Bernard Mergen

Review Essay: Children and Nature in History

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

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.

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 West examined hundreds of published and unpublished oral histories and autobiographies to produce a picture of the impact of the prairies, farms, and mining camps of the West on children from 1840 to 1870.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

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.

Consider the deceptively simple paragraph at the beginning of this essay. The roundness of the world is not meant literally, but captures perfectly the sense of order that comes from comparative perspectives. The creeping or toddling infant rarely glimpses more than a fragment of its physical environment. The slow process of piecing together observations made near the ground is accelerated when the child is raised to adult eye-level. A child's desire to be given a piggyback ride may stem from multiple desires—for intimacy, for the sheer pleasure of vertigo, to avoid painful objects on the ground, or to get a better view—but in Howard's depiction, it is the crucial first step toward an ever-ascending field of vision, from father's back, to neck, to the branch of a tree within his reach, and finally to the fence post. The "Thinking Post," as Howard calls it, may not be higher than the other perches, but it can be climbed alone, whenever and for as long as her free time allows. The fundamental truth of a child's experience of nature is that it comes with autonomy.

Questions

WHEN CHILDREN'S environments are considered by social scientists, several questions invariably arise: How different are children's perceptions of nature from adults, what can we learn from children, and what are the connections, if any, between childhood experiences and the environmental attitudes of adults? To what extent are children's perceptions shaped by human evolution? What is the role of race, gender, age, and cultural differences in children's attitudes toward nature? How important to children is wilderness or relatively unmanaged nature, and what kind of nature study and outdoor challenge programs provide the most positive experience with nature for children? Can cities provide a meaningful experience of nature for children? What is the role of pets to children's environmental awareness? What is a child's sense of place?

These are among the questions raised in one of the most recent studies, Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations, edited by Peter H. Kahn, Jr., research associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and Stephen R. Kellert, professor of social ecology at Yale University, as well as in one of the pioneering attempts to define the field, Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment: Proceedings of a Symposium-Fair sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service in 1975.⁴ The symposium was the brainchild of Elwood Shafer of the Forest Service's Pinchot Institute of Environmental Forestry Research. Its participants represented a wide range of academics; local, state, and federal health, recreation, and park officials; and individuals working in the fields of child development and environmental studies. The Kahn and Kellert collection presents the work of mainly university-based ecologists, biologists, and psychologists. Despite the very different origins of these volumes and the twenty-five years that separate their publication, their conclusions—that children in 1975 and 2000 are being denied the opportunity to explore wild places and to learn about nature—are similar.

This conclusion rests not so much on empirical evidence as on unresolved anxieties over the future of both children and nature. Today's parks and playgrounds are the products of a narrative of declension and loss that begins in the 1890s. I am not arguing that the concern is misplaced, only that we should be skeptical of mythic representations of nature and of the child.⁵ The contributions to Children and Nature, to Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment, and to such publications as Environment and Behavior (1968- ) and Children's Environments Quarterly (1984–1991, succeeded by Children's Environments, 1992–1995) are based on two key assumptions: first, that nature, however defined, is a good place with inherent powers to improve human behavior, and second, that children, usually defined as those aged five to twelve, are a distinct group of humans, unlike adults, and in special need of nature. A corollary to these assumptions is that childhood experiences with nature are crucial to developing good adult environmentalists. These anxieties and assumptions offer historians a great opportunity to clarify the issues and contextualize the debate over how to save nature and children. Many theorists argue that children need to be alone in nature in order to fully appreciate their relationship to it, while historical studies suggest that children in the past spent most of their time in the company of others. Did children in the nineteenth century really have as much time to become acquainted with their physical environments as today's child from a smaller family?

Children and Adults

MOST OF THE PARTICIPANTS in the Forest Service symposium assumed without doubt that children experience their environments, natural and cultural, differently from adults. In the first paper in the proceedings, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan asserts that, "To the small child events and objects seem vivid and dramatic because their utilitarian, social, or scientific contexts are not perceived."⁶ He also argues that small children learn as much through their senses of smell, taste, and touch as through sight and sound, and that a child's senses are undulled by age. On the other hand, Tuan acknowledges, children cannot appreciate what they sense until they acquire the ability to discriminate among odors, tastes, and textures. As they learn to label experiences, they lose the inchoate richness of experience itself. Appreciation of this paradox leads geographer Briavel Holcomb "to question whether natural settings are in fact so necessary to young children, and to explore further the environmental perceptions, preferences and needs of preschool children. Could it be that we adults are imposing our tastes and preferences on children, claiming that they need nature, trees, grass, flowers and other living things when in fact it is we who want them?"⁷ Holcomb showed fifteen four-year-olds pictures of woods and mountains, "natural" scenes, and pictures of buildings and streets. Rather than selecting images of nature over urban, the children preferred places they associated with pleasurable activities and friendly people.

In Children and Nature, psychologists John Coley, Gregg Solomon, and Patrick Shafto focus on children's understanding of the biological world, or, as they label it, folkbiology. Specifically they ask at what age a child develops an understanding of biology sufficient to constitute a folk theory, and is the child's understanding of biology just a simpler version of an adult's, or is it profoundly different? Their answer, based on a review of recent studies, is that "children as young as two-year-olds assume that members of named kinds share underlying properties despite superficial dissimilarities."⁸ This conclusion is based on a study in which two-year-olds were shown pictures of a brontosaurus and a rhinoceros, and then told that the dinosaur was cold-blooded and the rhino warm-blooded. When given a picture of a triceratops and told it was a dinosaur, the children correctly inferred that it belonged to the cold-blooded class of animals. Coley's final conclusion is that a child's understanding of biology is not qualitatively different, but that children do experience a significant conceptual change when they move beyond essentialism to grasp evolutionary theory—a conceptual change that, according to polls, a large number of Americans never achieve.

Two brief observations on the significance of folkbiology in considering the difference between children's and adult's perceptions and conceptions of nature should be made. First, the question comes out of nineteenth-century ideas about childhood as the most "natural" time in a person's life. Children were seen as preserving a pre-industrial heritage in their play in fields and forests. In the 1890s, folklorist Fanny D. Bergen published two essays on children's folkbiology that anticipate both Tuan and Coley. After listing many of the plants children eat—biscuit leaf, cinnamon fern, swamp apples, willow twig, and thistles—she observes that: "Children perhaps, as a rule, take little cognizance of odors, but must unconsciously be more or less influenced by them; for in later years a whiff of some wild perfume recalls more vividly than can aught else happy scenes and experiences of one's early years. ... Children have a happy facility in naming their flowers and fruits,—sometimes with visible reason, often without. In eastern Massachusetts they call the spikes of fruit of the sweet flag (Acorus calamus) critch-crotches, probably from the zigzag lines which mark the divisions between each member of the spike and its neighbors. But why Boston school children should call the round fruits of the linden monkey-nuts I cannot guess."⁹ The repeal of Victorian reticence allows us to guess, and to recognize the bawdy nature of children's lore—another characteristic that links the mental processes of children and adults. Tuan may be right that children have a richer direct sensory experience of nature because their nibbling and browsing habits are not yet limited by adult conventions, but Bergen's point about the power of odors to trigger memory suggests that the reservoir of sensory experience is always available.

