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Review Essay: Children and Nature in History
Bernard Mergen
The world had not always been round. Not until she could shinny up the garden fence post to sit contemplating, day after day, that never-changing circle of trees—periphery of the blue gutta-percha dome above. Until then she had caught glimpses of its roundness when Papa gave her a piggyback or let her ride astride his neck to protect her bare feet from sandburs or let her climb from his shoulders to the first crotch of the hackberry tree where he held her and forbade her to climb further. Until then she saw, in waking hours, the world at her own eye level: globs of moving people and things, shapeless under a shapeless sky.1
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| THESE LINES from Dorothy Mills Howard's Dorothy's World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom 1902–1910 encapsulate (or as Howard would prefer, "put in a nutshell") the dawning of a child's environmental consciousness. Howard (1902–1996) was a pioneering folklorist and brilliant autobiographer of childhood. Dorothy's World vividly recreates the sights, sounds, and tastes of a child's life in rural east Texas in the first years of the twentieth century. Howard's ability to evoke the ways in which an eight-year-old girl conceives her environment, and to recall how she felt as she grew to know it, is, I think, unmatched among oral histories and autobiographies of childhood. |
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This essay is a review of recent scholarship on children and nature, mostly by psychologists, sociologists, recreation specialists, and landscape designers. Many of the authors acknowledge that the idea of children and nature is an abstraction with little meaning until located in the lives of specific children in specific places at specific times, but they are less concerned with the past than with the future. Few historians have directly addressed the topic. Elliott West's Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier is a notable exception. West examined hundreds of published and unpublished oral histories and autobiographies to produce a picture of the impact of the prairies, farms, and mining camps of the West on children from 1840 to 1870. Other historians, such as Dominick Cavallo and David Nasaw, have touched on the urban environment.2 |
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While environment is relatively easy to define as the physical, biological, and cultural conditions in which an individual lives, nature is, in the words of Raymond Williams, "perhaps the most complex word in the language."3 When the words are joined in the literature on children and nature in the phrase "natural environments," the meaning is generally, but not always, assumed to be the non-human environment. I will comment further on this as I review some of the important literature on children and nature, offer some additional insights gleaned from autobiographies of childhood, and suggest some possibilities for research on the interrelation of children and the natural environment. My principal goals are to encourage historians to study children and nature, to show how scholarship in the social sciences can provide hypotheses to investigate, and to call attention to some of the relatively neglected sources for understanding this important topic. Many of the assumptions about the importance of childhood and of nature are products of the recent past and need to be placed in their historical context. Historians also must be prepared to use a variety of interdisciplinary techniques. Autobiographies of childhood, for example, must be analyzed as literature as well as historical documents. |
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