77. Establish an eco club. One example: Crenshaw High School Eco Club is one of the most popular clubs in the predominately African-American high school in Los Angeles. Students have received their first introduction to the natural environment through the club’s weekend day hikes and camping trips in nearby mountains, as well as through expeditions to Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks. Community service projects include coastal cleanups, nonnative invasive plant removal, and hiking trail maintenance. Past members become mentors for current students. Student grades have improved.
78. Start a Salmon in the Classroom project or a similar endeavor. In Washington State, participating students in over six hundred schools receive five hundred hatchery eggs to care for in each classroom. They learn about life histories and habitat requirements and release the salmon as fry into the streams they have studied (wdfw.wa.gov/outreach/education/salclass.htm).
79. Beyond the school grounds, create nature-based community classrooms through outreach programs that engage parents, physicians, landscape designers, businesspeople, parks departments, and civic leaders who can help develop safe natural learning environments within walking distance of every school. Include visits to parks and overnight camping trips in the curriculum.
80. Follow Norway’s lead and establish farms and ranches as “the new schoolyards,” and thereby create a new source of income to encourage a farming culture. This will teach kids about the sources of their food and give them hands-on experience with lasting benefit, regardless of their future occupation.
81. Return natural history to higher education. Work to require universities to teach fundamental natural history, which has been eliminated from the curricula of many research universities, and to fund research on topics involving the relationship between children and nature. Higher education can be a doorway to more career choices, including recreation and service-learning opportunities.
82. Work for legislation. At the national, state, and local levels enact bills supporting environmental education in the classroom and outdoor experiential learning.
Goals for Government
83. Launch a governor’s campaign in your state. For example, in 2007, Jim Douglas announced the No Child Left Inside challenge in Vermont, John Baldacci unveiled Maine’s Take It Outside initiative, and Ed Rendell appointed a task force to organize a series of public meetings on the issue across Pennsylvania. Governors also can sponsor versions of the Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights, signed by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007 (to see the bill, go to www.calroundtable.org). The National Governors Association could also take action.
84. Mayors and other local and regional government executives: Review zoning barriers to nature; support environmental and outdoor education in municipal and state parks and recreation centers; convene meetings of developers, health and childhood experts, landscape architects, and outdoor play experts to consider future development and redevelopment policies.
85. Enact legislation that strengthens public health and education by increasing both opportunities for contact with nature and investments in research related to children and nature.
86. Provide state and federal funding to train teachers in environmental education, develop model outdoor education and environmental literacy programs, finance grants to teach teachers how to take kids into nature, and reestablish an office of environmental education within the U.S. Department of Education.
87. Support policies that increase the supply of naturalists at our parks and other nature settings. Government conservation agencies could build a stronger national conservation corps (or family conservation corps) to actively recruit young people from diverse backgrounds into the conservation professions.
88. At the federal and state levels, park systems can replicate Connecticut’s No Child Left Inside program, which has so successfully repopulated that state’s parks with families. Innovative nature attractions should be supported; for example, the simple “canopy walk,” created by biologist Meg Lowman in Florida, doubled attendance at one state park.
89. Adopt policies that keep farming families on their land, strengthen land trust law, and decrease property owners’ liability when they allow children to play on open land.
90. Build collaborations between the departments of Interior, Education, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services that focus on children and nature. This is a challenge that affects them all and can best be addressed through multiple disciplines.
91. Reach beyond government. By encouraging and working with a national Leave No Child Inside movement, government agencies can seek philanthropic partners—for example, foundations concerned about child obesity, education philanthropies promoting experiential learning, and civic organizations that see the link between land and community.
Build the Movement
92. Create a regional Leave No Child Inside campaign. The challenge of connecting children to nature is place-based, planted fully in the biology and human ecology of each region. There is no single set of solutions. However, leaders of regional campaigns are already learning from one another. To find out more, go to the Children & Nature Network (www.cnaturenet.org).
93. Botanical gardens, zoos, and natural history and children’s museums: become convening centers for regional children and nature campaigns and for discussion groups for adults and young people. Bookstores could host similar meetings throughout the year.
94. Follow the lead of communities that have launched campaigns. The new Leave No Child Inside initiative of Chicago Wilderness is bringing together 206 organizations in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan to sponsor year-round nature events, such as camping trips and restoration activities. They also are compiling the Chicago Wilderness Field Book for families. Still in its formative stage, Leave No Child Inside of Greater Cincinnati is posing such questions as: “Can we form alliances with preschools and day care centers that will encourage them to make use of local green spaces? Can we create ‘train the trainer’ courses so their staffs will feel comfortable taking the children into nature for play activities?” Their experiences may benefit campaigns in other regions.
95. Work with researchers, civic organizations, and advocacy groups to establish baseline measurements of the nature deficit so that progress can be measured and reported. Include annual progress measurements in reports on children’s health and educational status.
96. Establish the economic importance of nature experiences for children and adults. A full economic study would include but go beyond traditional recreational activities (fishing, hunting, boating,