The use of dinosaurs in the experiment cited by Coley and his associates is interesting because it shows how mediated knowledge of nature is accepted as equivalent to personal knowledge. Since we cannot know anything about dinosaurs except through illustrations, museum recreations, movies, and toys, asking a psychologist or a child to put pictures of these animals into categories is to place great faith in the current state of paleontology. The fact that Robert Bakker and others were advancing the warm-blooded dinosaur thesis about the time the children's classification studies were done is not unimportant. The landscape of the Jurassic may be more familiar to children in the twenty-first century than that of their grandparents' farms, but this was not always the case. The popularity of dinosaurs among children has a history that should be considered when discussing children's perceptions of nature.¹⁰

Evolution

PETER VERBEEK and B. M. de Waal address the second question raised by the contributors to the Kahn and Kellert book, the evolutionary origins of children's relationships with nature, in a review of research on primates. They conclude that our primate kin perceive nature directly as humans do; they exhibit biophilia by showing emotions of attachment, belonging, and security; like us they use nature for food and medicine; and like us they express a sense of wonder at phenomena such as storms. In a following chapter, Judith Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians extrapolate from a number of studies of infant and child behavior to argue that current human neural capacities and response patterns are the result of adaptations to environmental conditions as humans evolved. Ways of gathering and processing topographical and ecological knowledge necessary for survival in the hunting-and-gathering era are presumed to remain operative in our species today. When young children respond to storms with fear or a sense of wonder, when they choose to play in sheltered areas and to construct clubhouses, and when they prefer to play with small objects close at hand, they are behaving in ways that promoted the survival of their ancestors. Some inherited behaviors may be potentially harmful, such as mouthing (nibbling and browsing?), because there are so many more poisonous materials in the environment today. Moreover, children now live in the virtual environments of television, video games, and the Internet. The result, Heerwagen and Orians fear, is a devaluation of local nature and the overvaluing of national parks and charismatic megafauna as seen on nature programs.¹¹

As Edmund Russell has recently argued in this journal, an evolutionary approach to environmental history holds great promise.¹² The same may be said for the history of childhood, which has its own long and complex relationship with evolutionary history, beginning in the 1880s with the work of psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Hall believed that children recapitulate stages of human evolution as they grow from infants to adults. His ideas were further simplified by advocates of playgrounds such as Hall's student Henry S. Curtis, who, writing in support of climbing structures in boy's playgrounds, claimed that "the tree lures the ape in him to its ancestral home." In 1933, the Playground Equipment Company advertised its "Junglegym" as the equivalent of trees, claiming its apparatus "meets a deep-seated instinct for climbing."¹³ The catalog pictured children climbing on a Junglegym in preference to nearby trees. The search for design solutions to the lack of natural environments continues to be a dominant thread in work on children and nature. Beverly Driver and Peter Greene asserted in 1975 that "Primitive man's response to biological cycles, his need to form cognitive maps and to explore the unknown, his need for perceiving patterns and making sense of his surroundings, his psychophysiological preference for elbow room, for natural ionized air, and for freedom from excessive noise—all are characteristic of modern man." "We should strive," they continued, "to redesign urban areas with more of an eye toward interspersing natural and man-made elements." To this they added a footnote: "Although costly, it can be done. An excellent example is the riverfront development in San Antonio, Texas."¹⁴

While it is tempting to dismiss the palliatives of the playground equipment vendors and recreation managers as self-serving, their concern for providing appropriate settings to serve human needs is admirable. The proposals of reformers are based on the assumption that some environments are better than others and that it should be possible to determine which are superior by learning more about the preferences of various groups seeking and using "nature." There is also an assumption that all humans prefer savanna-like landscapes because current paleontological evidence supports the origins of humans in East African grasslands. Those assumptions are supported by the work of Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, the only authorities to appear in both the 1977 and 2002 volumes.¹⁵

Historians need to look in greater detail at how evolutionary theory has shaped child study and ideas about nature. What were the criteria by which reformers decided what is "natural" and what is not? Given the many shifts in adult attitudes toward wilderness, landscape painting, and the human transformation of the earth and sky, it would be surprising if children's preferences have not changed over the years as well.¹⁶

Age, Gender, and Race

THE KAPLANS' meticulous work firmly establishes the need for varieties of natural settings for different groups, and after surveying numerous studies the Kaplans have reluctantly concluded "that adolescents, compared to younger and older groups, have lower preference for natural settings and greater appreciation for certain kinds of developed areas. The latter tend to be places that suggest action and activity."¹⁷ While the Kaplans remain hopeful that adolescents will develop preferences for nature when they grow up, they believe that adolescence itself has changed historically, a challenge to historians. Cynthia Thomashow, who teaches junior high and high school students in New Hampshire, uses a variety of techniques to instill what she calls "ecological thinking." By having students write about places that are special to them and by linking this exercise to practical work on local land-management projects, Thomashow feels she succeeds in raising adolescents' appreciation of and identification with nature.¹⁸

In contrast to the relatively straightforward influence of age on children's perceptions of nature, race and gender present more complex variables. Race, moreover, is often a mask for class. The pioneering work of urban planner Kevin Lynch inspired a number of studies in the 1970s. As early as 1955, Lynch and an associate asked twenty-two students at MIT and eighteen others from a variety of occupations to recall the physical details of their childhoods and express their preferences for one kind of space over another. Since the respondents were mostly young, white, middle-class urban dwellers, it is not surprising that they liked lawns, dirt for digging and molding, and smooth pavement for biking and roller-skating. Men and women fondly recalled bushes, alleys, and garages to hide in. When Lynch and his associates collected childhood memories from residents of Warsaw, Melbourne, Mexico City, and other cities, they found striking similarities. Urban childhoods, they concluded, were rich in street play, and nature consisted of trees, parks, "waste" areas, and ponds. Race and gender differences were inconsequential.¹⁹ Not so in socially fragmented America. A 1972 study of Harrisburg, Texas, found significant differences among Anglo, Mexican-American, and African-American children's conceptions of their segregated neighborhoods. Ninety-one children ages seven to fourteen (forty boys and fifty-one girls) were asked to list and draw maps of their favorite and disliked places in their community. While all the children mentioned home, house, streets, trees, grass, doors, and windows, only Anglo children mentioned fire stations, gas stations, a theater, trailer parks, and Boys Clubs, and only black children mentioned dog houses, house numbers, lights, barbecues, apples, and smog. Only Mexican-American children mentioned a graveyard, smoke, stars, and a rainbow. African-American children almost always drew the home first, made it ten times larger, and put fewer details about their neighborhood on their maps, in contrast to Anglo children.²⁰

These and many other differences make the data difficult to interpret and the authors merely speculate about the relative safety of the neighborhoods and suggest ways to improve future studies. As I will attempt to illustrate using autobiographies of childhood, the historical record supports a hypothesis that for children younger than twelve, gender and race do not have much effect on attitudes toward nature. Gender differences among the children were not pronounced in Harrisburg; boys and girls expressed similar preferences, and gender differences do not seem to be a concern in the studies in the Kahn and Kellert collection. On the other hand, such differences are a major concern of Stephen Trimble in his chapters in The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places, co-authored with Gary Paul Nabhan. Quoting Wyoming rancher and writer Teresa Jordan, Trimble argues that the cultural constraints that often prevent women from feeling comfortable in wild places can be overcome, but that gender differences in attitudes toward those places remain. "'It is so much easier culturally for women to love the land,' says Jordan, 'to simply be in it rather than to control it. When I played with boys as a child, we rode horses, we played cowboys and Indians or rustlers: the land was backdrop. When I played with girls, the land and animals were central; we didn't just ride horses, we became horses.'"²¹ Trimble mentions studies that show that children are less likely to impose their own gender distinctions when they play in undeveloped spaces rather than playgrounds, which he uses to argue for more opportunities for women to experience wild places.

Wilderness

HOW IMPORTANT are wild places, true wilderness, to children? This question should be the most compelling for environmental historians. Buried in the records of numerous national and state parks are visitor surveys that might shed light on this and other questions of perception and use of nature by children. Trimble, citing Edith Cobb's intensely personal meditation on nature as the source of creativity, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, asserts that only through direct contact with the incredible diversity of nature can children experience a meaningful relationship to the Earth. Children also need solitude to find spiritual sustenance. How wild does wilderness need to be? All of the advocates for exposing children to wilderness acknowledge that the realities of life in the twenty-first century preclude anything more than brief and partial wilderness experiences. As will become clear in this review, the term "wild places" covers a wide range of environments. These and other problems of definition invite historical study.

Peter Kahn's chapter on the environmental values of children in four cultures—Houston, Texas; an Amazonian village; Prince William Sound; and Lisbon, Portugal—introduces the concept of "environmental generational amnesia," by which he means that the constant degradation of the environment results in the lowering of expectations. We recall the landscapes of our childhoods as pristine wilderness, while in fact they were already scarred by generations of misuse. Children in Houston seldom mentioned pollution because to them it was natural.²² Environmental histories of specific places should make clear the extent of degradation and restoration and its effect on the lives of the residents.

