Season 2, Episode 22: Children and Nature with Louise Chawla
image credit | Markus Spiske
Season 2, Episode 22: Children and Nature with Louise Chawla
In this episode we look at the question “What makes for a healthy relationship between children and nature?” and by extension for all of us. To help with this, Panu and Thomas met with Louise Chawla, one of the eminent researchers of environmental psychology and child development in relation to nature. Louise described her own youth and sense of nature being “an eternal world” and how she has listened to children around the world describe their own beliefs and increasingly “fearful imaginings.” She, Panu, and Thomas discussed how to support children, share in their curiosity, and enlist them as collaborators as we all cope with losses and strive to make our lives better.
Links
Louise Chawla, Some key papers:
(1998) Significant Life Experiences Revisited: a review of research on sources of environmental sensitivity
Transcript
Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.
Thomas Doherty: Please support the climate change and happiness podcast see the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.
[music: “CC&H theme music”]
Doherty: Well, hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.
Panu Pihkala: And I am Panu Pihkala.
Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness. Our podcast, the show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about climate change and other environmental issues. And this is a place where we do allow ourselves to be with our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions. And today, we have a special guest. Someone that I've been able to work with in the past that I have not met for about a decade.
Louise Chawla: Hello, I'm Louise Chawla. I'm a professor emerita at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And I'm part of the program in environmental design there. And now that I'm retired I work with their community engagement design and research center primarily. I have a workplace there. And I helped create the center. So I'm very much involved in how do you bring research and design, which means really, the entire physical world out there, including the natural world together on big environmental and social topics of our time. And I came to that from a background initially in child development. Then my master's in education. And then as I discovered, what I'm really interested about is what children learn outside the classroom, when they are out and about in their communities. Both socially, culturally, and about the natural world and their cities.
And so I did a doctorate in environmental psychology, where we focus on people's relationships with the physical world out there. And it's a discipline that's been around since the 1970s. I entered it in 1980. So that is my focus: What are our relationships with the world beyond ourselves and our immediate human societies?
Doherty: Yeah, that's great. And Louise is a pioneer in this research of children's experience of nature. And a lot of what we know in terms of healthy child development and people's environmental identities and the role of mentors comes out of Louise's work. And she's a bridge between the original environmental psychology people that were studying built places and design, and the more recent focus on mental health and identity and environmental behaviors that we have now. So it's really great to have Louise. And we'll be talking about a lot. Panu, do you want to get us started in our conversation?
Pihkala: Warmly welcome, Louise, also from my part. We have been exchanging some emails online. And I of course know your work from environmental education research. Many Finns have also been curious about studies of children's natural experiences and nature connection. This theme of having significant experiences in natural environments is just one part of that. And speaking of that, would you like to share with us some of your own earlier journey? You described some parts of your professional journey, but do you see some developments in your own childhood and youth and adolescence which led you towards this part of life and research?
Chawla: Well, absolutely. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I was very fortunate to have a childhood where I lived kind of between two places. One was an old suburb of New York City. Where the back border of our home was a brook. And that went up to a marsh. And then beyond the marsh was a woods. And there was an old orchard and woodlots and so forth. And so I had all of that. Which is where I spent just countless hours growing up as a child. But I also had family in New York City. So it was still a generation, where I just had to show up for dinner. And I was able to roam around initially, Greenwich Village. And then when the family moved to the edge of Chinatown, and Brooklyn Bridge. That part of lower Manhattan. So I've never really drawn a distinction between nature and cities and nature and towns. Because at their best, even our densely inhabited places, have nature in them.
Certainly when you're a child, they have child sized nature in them. And of course, New York City has great parks. It had the rivers. And so that was so important to me that when I discovered there is a field of environmental psychology when I was a master's student doing a degree in child development and education, I realized immediately that's what I want to spend my career doing. How can we create places and cultures where every child in the world has an opportunity to have those kinds of opportunities to discover the natural world and the cultural world together? And, you know, of course I'm not going to achieve that. But I think it's like our goal of living in harmony with nature, as Rachel Carson said. You know, it's the horizon we work toward. And having that horizon keeps us going. And will we perfectly achieve it, maybe not, but it still keeps us going.
