60. Consider a career change to a nature-oriented job. Conservation organizations are experiencing a “brain drain” as baby boomers retire; this presents career opportunities you may not have considered. Or, if you wish to stay in your current field, consider ways to make the children and nature movement part of it.
61. Participate in Take a Child Outside Week, an annual international program that originated at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History (www.takeachildoutside.org).
Pursuits for Businesses, Attorneys, and Health Care Providers
62. Give corporate leadership and support to the creation of regional and national campaigns that connect children to nature, through contributions of money, services, employee volunteer time, or goods in kind.
63. Adopt a targeted effort. Your company can fund bus services for underbudgeted school field trips, sponsor outdoor classrooms for schools, underwrite nature centers and programs for vulnerable children, join with land trust organizations to protect open space—and help build family nature centers on that land.
64. For your own employees, sponsor on-site nature-based child care centers, as well as nature retreats for employees and their families.
65. Save your own business. The outdoor equipment and sporting goods industry faces diminished sales if the divide between the young and nature continues to widen. The industry can help raise public awareness about the benefits of nature to child development and on a practical level can put more entry-level gear in the hands of children and families, particularly those who cannot afford to buy it. To find out more, contact the Outdoor Industry Foundation (www.outdoorindustryfoundation.org), the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation (www.rbff.org), or Anglers’ Legacy (www.anglerslegacy.org).
66. Construction and urban design professionals: convene conferences at local, state, and national levels on how to create new kinds of housing developments that connect residents to nature. Establish incentives for child- and nature-based development. Louise Chawla, a professor at the University of Colorado, proposes a children and nature design certification along the lines of the green industry’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. A good resource: Children, Youth & Environments Center for Research and Design (thunder1.cudenver.edu/cye).
67. Lawyers and insurance agencies: promote the concept of comparative risk as a legal and social standard. Establish public risk commissions to examine areas of our lives that have been radically changed by litigation, including the experience of nature. Create a Leave No Child Inside legal defense fund that would, using pro bono attorneys, help families and organizations fight egregious lawsuits that restrict children’s play in nature and bring media attention to the issues. One provocative resource is Common Good (www.anglerslegacy.org).
68. Health care providers and public health officials: in your community advocate children’s contact with nature as integral to healthy development. In the ongoing search for answers to child obesity, attention-deficit disorder, and childhood depression, health care researchers, practitioners, and public health officials should emphasize free outdoor play, especially in natural surroundings, as much as they now do organized sports. At the national level, health care associations can support nature therapy as an addition to the traditional approaches.
69. Create a “grow outside” campaign. Pediatricians and other health professionals, using office posters, pamphlets, and personal persuasion, can promote the physical and mental health benefits of nature play. This effort might be modeled on the national physical fitness campaign launched by President John F. Kennedy. A similar approach, “green checkups,” is proposed by the National Wildlife Federation: “State health and natural resource departments can follow the lead of the American Academy of Pediatrics and ask doctors to recommend regular outdoor time as part of a wellness check for children.”
Ways Educators, Parent-Teacher Groups, and Students Can Promote Natural School Reform
70. Parent-teacher groups: support educators who sponsor nature clubs, nature classroom activities, and nature field trips. Establish annual awards for the teachers and principals who most creatively and effectively exemplify the “leave no child inside” slogan.
71. Become a natural teacher. Learn more about the cognitive benefits of nature experience. Also learn how nature outings help reduce teacher burnout. Resources include: Green Teacher magazine, available in English, Spanish, and French (www.greenteacher.com), and the Learning with Nature Idea Book, published by the Arbor Day Foundation (www.arborday.org).
72. Ask your students to take the nature-deficit disorder survey. Created by Dave Wood, an eighth-grade teacher at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., for his students and for National Environmental Education Week, the survey is available at www.eeweek.org/resources/survey.htm.
73. Green the K–12 curricula. Tap professional resource programs, among them Project Learning Tree (www.plt.org) and Project WILD (www.projectwild.org), which tie nature-oriented concepts to all major school subjects, requirements, and skill areas. The National Environmental Education and Training Foundation’s Classroom Earth (classroomearth.org) maintains a directory of environmental education programs and resources for K–12 teachers, parents, and students.
74. Teach the teachers. Many educators, especially new teachers, may feel inadequately trained to give their students an outdoors experience, so programs must be created and existing ones broadened. Many wildlife refuges, working with nonprofit organizations, provide professional development programs that have been correlated to public school curriculum standards (www.fws.gov/refuges). For example, an interdisciplinary workshop called Teach the Teachers is regularly offered at Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland.
75. Green the schoolyards. Tap the knowledge of such programs as Eco-Schools in Europe (www.eco-schools.org), Evergreen in Canada (www.evergreen.ca/en), and the Natural Learning Initiative (www.naturalearning.org) in the United States. A worldwide list of schoolyard greening organizations, including ones in Canada, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, can be found at www.ecoschools.com. To get started, send for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Schoolyard Habitat Project Guide” (www.fws.gov/chesapeakebay/schoolyd.htm).
76. Create nature preschools, where children begin their school years by knowing the physical world firsthand. Encourage nature-based public, charter, or independent K–12 schools that place community and nature experience (not only environmental education) at the