Robert Michael Pyle provides personal testimony to the value of undeveloped and untended spaces in cities and suburbs. In a chapter in Children and Nature based on his book, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Pyle recalls his childhood exploration of the High Line Canal east of Denver in the 1950s, and strongly argues for the value of "waste ground" and vacant lots as places for children to discover nature through play and study. Pyle's book, which he calls a "love song to damaged lands" and "a portrait of a changing countryside and the people who depend on it," is also a wonderful autobiography of childhood and a philosophical examination of the importance of place.²³ After offering further evidence of the value of wilderness to children, especially adolescents, Stephen Kellert raises an interesting point about the importance of direct experience with nature versus indirect, mediated, and vicarious experience. Compared to the built environment, Kellert argues, the natural environment changes rapidly, attracting a child's attention and stimulating it more. "Not only is the child confronted by continuous change in nature, but these alterations are often unpredictable and challenging, necessitating a wide range of adaptive and problem-solving responses."²⁴

Kellert also presents good evidence that children value nature in different ways at different stages of their physical and mental development. Young children, ages three to six, for example, exhibit utilitarian, dominionistic, and negative attitudes, meaning that nature for them is either something to use, control, or fear. In contrast, children six to twelve years old develop aesthetic, humanistic, and symbolic values—appreciation of beauty, emotional bonding, and heightened imagination. Adolescents manifest an ethical and spiritual relation to nature and begin to explore and develop a scientific understanding of nature. In recent work, Rachel Kaplan provides evidence that even a view of a natural setting from a window contributes to a sense of well-being, and argues that natural elements must not be considered as amenities, but as basic to mental health.²⁵

Cities

CAN CITIES provide the diverse, sustained, and meaningful experiences with nature required to develop environmentally concerned adults? This fifth question separates the contributors to the 1977 symposium from those in the 2002 volume. Because the Forest Service symposium was explicitly concerned with the urban environment, the answer of most of the contributors was, yes, while the essays in Kahn and Kellert range from cautious optimism to David Orr's angry indictment of American society for tolerating conditions harmful to children—pollution, junk food, television, poor schools, poverty, and environmental degradation. Orr is concerned with the failure of government to protect children and the wilderness to which he believes they are entitled. With 16 percent (almost 12 million) of the nation's children living below the federal poverty level, he has a good point.²⁶

For environmental historians the challenge of this question is to discover how city children in the past related to nature. Concern for children's urban environments can be traced to the founding of the Playground Association of America in 1906, since this association evolved into the National Recreation and Park Association, which today announces its mission as the advancement of "parks, recreation and environmental conservation."²⁷ The connections between the urban recreation movement and the conservation movement are important and need to be further explored. In both efforts, activists assumed that nature and play were important for identity formation. That assumption was central in playground design. A century of playground design has resulted in three basic types, labeled "traditional," "contemporary," and "adventure" playgrounds. Traditional playgrounds dominated cityscapes from the 1890s to the 1960s. They usually consisted of cast-iron swings, slides, seesaws, Junglegyms, giant-strides, and merry-go-rounds and sandboxes for young children. Located on school grounds and in city parks, the equipment often was surrounded by trees, lawns, and ponds with benches where adults could wait while their children played.

The post-World War II shift from cities to suburbs, increasing concern for child safety, and the development of new plastics for construction led to several innovations in playground equipment that came to be called "contemporary." The designs showed concern for texture and more natural sighting. Climbing structures were reduced in size and often made in the shape of castles, forts, rockets, and vehicles of various kinds. Smaller versions of these plastic and wooden structures became standard in suburban backyards. Adventure playgrounds originated in Scandinavia and England and consist of vacant lots with a supply of boards and other materials from which children are encouraged to build their own structures and engage in gardening, sometimes under adult supervision. Although adventure playgrounds are close to the idealized vacant lots and fields of earlier generations, they have not been popular in the United States because of anxieties over safety and liability.²⁸

The recognition that children explore, forage, and play in cities in much the same way they do in the countryside has resulted in a large body of work that, if not actually celebratory of the urban experience, is at least hopeful that with some planning and encouragement city kids can develop into good citizens. Colin Ward's The Child in the City, based chiefly on British examples, is still the touchstone study. The closest American equivalent is City Play, by folklorists Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin, which focuses exclusively on New York City. Both books contain many photographs that should dispel any concerns that city kids lack dirt, water, trees, and other "natural" elements.²⁹ Providing better natural environments in the contexts of school and city playgrounds has been the goal of Robin Moore, a British-born urban planner who studied with Kevin Lynch at MIT and who has been active for the past thirty years in the United States. Collaborating with children and school officials, Moore helped to design an elementary school "environmental yard" in Berkeley in the 1970s. Combining ideas from adventure playgrounds with the need to provide an outdoor setting for classes in natural science resulted in a space divided into an asphalt area for ball and other games, a playground with traditional equipment, and a natural resource area with ponds, gardens and trees. In Childhood's Domains: Play and Place in Child Development, Moore proposes a unified theory of children's interactions with their surroundings and offers policy directions. Influenced by Edith Cobb, he is convinced that children between ages five and twelve develop a sense of mastery and control by playfully interacting with their environments. Through his observations and the maps and lists that children have prepared for him, Moore provides a richly detailed view of the topography of pathways, homes, parks, playgrounds, school yards, and abandoned places frequented by children in urban England and America. His list of more than two hundred objects children say they encountered as they roamed from their urban homes seems equally divided between the expected—asbestos, ash paths, and asphalt—and the remarkable—beehives, beetles, and berries.³⁰

According to psychologists , the little details that children observe and include in their fantasy play are clues to the manner in which children experience nature. In her contribution to Kahn and Kellert's Children and Nature, Louise Chawla, an environmental psychologist at Kentucky State University and the international coordinator of UNESCO's "Growing Up in Cities Program," reviews the Romantic legacy of William Wordsworth and others and considers its implications for the scientific study of children and nature. Drawing on the work of philosopher Jean Gebser, Chawla urges more attention to children's mythic and sensual appreciation of nature, which she feels underlies adult feelings of place. "[W]hen a child receives love, sympathy, and care, it is prepared to reach out to the world around it with corresponding sympathy and creativity," she writes, "so Gebser suggests that when we are grounded in the consciousness of our own body with a sense of basic trust and security, we are enabled to accept identity with the world as the genesis of wisdom. These principles imply both that children need opportunities to identify with natural areas and that they, as well as the natural environment, need protection."³¹

Pets

EVEN SEEMINGLY small questions, such as the role of pets in children's environmental awareness, are not easy to answer. The topic was totally ignored in the Forest Service symposium despite its focus on the urban environment where pets might be expected to play a significant part in the lives of children. On the other hand, two chapters of Kahn and Kellert address animal companions for children.³² Olin Myers and Carol Saunders offer evidence on the value of animals to the social development of children and for the transformation of values in adults. Unlike many environmentalists, they believe that zoos facilitate environmental care and moral concern by making the public aware of biodiversity and the need for good environmental management. Aaron Katcher reviews the evidence for the therapeutic value of animals for children with autism, developmental disorders, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other behavioral problems. Borrowing Victor Turner's idea of liminality, or transition between two stages of a personal life, or two institutional settings, Katcher proposes that animals, both real and in children's fairy tales, help children negotiate difficult changes in their lives. Katcher's stimulating discussion of the ways in which children identify with animals, including the fantasy animals of fairy tales, raises a number intriguing questions for further research, such as the relation of non-verbal to verbal expressions of biophilia and the meanings of domestication.