Doherty: Yeah, there's so much I'm thinking for listeners who are parents who are thinking about how they might want to be the best parents they can for their children. Or for all of us we're thinking about our own childhoods, you know, I grew up in Buffalo, New York. And had a certain view of nature based on that. Panu, of course, has his view. And all the listeners all have their own places. But since you've been doing this for a while, I wonder if we can just help people to see the larger trends first. And then we can drill down to some really specific, you know, concepts and things.
But Louise, you must have seen a lot because, like you say you yourself are of an age where you were lucky to have safe access to nature. And the urban rural divide wasn't so black and white. And then, of course, over the last few decades, we've had this whole child and nature movement. And the work of Richard Louv. And this “Last Child in the Woods” kind of insight that, you know, life has changed for people in the modern world – being much more technological. And nature and the outdoors not being seen as safe. And people must be much more concerned about liability. And different views on parks. And I'm also thinking of David Sobel's work and other people. What do you see as the broad trend that brings us to the present day? Like what do you think, how would you land us now, you know, given what you've seen over the last couple of decades?
Chawla: Well, you're entirely correct, Thomas, in saying within a generation, and now moving into another second generation, there's been a transformation in terms of children's freedom to autonomously explore the world around them. The world around them has been changing, as you said. More densely built. More traffic. More crime. You know, a side of my work has been that. For 10 years, I coordinated the Growing up in Cities project for UNESCO, where we worked with children generally around 10 to 14 in low income communities around the world. And I was reviving a project that the urban planner and designer Kevin Lynch had created with UNESCO in the 1970s. So one generation later and already we could track between his work and the work we were doing. We started this in the mid 1990s. I coordinated it for 10 years.
And now we have a local version of it that I helped create with others called Growing up Boulder, since we live in Boulder, Colorado. But we could already over that generation see, you know, that cities were more crime. And not just children's perception, that's certainly what data showed as well. And, of course, more traffic, and more ethnic tensions. And of course, in part that was because certainly in the United States, we had a whole system to keep people in their place. But, you know, by the mid 1990s, there was more immigration around the world. I mean, a new wave of immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, mostly. But new waves of immigration and the tensions created within communities. So we could really see those changes happening. And yes, and then screens, you know. TVs changed from a little gray thing when I was a child to all of their enticements. And on smartphones and computers and iPods and all kinds of screens. And so that's been a dramatic change, of course, in children's lives. Really dramatic.
But on a personal note, what I need to say is that, you know, when I was a child playing up in the marsh, or in the old woodlot, or up in the woods, in the brook, I just assumed that was an eternal world. That the world of nature was eternal. And, of course, I hadn't taken any classes in ecology or evolutionary history yet. But that was just a feeling as a child. But, of course, we know it's not eternal. But when I was talking to a friend, the artist Patricia Johansson. Who works with water in the landscape. So very connected to the landscape. And she was saying the same thing, you know, out in the woods, it's just that this is an eternal place. And that was part of, I think, why it was magical, and comforting, as well. But her grandchildren don't have that perspective at all. So, on a personal note, I never expected I would be writing about and researching how to help young people cope with a very rapidly changing planet.
Doherty: Yeah.
Chawla: So that's been a personal trajectory for me.
Pihkala: Thanks for sharing all that. And that brings us to the close connections between some of my research and your research. And I've greatly enjoyed your article from a couple of years back, called Childhood Nature Connection and Constructive Hope, with a subtitle A Review of Research on Connecting with Nature and Coping with Environmental Loss. And this latter part, as you hinted at now, that's been more rare in environmental education scholarship, for complex reasons I think. And I really appreciate this wide ranging review that you did, and which highlights the point that it's all based on caring and connection. Because we hurt where we care, as Thomas has a habit of saying. So both the empathy and the feelings of loss and grief and various fear and anxiety and worry -related feelings. They are related to the same fundamental point, but would you like to say something about these interconnections and that paper?
