stared transfixed by a round, black pupil as its muscular olive flanks curled over my knees in a seemingly endless length and disappeared back into the russet and green fronds that fringed the ditch I was sitting in. I ran home screaming that there was a ‘ladder in the bracken field’.

My parents soon established from my vivid description of a yellow collar that it was neither ‘a ladder’ nor an adder, but a harmless, if somewhat overfriendly, grass snake. I was sent straight back and the game carried on. Looking back, two things strike me about the incident: firstly that my screams weren’t out of fear but excitement and secondly, the fact that my parents returned me to a snake-infested place to play! I’m sure both would be different for a child now.

But my brother and I were lucky. From babies we were encouraged to develop a profound connection with nature and every day was spent playing outside. I remember snapshots: being dragged bleary eyed from bed before dawn to watch a new badger sett, the flashing sapphire of kingfishers on a silver river, roe deer drifting through the trees like smoke as we roamed over the moors with our gang of friends. The grass snake merely confirmed what I already knew to be true: the patch of wild land that lay beyond our house was a magical kingdom that was ours to explore.

Summer days evaporated like morning mist in the endless adventures we found beyond the roads and houses of town. We busied ourselves building dens and bases, swimming in the freezing drop pools fed by moorland streams and gorging on the bilberries plucked from ling and heather. Rain brought mud and all its joys, snow epic sledging battles where old plastic animal feed bags borrowed from a sheep pen whipped us down slopes at breakneck speed. There were rules of course: be back before nightfall and never split up. If one comes home, all come home. However there was an understanding in parents that it was better for us to be playing outside. It was the greatest gift we could have been given and one that has enriched my life ever since.

Later I discovered how fortunate our childhood was; an outdoor-focused life was already a rarity for most British children in the 1980s. The proliferation of screen-based media in homes happened fast; video players, affordable televisions, the first personal computers – all moved our focus squarely inside. It was a profound and seemingly irreversible shift in the minds of children and, perhaps most importantly, adults. It also made childhood a far more expensive affair.

This generation

Growing up now requires our learning of the systems and processes of a technologically advanced age. The accessibility of information means the two-dimensional screen dictates our every move, it keeps us indoors and living in virtual silos and has resulted in the curious paradox that we are all connected to the wider world yet disconnected from our closest surroundings. We are encouraged to spend our rare holidays far away in carbon-copy foreign resorts. At home our experience of nature comes through the safe, clean filter of laptops and HD TVs; we draw the curtains against the cry of the fox and the call of the owl to watch wildlife shows. Our food comes washed and shrink-wrapped from around the globe and our daily movements are made via the climate-controlled cages of cars, buses and trains. We find ourselves too busy even to notice the seasons change. If we do spend time in the outdoors, we tend to march through it from A to B; we ‘do’ a walk, projecting goals onto the landscape rather than taking the time to really be in it in the same way we did as children.
Yet we all know that slowing down and spending time in nature is good for us. Why else would anyone pay more for a room with a view? The National Trust’s much-needed Natural Childhood report details the myriad physical and psychological benefits the outdoors can have upon us and the list will strike a chord with anyone that grew up enjoying an outside life. It reinforces that fact that the human animal evolved to be in nature and there are riches to be discovered when we return to our natural habitat; a transformation both physical and psychological. Just think of the way our eyes adjust with the smudging dark of dusk, shifting from using cones to rods as a natural night vision kicks to provide a far more effective motion sensor. Our surviving and thriving over millions of years depended on such a closeness to and symbiosis with our natural environment; it explains how we have managed to adapt to exist in some of the most inhospitable landscapes on this planet.

Even now, if we take the time to strip away the filters and walk out into nature, our innate joy and inquisitiveness soon returns. There is a yearning to explore, to touch, smell, watch and wonder at the three-dimensional natural space. It can be seen most immediately and powerfully in children. The same kid that stifles yawns in front of man’s greatest architectural or artistic wonders will invariably be entranced by a vast tree for climbing or a simple den in the woods. Nature reveals itself as the greatest playground, one that should be part of any and every childhood. From waves of grass beneath our feet to the wide perspective of a sunset descending across the pastel-blue horizon, the stimuli are endless: the cracking open of buds, the scurrying of creatures in the undergrowth, the depth and range of birdsong in a darkening wood, the unbelievable yellow of rapeseed, the power of a river in spate, the arc of the sun shifting shadows. All is alive and we become truly alive within it.

It’s not their fault

It was a realisation that drove Leo Critchley and I to write our book Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild. We had met while imprisoned in a London office and found that we shared the same sense of dislocation in our entirely city based existence. We felt unhappy and uprooted and struck on an idea for a book of activities that would help us to slow down, draw closer to and connect with the wild in the same profound way we had as children. From skimming stones and catching fish with homemade rods to carving elder whistles and building igloos, we wanted to share the techniques to simple activities that help us to really be in the spaces that lie outside our day-to-day lives. At the same time, we wanted to explore the philosophical and physical reasons why time spent doing such things in the outdoors enriches our bodies and minds, reflecting on why birdsong affects our mood or how finding a fossil can impart a unique perspective.

Our journey took us through Britain’s woods, seashores, rivers, fields and fells, as well as more deeply into ourselves. The many nights we spent under a canopy of stars or days sitting quietly in a wood gave time for reflection on how much people, and most importantly, children are missing out on the same journeys. With each step we felt the growing joy of tapping into the greater rhythms of day and night, the changing seasons, the tides, the lessons of real-time life, death and re-creation; the simple sense of acceptance that comes from a ladybird landing on your hand; the feeling of otherworldliness that following deer prints through a snowy field brings. We became increasingly convinced that there has to be a societal shift towards making such experiences a key part of every child’s life. Just as kids are encouraged to eat five fruit and vegetables a day or take regular exercise, we must all recognise that immersion in natural spaces and unstructured outdoor play is vital to their health and development.

Yet there was a reason we wrote our book to appeal as much to adults. In order that I could experience the unforgettable, alien wonder of a grass snake slithering over my knees as a boy, I had to be outside, but I was only there because of my parents encouraged it. They shared a profound connection to nature of their own, something that has become irrelevant in our modern interior-bound world. The ever-growing disconnection and irrational fear in parents and those that directly and indirectly influence children is as much to blame for young people’s nature-deficit disorder as the lure of video games. As Betjeman wrote: “It’s not their fault they do not know, birdsong from the radio.”

Even those adults that do recognise the importance of the outdoors have lost many of the skills held by previous generations that provided a vital route in. The landscape has become an amorphous, impenetrable mass on the fringes of our vision. Our hope is that our book provides an intervention and inspiration, a guide that explains the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of reconnecting with it whatever our age.

Children aren’t fools; they recognise hypocrisy everywhere. It is no good espousing the benefits of outdoor play if we grown-ups don’t share the same sense of connection with wild space. We must remember that the establishing nature in childhood will only happen if we recognise its importance and take the time to let it grow just as strongly in our own lives.

Rob Cowen is co-author of ‘Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild‘, published by Hodder/Coronet.