Place

THE SEVENTH question raised by the work on children and nature is the most amorphous: What is a child's sense of place? This was addressed directly by Paul Shepard in the 1977 symposium. Shepard proposes that humans go through eight stages of ontogenesis in their first twenty years of life. While all of the stages are linked to specific places, the fourth stage, which he labels "terrestrial anlage," is especially place-dependent because it is the time when the child learns the names of things in its immediate home territory. "Space is structured differently in juvenile life than it is at later ages," Shepard asserts "it is intensely concerned with paths and boundaries, with hiding places and other special places for particular things."³³ It was the terrestrial or territorial foundations of childhood that geographer Roger Hart explored in great detail in a study of eighty-six children ages four to eleven in a New England village of eight hundred in the early 1970s.³⁴ Hart's book is so rich in detail that it is impossible to summarize his findings briefly, but in relation to place knowledge and values he found that children distinguished among "free range," "with permission" range, and "with other children." Up to age seven, children are seldom allowed out of calling distance. Eight- and nine-year-olds may roam as far as three hundred yards; those with bicycles somewhat farther. Ten-year-olds expand their range, which is often defined by time. They can go anywhere for a certain number of hours. Children value different places for different reasons—play, interesting people, buying things—and some places are valued because they are dangerous. Hart's ethnography remains unique in the literature of children and nature studies, although Roger Barker and Herbert Wright's sociological study of the everyday behavior of children in a mid-western city in the 1950s provides some comparative data.³⁵

The next step, it seems to me, is to link the work of environmental psychologists, geographers, and historians with that of philosophers and ethnographers of place. Edward Casey makes many strong and interesting arguments for the centrality of place in human identity. He contrasts built places that have well-defined boundaries with wild places that are seemingly formless, then suggests ways in which each individual perceives form as a "moment of Nature." The individual, or "the body" in Casey's terminology, first experiences the "sensuous surface" of a wild place—the shape, motion, color, texture of the place. Simultaneously the body feels the "ground," and the "things" on the ground, the distinctive geography and biology. Above and beyond is the "arc" and the "atmosphere," the former enclosing the horizon and all the material things and sensuous surfaces, while the latter "embodies the emotional tonality of a wild place."³⁶ As the body experiences each of these "moments of Nature" it begins to understand the order underlying the wild, un-built place, finally encountering the "surrounding array," which is diffused through all the moments of experience, connecting what has been separate.

The value of Casey's approach, abstract as it may be, is twofold. First, it brings rigorous analysis to the romanticism pervasive in much of the "children and nature" studies of the past two centuries. Second, it offers a better way of talking about the links between the manner in which a child achieves identity in the context of its "home range" and the ways in which adults experience a place or recall experiencing a place when they were children. In his enjoyable and innovative study, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache, anthropologist Keith Basso provides numerous insights into the ways in which individual Apaches associate places with things that happened there and use the stories that they know about places to instruct, admonish, and entertain—in short, to create their culture and history. No historian can read the stories Basso heard from his Apache friends without recognizing similar tales told in our culture by parents, teachers, and the media. The stories of Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, and Ellis Island are part of a national narrative, while Crawford's Notch, the Cumberland Gap, and Donner Pass tell more regional stories, but all function in ways similar to the Apache stories: They explain what happened and why it was important. Obviously, in a society as large and complex as the United States, places have "official" stories told on historical markers and in guidebooks, but they also have vernacular versions told orally or in unauthorized texts. Just as children map their neighborhoods and tell stories about them that are different from their parents, so do we all negotiate meanings of places when we talk about them with others.

Developing a sense of place, for children and adults, is an everyday activity of observing, using, and describing a site and its meanings, meanings that are created from memories. Moving beyond the importance of place, Basso, following Martin Heidegger, is interested in how people "dwell," which he defines as, "the multiple 'lived relationships' that people maintain with places, for it is solely by virtue of these relationships that space acquires meaning. ... In many instances, awareness of place is brief and unselfconscious, a fleeting moment (a flash of recognition, a trace of memory) that is swiftly replaced by awareness of something else. But now and again, and sometimes without apparent cause, awareness is seized—arrested—and the place on which it settles becomes an object of spontaneous reflection and resonating sentiment. It is at times such as these, when individuals step back from the flow of everyday experience and attend self-consciously to places—when, we may say, they pause to actively sense them—that their relationships to geographical space are most richly lived and surely felt."³⁷ The adult's experience of dwelling is similar to what Edith Cobb meant by "The child's ecological sense of continuity with nature." This sense, she wrote, "is not what is generally known as mystical. It is, I believe, basically aesthetic and infused with joy in the power to know and to be. These equal, for the child, a sense of the power to make."³⁸ The child's sense of nature, of "wild places," is not qualitatively different from an adult's, merely prior, more sensual, less cluttered with other kinds of knowledge.

Autobiographies of Childhood

COBB DREW ON more than 250 autobiographies to make her case for the connection between happy childhood experiences and nature and adult creativity. In my work on children's play I have read many of the same autobiographies and dozens of others, some published after her 1977 book. Without denying that autobiographers of childhood, many of whom are professional writers, usually include memories of play in natural settings, I remain skeptical of any causal connection between childhood experience of nature and adult creativity. Louise Chawla came to a similar conclusion based on her reading of 38 percent of Cobb's bibliography.³⁹ The link between a child's experience with nature, as recalled by an autobiographer, and the environmental attitudes of that adult is, paradoxically, both more general and more specific. More general because the passages that reflect on nature in all of the autobiographies I have read are preceded and followed by equally blissful recollections of people, books, fireworks, locomotives, and even fist fights. More specific because the recall of some moment involving earth, sky, trees, streams, and animals is often intensely personal, a moment of self-discovery that the author savors for its own sake.

We have all experienced such epiphanies, but the details differ. I will illustrate with a few examples from American autobiographies of childhood that I think illuminate, confirm, or challenge some of the ideas about children and nature expressed above. Although it is probably impossible for a writer to articulate the difference between his or her perceptions of nature as a child and as an adult, the connection between childhood experience and adult attitudes is relatively straightforward. John Burroughs, recalling his youth on his parent's Catskills farm in the 1840s, writes of the hundreds of chipmunks, squirrels, hawks, crows, and owls he killed for money and because, "In those days the farmer's hand was against nearly every wild thing." Many kinds of small wildlife will never recover, he notes, "but all that is changed and now our sable friends [crows] and the high-soaring hawks are seldom molested."⁴⁰ Burroughs regrets his participation in what he later realized was senseless slaughter and assumes that his conversion to conservation represents the trend of the future.

Edwin Way Teale's Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist provides all the reader expects in the way of childhood love of nature. Robert Michael Pyle and Gary Paul Nabhan mention being inspired by him, but Teale himself was inspired by "nature faker" Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages to the point of burning himself with hot coals, as Seton's Indians did, to prove his bravery.⁴¹ Teale's interests are astonishing in their breadth. Inspired by Octave Chanute's experiments with powered aircraft on the lake's dunes, he tries to build an airplane and assists in a balloon launching. He also creates his own museum in a wagon shed and rebuilds an Underwood typewriter. For Teale, all of this was "natural" history.

Louise Dickinson Rich, who grew up in the early twentieth century in a small town in Massachusetts, provides one of the best examples of the difference between a child's and an adult's view of a place. Remembering how her mother limited her unsupervised roaming, she writes:

We should have felt restricted, but ordinarily we didn't. The world has never seemed as big and various since as it did then, when it was bounded by a few blocks—only we didn't call them blocks, but simply streets. (A block was a toy or a business building.) Because our range was geographically narrow, we learned its minutest detail, knew each stone, each hollow in the sidewalks, each wall and ornamental shrub and vine. Every dog and cat was a friend, and every tree an intimate, its personal characteristics familiar and loved. ... The purple beech back of the Hunt's garden was the best for climbing, the elm opposite the Severances had wonderful holes about its roots for the hiding of treasures, and our own maple dropped the prettiest leaves in the fall.⁴²

Rich goes on to describe the exploration of her backyard, an almost archaeological excavation to discover what previous owners had planted and grown, and her browsing on grass, rose petals, nasturtium stems, chock cherries, and ornamental shrubs, all out of sheer curiosity. Annie Dillard's childhood in Pittsburgh, forty years after Rich's in Bridgewater, suggests changes in child rearing, but not in the impulse to explore. "My mother had given me the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number," Dillard writes. "I walked and memorized the neighborhood. I made a mental map and located myself upon it." At seven she acquired a bicycle and roamed Frick Park, observing birds and animals: "Walking was my project before reading. The text I read was the town; the book I made up was a map."⁴³ For the adult writer, every childhood memory about a place is a story, like those of the western Apache, which makes you live right.