Chawla: Yeah, well, where that paper comes from specifically is that I was part of a, actually a three year project with North American Association for Environmental Education was the Center for Children in Nature Network. A cluster of universities. To look at how connection to nature was being measured. And so I was there with Thomas Berry, who is in Sweden as a researcher. At that time, he was at the University of Minnesota. And we recognize that we have to make sure that measures for children are part of this effort. The goal was to produce a practitioners guide to assessing connection to nature, which is now freely available on the North American Association for Environmental Education website. But in the process of getting there we had all these different measures for, you know, mostly older children and adults. And as a group, we were reviewing them. We met in workshops. And to try to select the ones that would be really most accessible and useful for people in the environmental education field. And first, you know, Thomas and I noticed, there's very little here for younger children. So we made sure that early childhood measures are included in that.
But in the process, yeah, I noticed these are all positive measures. I mean, the assumption is that connecting with nature is always a happy experience. And yet, I was aware, you know, I've been since the 1990s, I've been following studies that would ask children just really open ended questions like, what do you think the world will be like in 50? years? Or what do you think it'll be like in 100 years? Or what do you think you'll be like when you're raising your own children? And most of the responses from different countries, you know, just different interview approaches, drawing approaches. They were mostly dystopian. Like really dystopian. And dystopian, especially in terms of what was going to happen to the environment. And yet, you know, the children responding to these very open-ended questions were, certainly, in my view, expressing connection with the natural world too. That's why they were so upset. That's why they had such fearful imaginings for the future. And then I had a doctoral student Susie Stryfe, who did a study of the meaning of nature in the daily lives of children in a nearby city called Commerce City. Industrial city. Huge oil and gas refinery. And loads of warehouses. Idling trucks, et cetera. Gangs. A number of Superfund sites. And yet, nature was very important to them wherever they could find it. I mean, it might be an overgrown ditch. It might be the big, weedy overgrown corner of a, you know, basketball court. But it might be the strip of trees. But it was really important to them, where they found it. Where they could find it.
And then simultaneously, she was doing all the same methods with children in a very economically upscale suburb of Denver, not far apart. They tend to think of nature as the exotic vacations we go on. To go as a family. But either way, she asked him this very open ended question, do you have any environmental concerns, and about 80% in both communities. It didn't matter which one. Had these, you know, expressed themselves in ways that hit me in the stomach. I mean, they said things like, I'm really sad because my grandson, or my great nephew is going to have to experience the end of the world. Or I'm really sad because all the animals are going to die. And, I mean, these really powerful statements to me. That was definitely part of their connection to nature. And so that's where I took these two literature reviews. Connection to nature. And all the good things it's about which it is and how it's being measured. And then this other research on children's fears and worries and sadness about what is happening to our planet. And brought them together to say, there's this, you know, difficult side of society of connecting to nature too. And, you know, given that one of the things that comes out of coping with environmental loss literature is the importance of opening in a space to feel you can freely express your emotions. In which I know has been a very important part of your work, Thomas and Panu.
I see it's a very important part of your thinking about this as well. And, yet, my friend Maria Ojala who I brought over here for a while. And, you know, in her work in Sweden she said she thinks maybe Swedish children feel they have to be cool all the time. If you're cool you can't let anybody know you're worried about anything. And children talking about, you know, if they bring up concern about what's going on with the planet. Being told, you know, we don't have time for that in the classroom. Or actually being laughed at by their peers. And you know, we have a culture which tends to put authentic emotions under wraps. And so it's just put me on my current path where I'm really thinking about what are the different opportunities we can create for young people to feel they can, you know, acknowledge and be open about this difficult side of being connected to nature. And how can we help them with that process?
Doherty: Yeah, I just want to speak to the listeners as you're listening. We've been doing this podcast for over a year, but this is one of the first times we've got into this particular area of child development. And just so listeners know, there's, there's people that have been studying this for years. People like Louise. And people like David Sobel, Peter Kahn, Carol Saunders. And, you know, so there's a whole, like, academic literature that's been recognizing this. But it is all of our task right? Every time we bring up children in nature. And any conversation, we ended up having to go through this mini rite of passage. Even in the conversation where we have to then confront, okay, we're in this world. And we have all this stuff, and climate change. And it is daunting, everything.
