The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature

Abstract

The problem of environmental generational amnesia is that nature gets increasingly diminished and degraded, but children of each generation perceive the environment into which they are born as normal. Thus, across generations, the baseline shifts downward for what counts as healthy nature. One solution is to broaden and deepen children’s interactions with nature, and whenever possible, with big nature. To convey how this solution looks in practice, we draw from our observational data of children in a forest nature preschool to identify patterns of interaction with nature and illustrate how these interaction patterns may help children develop environmental capabilities, values, knowledge, intimacies, and relationships.