Some autobiographers are sensitive to the loss of a special place, highlighting in another way the difference between memories of childhood pleasures and current realities. In Where the Wings Grow, dancer Agnes De Mille fondly describes her family's country place south of the Catskills circa 1916, its gardens, forests, and wildlife. Like Thoreau she was fascinated by a battle between black and red ants. When she returns more than forty years later, she writes: "The terrain itself has changed. What has disappeared from our forest are open fields—the forest encroaches—wild cats, whip-poor-wills (one summer suddenly there just were no more), snakes of all kinds (rattlers, grass, garter, and king), fireweed, red wood lilies, wild orchids, lunar moths, puffball mushrooms, chestnut trees ... silence." De Mille, of course, is writing in the post-Rachel Carson era, aware of loss and the unending assaults on nature, but she goes on to catalogue what has become abundant: "day lilies, tawny hemerocallis, banks of them, by the open fields, unknown in my youth or rare, since naturalized. What has become overabundant are mosquitoes, red deer, cottages, trailer camps with their inhabitants and refuse, and gypsy moths; the forest is fighting for its life against the gypsy moth."⁴⁴ Revisiting is unusual in autobiographies of childhood. Pyle revisits the High Line Canal and weeps. The authors assume, I think, that the wild places of their childhoods are lost like the years themselves. This is true because the places, even in the unlikely event that they have remained unchanged, can never be experienced in the same way twice.

For some autobiographers their memories are so painful that there is no incentive to return to childhood places. Poverty and prejudice have obviously robbed many children of happy childhoods, but what is remarkable is that children growing up in poverty manage to discover and enjoy nature in their own special places. The African-American novelist Richard Wright (1909–1960) lists among his earliest memories in Jackson, Mississippi, horses, vegetable gardens, sparrows wallowing in a dusty road, ants, crawfish, clouds, catching fireflies, rolling in the grass, fishing, eating persimmons, and gathering nuts and berries.⁴⁵ Poverty stigmatized white children, too. John Taylor Waldorf, whose contact with nature was limited to the abandoned tunnels and water-filled mine shafts of Virginia City, Nevada, in the 1870s, remembered two social classes in the mining camp, those who gathered wood on the dump and those who didn't.⁴⁶

Despite poverty and the limitations of caste and class, Waldorf and children in other boomtowns used their environments as best they could in creative ways.

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) remembered one Oklahoma oil town where "I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing, and found all of the snuff cans the London folks had throwed out into the high weeds around the house for the last ten or fifteen years."⁴⁷ In the same years, across the border in Mexia, Texas, Estha Briscoe Stowe built playhouses of sticks and rocks. "We always had a bedroom and bath for each family member, plus a kitchen, dining room, music room, living room, drawing room, library, and an office for the daddy. Our imaginary furniture was as elaborate as our four minds could conjure up from our limited visits to fine homes or furniture stores. Being oil field kids living in tents did not inhibit our dreams."⁴⁸ Children's attachment to place, however temporary, on the western frontier of the late nineteenth century is splendidly documented in Elliott West's Growing Up with the Country. Although fear of real and imagined dangers was pervasive in the memories of children who grew up in the Great Plains and mountain west, so was a strong sense of identity with the land.⁴⁹

City childhoods, from Edward Everett Hale in Boston in the 1820s and 1830s to Annie Dillard in Pittsburgh in the 1940s and 1950s, are by necessity less solitary than those on the frontier, although Dillard's experience suggests that even the largest metropolises offer possibilities for solitude. More than solitude, children seek autonomy, freedom from adult supervision. Hale recalls the belief among boys that the law did not extend beyond the high-water mark so that the mud flats of Back Bay became a site for gambling games at low tide.⁵⁰ More than a century later, in Buffalo, New York, Thomas Yukic and his brothers and friends turned a stretch of Niagara River waterfront into their own playground. Nominally the property of Du Pont and other chemical companies, the waterfront consisted of a few piers, water intake pipes, a paper company factory, an electrical transmission tower, and a sandy beach. The boys named and mentally mapped the area, constructed boats, and claimed a small island for their clubhouse. Over a twenty-year period the boys acquired a detailed knowledge of the river, its currents, fish, and sources of pollution.⁵¹ Many observers have noted that children are attracted to "waste" places—trash piles, junkyards, industrial sites—even when other natural areas are available, partly for the danger and partly for the variety of useful things found there. Above all, the knowledge was their own. As Robert Paul Smith observed in his popular autobiography of childhood, "What we knew as kids, what we learned from other kids, was not tentatively true, or extremely probable, or proven by science or polls or surveys. It was so."⁵²

Opportunities for Historians

I THINK the small sample of adult memories of childhood offered above is sufficiently various and complex to make it clear that historians must not neglect autobiographies when writing about children and nature. Understanding children's environments in the past is a difficult task, but autobiographies, diaries, oral histories, the early descriptive work of folklorists, park and playground designs, paintings, and photographs offer abundant but often ambiguous data. Environmental historians must work with ecologists, geographers, and ecocritics to take full advantage of the physical and literary evidence. For example, many local historical societies have collections of oral histories, memoirs, and diaries that describe the same sites in the local environment. These can be supplemented with historical photographs, sketches, and paintings. The places can be visited for "above-ground" archaeological data, and ecological investigations may yield information on the succession of plants and animals following human occupation. The goal would be to show the changes in what might be perceived in memory as a "timeless" space.

Public historians in particular have developed new tools for working with oral testimony, personal recollections, and community records. Public memory is now a subject of numerous historical conferences and publications. As David Thelen astutely observes:

Since memory of past experiences is so profoundly intertwined with the basic identities of individuals, groups, and cultures, the study of memory exists in different forms along a spectrum of experience, from the personal, individual, and private to the collective, cultural and public. At one end of the spectrum are psychological issues of individual motivation and perception in the creation of memories. At the other end are linguistic or anthropological issues of how cultures establish traditions and myths from the past to guide the conduct of their members in the present. ... Since the explanation of change over time practically defines history, historians bring obvious tools to build from the point on the spectrum defined by psychologists' conclusion that people construct memories in response to changing circumstance.⁵³

Thelen then mentions the use of photo albums as attempts to tell family histories, reminding historians that all historical memory has an intended audience and that personal history must be placed within the larger contexts of local, regional, national, and global history.

While the reliability of memory will remain disputed, there are other ways for historians to investigate the past relationship between children and nature. Art historians Sarah Burns and Jadviga Da Costa Nunes provide models using visual materials. In an essay titled "Barefoot Boys and Other Country Children: Sentiment and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Art," Burns speculates that the depiction in post-Civil War art of happy boys and girls in harmony with nature was a reaction to the fear that industrialization and urbanization were destroying traditional American values. John Greenleaf Whittier's "barefoot boy, with cheek of tan," painted by Eastman Johnson in 1860 and photographed by Rudolph Eickemeyer in 1901, symbolized, according to Burns, "all those longings, overt or submerged, for escape from the pressures of the present, to burrow back into an ideal past, to be a child again, to shed the burden of adult responsibility for a retreat into a sheltered, pastoral never-never land."⁵⁴ Burns also sees the idealization of rural life and the promotion of nature study in the schools as an effort to Americanize immigrant children.

While this may be true in part, even a glance beyond the central figure of the shoeless boy reveals details that convey additional information about the child's relationship with nature. In many paintings and engravings, for example, the boy's trousers are rolled up higher than comfortable walking requires. Why? Because he is walking near streams and marshes? Because it makes it easier to scratch insect bites? Whatever the reason, an environmental cause is likely. The boys and girls almost always have hats. Is this merely fashion, or do hats function as portable shelter for those who largely live outdoors? At the very least the hat assures that the cheeks are tan, not burned. In paintings such as William Sidney Mount's "Boys Caught Napping in a Field" (1848), and Winslow Homer's "Boys in a Pasture" (1874), we get a sense of the boys' topography and the relation of field and forest. Mount's "The Truant Gamblers" (1835) and Eastman Johnson's "In the Hayloft" (c. 1877–78) provide rich details about the built environment and what it provided for children's foraging and discovery.

