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4 publications listed under Environmental Generational Amnesia

Environmental Generational Amnesia

2026 / Environmental Generational Amnesia

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) is the psychological phenomenon wherein each generation constructs its understanding of what constitutes a “normal” natural world based on the environment experienced during childhood. The crux of the problem is that, as environmental degradation increases, each successive generation comes to perceive an increasingly impoverished natural world as normal. As a result, profound environmental losses—damaging to both human well-being and the more-than-human world—go unrecognized. It is difficult enough to address large-scale environmental problems when they are clearly recognized; it becomes even more difficult when such problems are barely recognized or not noticed at all. In this way, EGA reveals a temporally layered process, where shifting baselines accumulate across generations and obscure the long-term trajectory of environmental decline.

Reflections on: The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature

2026 / Children, Environmental Generational Amnesia

In “The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature” (Kahn & Weiss, 2017), Thea Weiss and I wrote that the problem of environmental generational amnesia (EGA) was one of the most pressing psychological problems of our lifetime. EGA happens in this way: With each new generation, children are born into an increasingly diminished, fractured, and partly destroyed natural world. Do we know that? No, because as children we take the nature we encounter as the baseline, the norm for what counts as healthy nature. It is difficult enough to address large-scale environmental problems when we clearly recognize them; it becomes ever more difficult when we barely recognize them, or do not notice them at all. In recent work (Kahn, in press), I review the empirical evidence for EGA. The body of research is still modest, but the findings in support are consistent across diverse ecological and cultural contexts. I also extend EGA’s theory, showing that it represents a tragic success of Piagetian constructivism. Children build cognitive structures around available external input, as Piaget established, but when that input is an increasingly impoverished natural world, the result is internally coherent yet ecologically misaligned and maladaptive knowledge. I also differentiate EGA from related constructs, including Diamond’s (2005) Landscape Amnesia and Pauly’s (1995) Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Neither construct reckons with the force of childhood baseline construction. Thus, both hold that the historical record and current knowledge can reasonably correct course. EGA is less optimistic: its roots in early childhood phenomenological experience make the amnesia more deeply entrenched. Here, looking forward, I would like to note two solutions to the problem of EGA, which were in their more nascent form in the 2017 article, and which I’ve been extending in my scholarly work.

Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia

2002 / Children, Development, Environmental Generational Amnesia

How do children reason about environmental problems? Are there universal features in children’s environmental conceptions and values? How important is it that children and young adults experience natural wonders? Finally, what happens to children’s environmental commitments and sensibilities when they grow up in environmentally degraded conditions? This chapter reports on the results of five studies that the author and various colleagues conducted. In these studies, children were interviewed in diverse locations about their environmental moral conceptions and values. The author also seeks to explicate two ideas that frame his theoretical approach to investigating children’s affiliations with nature–structure and development. Finally, the author builds on the structural-developmental framework and his research findings to articulate what may be one of the most pressing and unrecognized problems of the current age—the problem of environmental generational amnesia.

Child-Nature Interaction in a Forest Preschool

2020 / Children, Environmental Generational Amnesia, Nature school

Children participating in activities at Fiddleheads Forest School. In 2012 there were only around 25 nature preschools and kindergartens in the United States; now there are well over 250. It is a national movement that is gaining momentum. It is an exciting time because in principle these schools have within them the kernels to transform the world through increasing children’s direct interaction with nature and a more wild nature than that exists in most urban children’s lives. In this paper we begin to characterize forms of child-nature interaction that occur in one specific nature preschool, Fiddleheads Forest Preschool in Seattle, Washington, USA. Based on our observational data, derived through a randomized time-sampling methodology, we modeled child-nature interaction using what we call interaction patterns: characterizations of essential ways of interacting with nature described abstractly enough such that the pattern can be instantiated in different ways, across diverse forms of nature. Specifically, we use a nature language to describe (with photographs) eight interaction patterns: leaning on and hanging from supple tree limbs, climbing high in small tree, looking at wild animals, imitating animals, imagining nature to be something other than it is, making boundaries on earth, pushing the edges of boundaries, and waiting attentively in nature. Through an interaction pattern approach, we seek to provide insight into what is actually happening on the ground at a forest preschool and how that provides a key solution to the problem of environmental generational amnesia.