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Plant a Love of Nature in Your Kids

This Earth Day, show kids they can find refuge in the outdoors.

Credit...Enzo Pérès-Labourdette

Around 1954, when 8-year-old Stanley Temple began tagging along on Audubon Society field trips near Washington, D.C., he befriended a quiet, dark-haired woman who introduced herself as “Miss Carson.” To his delight, she treated him seriously as a fellow bird lover. “Most of the adult naturalists I knew wanted to teach me to identify things,” he said. “She taught me to stop and look.”

“Miss Carson” was Rachel Carson, who would later make history with her book “Silent Spring,” about the dangers of the pesticide DDT. Stanley Temple would become Dr. Temple, a well-known bird conservationist and a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Today, conservationists argue, the need for humans to coexist with other species is even clearer than it was in the era of “Silent Spring.” An estimated one million species of plants and animals are now at risk of extinction. If that’s not worrying enough, the likely animal origins of the coronavirus pandemic are a dramatic reminder that our species is tied to others.

Encouraging care for all species without delivering a counterproductive dose of fear or guilt is a delicate balance (and one that the conservation movement has long struggled to achieve). As a parent and the author of a book about the history of conservation, I’ve found that some of the best advice on striking that balance comes from the life stories of naturalists themselves. While their experiences are disparate in many ways, their early years include similar ingredients — and most of those ingredients are readily available, even during a pandemic.

Parents are besieged with advice on reducing screen time and encouraging outdoor play, and extended time outside has many benefits. But even a single, seemingly ordinary moment can inspire a lifelong conservation ethic.

Julian Huxley, a British biologist, recalled in his memoir that in about 1891, when he was 4, a goggle-eyed toad surprised him by hopping out of a nearby hedge. “That comic toad helped to determine my career as a scientific naturalist,” he wrote.

More than seven decades later, Scott Sampson, the future executive director of the California Academy of Sciences, was similarly impressed when, at 4 or 5, he stepped into a neighborhood pond in Vancouver, British Columbia, and saw tadpoles swarming around his rubber boots.

“I felt, perhaps for the first time in my life, a deep and ecstatic sense of oneness with nature,” he wrote in his book, “How to Raise a Wild Child.” While wonder can’t be scripted, parents can encourage kids to “stop and look” when outdoors, no matter the location. Video clips of familiar species doing extraordinary things — crows sledding down an urban rooftop, fungi bursting out of the forest litter, tadpoles migrating across a lake — can expand kids’ sense of the possible goings-on.

Parents don’t need to be expert naturalists to spark an enthusiasm for other species. J. Drew Lanham, a wildlife ecologist at Clemson University who grew up in South Carolina, fondly remembered learning his local birds by the nicknames his grandmother taught him: redbirds, bee-martins, rain crows. Not until later did Dr. Lanham acquire a field guide to American birds.

“At first the identities of the birds didn’t really matter to me,” he wrote in his memoir, “The Home Place.”

Rachel Carson, in an essay published at the time of her outings with the future Dr. Temple, described walks with her 4-year-old nephew during which she simply called his attention “to this or that.” Her nephew quickly learned to recognize different plants, assigning names to favorites. “I am sure no amount of drill would have implanted the names so firmly as just going through the woods in the spirit of two friends on an expedition of exciting discovery,” she wrote.

For families interested in learning together, the kid-friendly Seek app, developed by iNaturalist, uses image recognition to identify species of animals, plants and fungi from smartphone photos.

Almost every budding conservationist has discovered that plants and animals can be a source of comfort in difficult times. Rosalie Edge, who fought for the protection of hawks and eagles in the 1920s and 1930s, started bird watching in Central Park after the collapse of her marriage in 1921, reflecting that the sight of birds in flight “comes perhaps as a solace in sorrow and loneliness, or gives peace to some soul wracked with pain.”

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a poet, essayist and author of “World of Wonders,” recalled that when she was growing up in Phoenix during the “stranger danger” panic of the 1980s, she felt as if the tall saguaro cactuses in her neighborhood watched protectively over her and her friends. Now, Dr. Sampson noted, the outdoors and its inhabitants can be a refuge from the stress and isolation of the pandemic.

“I think every single one of us — adult, teen, child — has been going through some kind of trauma or suffering over this past year,” he said. “We all need some rehab, and one of the easiest ways to do it is just to step outside.”

Conservation is about preserving relationships — among species, between species and their habitats, between humans and other species — so it’s fitting that conservationists often learn to care for plants, animals and habitats while in the company of friends and relatives. Emmanuel Frimpong, a professor at Virginia Tech who studies the ecology and conservation of freshwater fishes, attributed his love of streams to his childhood in Ghana, where he followed his father and uncles on long hikes to promising fishing holes.

Michael Soulé, the founder of the field of conservation biology, spent much of his adolescence roaming the Southern California desert with friends from the junior-naturalist program at the San Diego Natural History Museum. When exploring habitats with your kids, multiply their opportunities for wonder (and turn the experience into a party) by inviting their friends along, and allowing them to roam together.

It’s wise to avoid lecturing kids about climate change and extinction, especially during their early years. David Sobel, an environmental educator, suggested parents and teachers use “no tragedies before fourth grade” as a rule of thumb. But Louise Chawla, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies youth engagement with nature, pointed out that in our media-soaked society, even very young children are likely to hear about the effects of climate change and other environmental crises.

If and when kids express a desire to do something about the accelerating threats to species and habitats, encourage them to look beyond individual- or household-level actions like recycling or gardening (as valuable as those can be). Maria Ojala, a psychologist at Örebro University in Sweden, found in a study of Swedish 12-year-olds that while such “problem-focused” strategies can help change behavior, “meaning-focused” strategies — actions or attitudes that recognize the long-term, collective work required to address global challenges — are more likely to encourage a broader optimism about the future.

Organized efforts to ensure the survival of other species, from political campaigns to bioblitzes — which are concentrated censuses of the species present in a given location — often welcome young volunteers. By working alongside others who share their concerns, kids can acquire what is perhaps the most important prerequisite for a conservationist: a sense of what Dr. Ojala called “constructive hope.

With a little assistance, any child can begin a relationship with other species: they can learn to look and listen closely, and to see the extraordinary in the familiar. Regardless of their future path, the rewards are rich. “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth,” Ms. Carson wrote, “are never alone or weary of life.”


Michelle Nijhuis is the author of the new book, “Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Inspire Your Kids To Love Nature. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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