Da Costa Nunes offers a slightly different look at children in nineteenth-century American art by focusing on the naughty child.⁵⁵ In paintings such as John Lewis Krimmel's "The Quilting Frolic" (1813), Mount's "Farmer's Nooning" (1836), James Goodwyn Clonney's "Mother's Watch" (c. 1852–56), and David Gilmor Blythe's "Boy Sipping Wine" (1856), we see children stealing, being mischievous, and getting drunk. The environments are rural or village, the boys often barefoot, but the message is more complex. In his paintings of newsboys, bootblacks, and street urchins, John George Brown sentimentalized urban poverty, while Blythe depicted children smoking, stealing, and fighting. In the paintings of both men, however, we find children using the mud, the stoops, the sidewalks, and outbuildings to create a life of their own. The extensive archives of photographs, prints, and paintings should be examined for what they reveal about children and nature.

In a promising attempt to combine psychological theory and historical documentation, psychologist Sanford Gaster used archival material and interviews with twenty-nine adults who grew up in a neighborhood on the northern tip of Manhattan between 1915 and 1976 to chart changes in children's access to their neighborhood. The neighborhood was developed in the 1920s with apartment houses for Irish, German, and Russian immigrants. Italians, Poles, Greeks, and Armenians began arriving in the 1930s and 1940s, and a few African-Americans in the 1950s. Gaster found that between 1915 and 1976 the mean age at which children were first allowed out alone rose from 5.5 to 7.55. The number of places children visited declined from 136 in the 1940s and 1950s to 103 in the 1960s and 1970s. Gaster attributes the narrowing of access to the city to parental restrictions placed on children because of concern for their safety as traffic and crime increased in the neighborhood. He also found that the amount of time children spent in supervised activities increased. In a later study Gaster extended his historical survey from the 1830s to the 1970s and found that children's access to neighborhoods varied with urban conditions and reform efforts.⁵⁶ Childhood is a brief and ephemeral period of human life and its history is difficult to document. It is necessary, however, to correct the tendency to impose an idealized vision of the past in evaluating the present and planning for the future.

Historians might begin with what environmental psychologists and others have maintained for some time, that it is what children do in a place, rather than the place itself, that develops the ecological imagination. Focusing on what a child does could gather together several strands of children-in-nature research, both theoretical and applied. In "Environmental Socialization: Quantitative Tests of the Childhood Play Hypothesis," Robert Bixler, Myron Floyd, and William Hammitt describe giving questionnaires to 1,376 middle and high school students in Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina and 450 middle school students in Texas, asking them to identify their childhood play environments, their environmental preferences for play, their recreational activity preferences, their fears concerning a wildland trip, their desires for modern comforts and, finally, their preference for future occupational environments. They also asked whether the students preferred hands-on or observational environmental education. They found that children who reported having played in wild environments had more positive perceptions of natural environments, outdoor recreational activities, and future indoor/outdoor occupational environments, a conclusion that supports most of the assumptions made in the papers in the Forest Service symposium and Children and Nature. Unexpectedly, the children showed no clear preference for hands-on environmental education, but play in wild land was related to future occupational choice. The responses produced three clusters based on environmental preferences for play, which Bixler and his associates labeled "wildland adventurers," "urban adventurers," and "yard adventurers." The discovery that urban adventurers also favored streams and woods, while wildland adventurers shunned alleys and vacant lots, complicates the play hypothesis and leads the investigators to propose adding "dumpster diving" and "exploring storm sewers" to the environmental preference list.⁵⁷

A major problem of such studies of play in wild places is the lack of clear definitions of play and wild places. In Bixler's and similar studies, "wild" includes streams, ponds, farm fields, pasture, and woods. It is not always clear whether these areas are on public or private lands, in urban or rural settings, or used exclusively for recreation. Like the Kaplans' studies, these preference tests often use photographs of different kinds of terrain. Wild places are simply those with little or no evidence of buildings. This is probably adequate for testing broad preferences and attitudes. A more serious problem with most children and nature studies is their lack of a definition of play.

Historians and Children's Play in Nature

IN THE UNITED STATES, psychologists, anthropologists, folklorists, and historians have been studying play intensively since the 1880s. At first, the dichotomies of work and play, games and play, adult leisure and children's play, and sport and play served to define play by what it was not. The inadequacies of this approach were apparent as the reform movements of the early twentieth century attempted to use play to improve education, provide recreation in crowded cities, and Americanize immigrants. Play, in turn, became virtually synonymous with childhood. Play also became a catchall term for everything children did when they were not doing something else, and it was assumed that play is vital to a child's development. Darwinian evolutionary theory suggested continuity between animal play, children's play, and adult festivals, games, and sports, which in turn influenced child-development theories. A century of speculation and research has not clarified the meaning of play, but has produced a substantial number of studies that can be useful to historians. The best overview of play theory is Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play.⁵⁸

Sutton-Smith briefly reviews the many ambiguities and paradoxes of play. Is an act real or pretend, serious or nonsense, spontaneous or biologically determined? He lists categories of activities that have been described as play—daydreams, hobbies, backpacking, playing a part, joking, sports, festivals, board games, snowballing, rock climbing—to illustrate the diversity of players and play scenarios. Note that recent definitions of play emphasize that it is a way of doing something, not the act itself. Work can be play if it is performed in a relatively creative way. This is amusingly illustrated by a passage in John Burroughs' My Boyhood: "one of my tasks in the dry mid-spring weather was to burn ... stumps—an occupation I always enjoyed because the adventure of it made play of the work." The work-as-play theme appears again when he describes being sent with his long-handled "knocker" to "the April meadows to beat up and scatter the fall droppings of the cows. ... To stand the big cushions up on edge and with a real golfer's swing hit them with my mallet and see the pieces fly was more like play than work."⁵⁹

Sutton-Smith then proposes to resolve the ambiguities by approaching the various theories as rhetorics, implicit arguments meant to convince others of certain beliefs. He identifies seven types, the most important of which for historians are: The rhetoric of progress, the rhetoric of the imaginary, and the rhetoric of the self. By the rhetoric of progress Sutton-Smith means the notion that animals and children develop through play. From the Romantic poets to the present, the "naturalness" of play and its necessity for the development of healthy adults has been assumed. Paradoxically, although play is thought to be natural, it also can be perfected, directed toward better behavior, and improved learning. The rhetoric of the imaginary argues that play enhances flexibility and creativity, traits highly valued in Western societies. The rhetoric of self values play for what it does for the player, the intrinsic and aesthetic satisfaction of play, especially solitary play such as collecting, hiking, and bird-watching. Sutton-Smith's emphasis on the evolutionary basis of play provides a strong connection to the essays in Children and Nature. He reviews the literature on animal and child play to conclude that there has been a shift among biologists from a view that animal play is adaptive and contributes to survival to a view that animal play is independent of future usefulness, that it merely gives pleasure and a sense of well-being. The problem of extending the evolutionary theory to children's play, Sutton-Smith points out, is that it obscures individual differences among children and oversimplifies the relationship between infant and child behavior and presumed evolutionary adaptations such as preferring natural settings with hiding places.

In the rhetoric of the imaginary, play is seen as the origin of art, literature, and invention of all kinds.⁶⁰ From Romanticism to Post-Modernism, play has been elevated to a kind of language, or meta-language, that allows players to be ironic, subversive, and creative, to fulfill themselves even at the expense of others. Sutton-Smith believes that in pretend and fantasy play, alone or in groups, children employ various rules and conventions of storytelling that check the free rein for invention. Children are no freer to create fantasy than adults. Like adults, their fantasy may be irrational, nonsensical, or phantasmagoric, to use his term. "The typical actions in orally told stories by young children include being lost, being stolen, being bitten, dying, being stepped on, being angry, calling the police, running away, or falling down. In their stories they portray a world of great flux, anarchy, and disaster."⁶¹ Sutton-Smith is not sure whether the similarity of children's phantasmagoric stories to traditional folktales is the product of imitation or something more fundamental in the human mind. The relevance of children's pretend play for historians of childhood and nature may be illustrated by a passage in novelist Margaret Deland's account of her childhood pretend hospital during the Civil War. Deland, writing in the third person, recalls her efforts to cure sick animals with "Bricktivia," made from crushed brick in water, and "Leafiticus," concocted from leaves. After a futile search for patients, she found two furry caterpillars that she "wrapped up in the mustard plaster, around which she tied a blade of grass to keep it in place. Then she pushed it under the top sheet." To be "'prepared for eventualities,' ... she scraped up a handful of yellow clay from the roots of the lilacs, and sitting on the lowest step of the summer-house, she made two little coffins."⁶² This child's fantasy involves nature and a close observation of both her natural and cultural environments, but her imagination takes a macabre direction.

Rhetorics of self, Sutton-Smith argues, favor metaphors of play as freedom, fun, and possibility. This is the rhetoric of those who advocate the therapeutic value of wilderness in outdoor challenge programs. Self-discovery, self-actualization, self-fulfillment are the promises of all wilderness experiences. Several autobiographers mention their disappointment in environmental programs sponsored by the Boy Scouts and similar organizations, but a clearer understanding of the complex nature of play would preclude unreasonable expectations. Although the Boy Scouts owes its origins to the return-to-nature movement of the early twentieth century and has merit badges for camping and environmental science, its primary goal is the socialization of boys into traditional male roles in corporate society. Moreover, as Jay Mechling makes clear in On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth, Scout camps actually subvert the official positions of the national organization because the boys and their leaders use songs, games, and many kinds of play to create their own temporary but vital camp culture. Within the forest occupied by the camp, the boys create different kinds of wild places in their hearts.⁶³

Conclusions

MORE THAN a century of child study has provided few answers to the seven questions raised at the beginning of this essay, but it has offered numerous insights that encourage further study. Even if we conclude children have no special relationship with nature, that some kids will never care about wild places, that neither capitalism nor socialism will ever put the protection of children and nature ahead of profit and politics, and that our special places will always be threatened, we see some directions for the future in the successes of such programs as For Spacious Skies and River of Words which encourage teachers to combine the study of nature with creative writing.⁶⁴

Many educators now agree that when children play they transform their environment. A tree becomes a fort, a rock becomes a horse. By encouraging children to express their symbolization in writing and art, one observer argues, "children feel closer to, and more situated in their environment."⁶⁵

Type in "children and nature" on Google and more than three and a half million items come up, the first of which is the Children and Nature Institute, a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles offering outdoor classrooms, festivals, teacher workshops, products for children, and the CNI Wonder Mobile that brings bird, mammal, and insect "units" for hands-on activities to schools and other organizations.⁶⁶ Whether this or any structured educational program can ever equal the experience with nature provided by days spent digging in the dirt remains to be seen.⁶⁷ As long as there are children and spots of unpaved earth, children and nature will be a subject worth considering and Dorothy Howard will be watching from her "thinking post."

Environmental historians can help their colleagues in psychology and other social sciences understand the processes of historical change and the effects of change on children and nature. By examining assumptions about children and nature over time and by comparing American attitudes with those of other nations and cultures, historians can make an important contribution to an already well-developed field and open new areas of research.

Bernard Mergen is professor of American studies at George Washington University. He is the author of Snow in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) and currently is writing a book on American perceptions, marketing, and management of weather in the twentieth century.

Notes

^1.� Dorothy Howard, Dorothy's World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom 1902–1910 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 13.

^2.� Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) and David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and At Play (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985) provide some information on urban physical environments at the turn of the twentieth century. Brian Sutton-Smith, A History of Children's Play (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981) contains valuable information on New Zealand's rural environments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Some of my work addresses children and the natural environment: See Bernard Mergen, Play and Playthings (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982); "Children's Play in American Autobiographies, 1829–1914," in Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840–1940, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 161–87; "Children's Lore in School and Playground," in Children's Folklore: A Source Book, ed. Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon (1995; reprint, Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999), 229–49; and Snow in America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), especially "Snowballs and Snowmen," 81–87.

^3.� Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Glasgow, Scotland: William Collins, 1976), 184–89.

^4.� Peter H. Kahn, Jr., and Stephen R. Kellert, eds., Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment: Proceedings of a Symposium-Fair, USDA Forest Service General Technical Report NE-30, 1977 (Upper Darby, Pa.: Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture Northeast Forest Experiment Station, 1977). Much of the material on children's experience of place and environmental needs used in these two volumes is presented in a more systematic way in M. H. Matthews, Making Sense of Place: Children's Understanding of Large-Scale Environments (Hemel Hempstead, U.K.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

^5.� Stuart C. Aitken makes this point in Geographies of Young People: The Morally Contested Spaces of Identity (London: Routledge, 2001), 39.

^6.� Yi-Fu Tuan, "Experience and Appreciation," in USDA, Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment, 3.

^7.� Briavel Holcomb, "The Perception of Natural vs. Built Environments by Young Children," in Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment, 33.

^8.� John D. Coley, Gregg E.A. Solomon, and Patrick Shafto, "The Development of Folkbiology: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Children's Understanding of the Biological World," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 81.

^9.� Fanny D. Bergen, "Nibblings and Browsings," Atlantic Monthly 72 (September 1893): 373–78. Her "Pandean Pastimes," Atlantic Monthly 77 (May 1896): 625–30, focuses on the things children make with twigs, leaves, nuts, and berries. Both articles are reprinted with a brief biographical note in Folklife Studies from the Gilded Age: Object, Rite, and Custom in Victorian America, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 119–33. An interesting study of the foraging habits of Canadian children in the 1990s is found in, Raymond Chipeniuk "Childhood Foraging as a Means of Acquiring Competent Human Cognition about Biodiversity," Environment and Behavior 27 (July 1995): 490–512.

^10.� The beginnings of that history may be found in W. J. T. Mitchell, The Last Dinosaur Book (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Ron Tanner, "Terrible Lizard! The Dinosaur as Plaything," Journal of American & Comparative Culture 23 (Summer 2000): 53–65. For Robert Bakker's work, see The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction (New York: Morrow, 1986).

^11.� Peter Verbeek and Frans B. M. de Waal, "The Primate Relationship with Nature: Biophilia as a General Pattern," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 1–27; Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians, "The Ecological World of Children," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 29–63.

^12.� Edmund Russell, "Evolutionary History: Prospectus for a New Field,"Environmental History 8 (April 2003): 204–28.

^13.� Mergen, Play and Playthings, 90. For a good summary of the influence of evolutionary theories on playgrounds, see Donald J. Mrozek, "The Natural Limits of Unstructured Play," in Grover, Hard at Play, 210–26.

^14.� B. L. Driver and Peter Greene, "Man's Nature: Innate Determinants of Response to Natural Environments," in USDA, Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment, 69.

^15.� Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Their work led them to develop a method of using photographs of different kinds of environments, which their subjects sorted by preferences, to discover categories of perception. Building on William James's distinction between involuntary and voluntary attention, between things requiring no effort to notice and those requiring what they called "directed attention," the Kaplans argued that directed attention to nature may be restorative if the environment is both coherent (not confusing) and complex (not boring). Historians should look for correlations between landscape preferences and notions of coherence and complexity in the past.

^16.� Major historical studies of changing landscape preferences include Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Roderick Nash, Wilderness in the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967; 4th ed., 2001); Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

^17.� Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan, "Adolescents and the Natural Environment: A Time Out?", in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 233, 236.

^18.� Cynthia Thomashow, "Adolescents and Ecological Identity: Attending to Wild Nature," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 259–78.

^19.� Alvin K. Lukashok and Kevin Lynch, "Some Childhood Memories of the City," Journal of the American Institute of Planners 22 (Summer 1956): 142–52; Kevin Lynch, Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960); Kevin Lynch et al., Growing Up in Cities: Studies of the Spatial Environment of Adolescence in Cracow, Melbourne, Mexico City, Salta, Toluca, and Warszawa (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977). Lynch's final book, Wasting Away (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), is also relevant in its focus on "waste" areas as usable environments.

^20.� Robert Maurer and James C. Baxter, "Images of the Neighborhood and City Among Black-, Anglo-, and Mexican-American Children," Environment and Behavior 4 (September 1972): 361–88.

^21.� Gary Paul Nabhan and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 61.

^22.� Peter H. Kahn, Jr., "Children's Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 93–116.

^23.� Robert Michael Pyle, "Eden in a Vacant Lot: Special Places, Species, and Kids in the Neighborhood of Life," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 307–27; Robert Michael Pyle, The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), xvii–xviii.

^24.� Stephen R. Kellert, "Experiencing Nature: Affective, Cognitive, and Evaluative Development in Children," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 140.

^25.� Rachel Kaplan, "The Nature of the View from Home: Psychological Benefits," Environment and Behavior 33 (July 2001): 507–42.

^26.� David W. Orr, "Political Economy and the Ecology of Childhood," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 279–303. For current poverty figures, see the National Center for Children in Poverty, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University: www.nccp.org.

^27.� National Recreation and Park Association: www.nrpa.org.

^28.� For a partial history of playgrounds, see Mergen, Play and Playthings, 87–98; Bernard Mergen, "Children's Playgrounds in the District of Columbia, 1902–1942," Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington, D.C, ed. Francis Coleman Rosenberger, vol. 50 (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1980), 383–97; Bernard Mergen, "Playgrounds and Playground Equipment, 1885–1925: Defining Play in Urban America," in Play and Culture, ed. Helen B. Schwartzman (West Point, N.Y.: Leisure Press, 1980), 198–206. For a suggestive study of the use of the three types of playgrounds, see D. Geoffrey Hayward, Marilyn Rothenberg, and Robert R. Beasley, "Children's Play and Urban Playground Environments: A Comparison of Traditional, Contemporary, and Adventure Playground Types," Environment and Behavior 6 (June 1974): 131–68. A gendered analysis of the playground movement is offered by Elizabeth A. Gagen, "An Example to Us All: Child Development and Identity Construction in Early 20th-century Playgrounds," Environment and Planning 32 (April 2000): 599–616.

^29.� Colin Ward, The Child in the City (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin, City Play (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

^30.� Robin C. Moore, Childhood's Domain: Play and Place in Child Development (Berkeley, Calif.: MIG Communications, 1990).

^31.� Louise Chawla, "Spots of Time: Manifold Ways of Being in Nature in Childhood," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 221.

^32.� Olin Eugene Myers, Jr., and Carol D. Saunders, "Animals as Links Toward Developing Caring Relationships with the Natural World," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 153–78; Aaron Katcher, "Animals in Therapeutic Education: Guides into the Liminal State," in Kahn and Kellert, Children and Nature, 179–98. Katherine C. Grier, "Animal House: Pet Keeping in Urban and Suburban Households in the Northeast, 1850–1900," in New England's Creatures: 1400–1900, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1993, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1995), 109–29, notes a shift in late nineteenth-century writing on pets from the pet as servant to the pet as child. She also notes an increase in fantasy play by children with their pets and a tendency by middle-class children to earn money by raising small livestock such as rabbits, pigeons, and chickens. The meanings of these trends await her full-length study in progress.

^33.� Paul Shepard, "Place and Human Development," in USDA, Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment, 8.

^34.� Roger Hart, Children's Experience of Place (New York: Irvington Publishers), 1979.

^35.� Roger G. Barker and Herbert F. Wright, Midwest and Its Children: The Psychological Ecology of an American Town (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1954). Barker and Wright's One Boy's Day: A Specific Record of Behavior (New York: Harpers, 1951), provides even more details about a seven-year-old boy's interactions with his environment on 26 April 1947.

^36.� Edward S. Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 219. Casey continued his exploration of place in The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

^37.� Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 106–7.

^38.� Cobb, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 23. For historians seeking models of the study of place, David Glassberg reviews the literature and offers some guidelines in Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 111–27.

^39.� Chawla, "Spots of Time," 214. Louise Chawla, "The Ecology of Environmental Memory," Children's Environments Quarterly 7 (1990): 34–42. Liahna Babener provides an intelligent reading of autobiographies and useful discussion of literary theory in "Bitter Nostalgia: Recollections of Childhood on the Midwestern Frontier," in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950, ed. Elliott West and Paula Petrick (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 301–20.

^40.� John Burroughs, My Boyhood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1922), 52–53.

^41.� Edwin Way Teale, Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943), 28–29.

^42.� Louise Dickinson Rich, Innocence Under the Elms (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1955), 32–33.

^43.� Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 42–44.

^44.� Agnes De Mille, Where the Wings Grow (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), 278–79.

^45.� Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper Brothers, 1945).

^46.� John Taylor Waldorf, A Kid on the Comstock: Reminiscences of a Virginia City Childhood (Palo Alto, Calif.: American West Publishing Co., 1970).

^47.� Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1943), 49.

^48.� Estha Briscoe Stowe, Oil Field Child (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989), 32–33.

^49.� Elliott West, Growing Up with the Country, 42–45.

^50.� Edward Everett Hale, A New England Boyhood (1893; reprint, Boston: Little Brown, & Co., 1964), 69–70.

^51.� Thomas S. Yukic, "Niagara River Playground: The Allen Avenue Gang, 1925–1946 (An historical glance at a boyhood on the Niagara River)," New York Folklore 3 (Winter 1975): 211–28. Yukic includes a map drawn from memory.

^52.� Robert Paul Smith, "Where Did You Go?" "Out." "What Did You Do?" "Nothing." (New York: Norton, 1957), 22.

^53.� David Thelen, "Memory and American History,"Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1117–18. David Glassberg develops these and other ideas in "Public History and the Study of Memory," Public Historian 18 ( Spring 1996) 7–23; and throughout his book Sense of History.

^54.� Sarah Burns, "Barefoot Boys and Other Country Children: Sentiment and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Art," American Art Journal 20 (1988): 48. The article is adapted from her book, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). The history of children in America is a new field and with the exception of Elliott West's history of children on the far western frontier, there is little attention to children and nature. For examples of recent work, see Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850–1890 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), which is part of a chronological multi-volume series on childhood, and Joseph E. Illick, American Childhoods (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), which is a brief overview of changes in the conditions of childhood from the colonial period to the present.

^55.� Jadviga M. Da Costa Nunes, "The Naughty Child in Nineteenth-Century American Art," Journal of American Studies 21 (1987): 225–47.

^56.� Sanford Gaster, "Urban Children's Access to Their Neighborhood: Changes Over Three Generations," Environment and Behavior 23 (January 1991): 70–85; Sanford Gaster. "Historical Changes in Children's Access to U.S. Cities: A Critical Review," Children's Environments 9 (1992): 23–36.

^57.� Robert D. Bixler, Myron F. Floyd, and William E. Hammitt, "Environmental Socialization: Quantitative Tests of the Childhood Play Hypothesis," Environment and Behavior 34 (November 2002): 795–818.

^58.� Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). The classic work on play and human civilization is, of course, Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1949; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). Helen Schwartzman, Transformations: The Anthropology of Children's Play (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), remains a useful survey of play theory that is global in scope.

^59.� Burroughs, My Boyhood, 48.

^60.� The appeal of this rhetoric may be fully appreciated in the traveling exhibition, "Invention at Play," created by the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian Institution in cooperation with the Science Museum of Minnesota. The exhibit, for which the author was a consultant, includes material on the natural environment as a source of inspiration and imagination. See www.inventionatplay.org

^61.� Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, 160–61.

^62.� Margaret Deland, If This Be I, As I Suppose It Be (New York: Appleton-Century 1935), 82.

^63.� Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

^64.� For Spacious Skies is a non-profit organization begun in 1980 by television newsman Jack Borden that works with schools and The Weather Channel to promote "Sky Awareness," and improve writing and other academic skills. Its website is: www.forspaciousskies.org. River of Words was begun in 1995 by then-Poet Laureate Robert Hass and writer Pamela Michael. It focuses on watersheds and encourages children to express their discoveries in poetry and art. It is associated with the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress. Web site: www.riverofwords.org.

^65.� Susan Engle, "The World is a White Blanket: Children Write About Nature," Children's Environments Quarterly 8 (1991): 42–45.

^66.� See www.childrensnatureinstitute.org. Sites checked 18 May 2003. Most of the first fifty sites were focused on the subject of children and nature, but some were pretty weird.

^67.� Denis Wood, "Ground to Stand On: Some Notes on Kids' Dirt Play," Children's Environments 10 (1993): 3–18. Wood's ethnography of children's play in the dirt in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the summer of 1975 is the kind of small-scale analysis of how children engage with nature that is needed to construct broader theories.

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