And, you know, as John Muir said, everything is linked together, when you pull on one thing, and the universe is hitched to everything else. So we don't have the luxury of just talking about children in a meadow with butterflies only. W9e have to realize, well, there's different social classes and different access and different places in the world. And kids are smart. They're very smart. And they see all the news. And they have their own thoughts and ideas about it. So, you know, I love the fact that Louise, you're just listening to kids. You know, it's this brave listening of research where we're just like, let's just see what's actually happening out there. But that's takeaway for parents. So if we want to bring this larger. We don't want to get stuck in this world conversation because people start spinning. And then they become disempowered. So how does this come back down to actual parenting and how we live our lives. Could you say a little bit - the idea that I think about as a parent, I find helpful coming out of a lot of this research is this idea of joint attention. The idea of an adult and a young person looking at nature together. At any age, from infancy to adult peers. And, you know, how that plays out in zoos and different natural places. And how that's helpful for our emotional development. Could you say a little bit about that, Louise? Because I know some of these things are a big part of your work.
Chawla: Yeah. So, you know, I think all of this does tie in with what you were saying earlier, Thomas, about kids being physically separated from nature now by rules about safety. And always being supervised. And there's not so much of it around. although, again, those kids in Commerce City, were able to find it wherever it was when they were free to move around outside. Um, but another piece of my research has been significant life experiences. And that started the area of research and environmental education that started in 1980 with someone named Tom Tanner. Who said, well, if our goal as environmental educators, and I hoped this would be the goal of parents as well as to, you know, produce children. People who really know and care about the natural world, then, you know, what were the formative experiences in people who were exemplars of that kind of caring? And it started with really interviewing and surveying people who were examples. Which makes sense. So staff in leading conservation organizations, environmental educators, people who would become professionals in learning about and caring about the natural world.
And so, again, my question was, what if we kind of can push that? And what if I went out there and I talked to the widest group of people I could. You know, people who were young and old. And men and women. And working class as well as professionals. And high school education. As well as PhDs. And doing very different kinds of activism, including defending their community from yet one more, you know, incinerator being put next door. And so I did that. And I did that research, I did it all around the state of Kentucky, where I lived at the time. And then I did it around Norway, when I was a Fulbright Scholar there.
And what this research shows is that what comes out the most often in terms of formative experiences is a time to kind of mess around out there in the natural world, as a child. Just, you know, free play, free exploration. But also important people. And that's what gets to the joint attention in your question, Thomas. Which meant parents, grandparents, favorite uncle. Whoever it might be, who, you know, went out in nature with you. And looked at things together. That joint attention. And it's so mundane. I mean, we do it all the time. How profound it is, I think, just escapes most people's awareness. It starts around nine months old. And there's really, if you think of any environment, there's kind of an infinite number of things in it in most places that we could pay attention to. I mean, I'm in my study now. I've got hundreds of books there. I could pay attention to any one of them. I could pay attention to the pattern in the wood on the floor. But so we have to learn to selectively pay attention. And we learned that with other people, you know, the other people around us kind of indicate what's important to notice. And when people talked about their relationships with these important people in their lives when they were children. Usually family members. Rarely teachers, but sometimes teachers. But usually family members. That's what they were doing. You know, they were noticing things in nature together. They were taking time to slow down and notice things appreciatively.
On the other hand, of course, we can be taught very early not to notice. I love the story of Bill Crane, a developmental psychologist who would watch little kids and their caretakers in public parks in New York. And he said, usually this is the scenario he would see. Something like this. A toddler sees a pigeon. It gets all excited about the pigeon. It's trotting after the pigeon. And it's caretaker grabs him and says leave that dirty bird. Or come on, you know, we have to get home. No time for this. Unfortunately he said that's what he mostly saw. So joint attention. And then as people get older it can be the fabulous teacher who takes you on field trips. It can become your best buddy who you go exploring with. It can become, you know, your outdoor camping leaders. But those processes of joint attention of showing. Of coming with us. Both getting excited about what excites us and inviting us to get excited about what excites them outdoors in nature are really fundamental. And then when we get to the other side of it noticing harm. Noticing loss. Noticing a wildfire that just burned out in your community. Very real to me living on the edge of the woods. And how do we deal with that together too? I think that those qualities of attention. And how we respond to what we see really is a fundamental mental part of the whole process of relating with the world around us.
Pihkala: Thanks a lot for that, Louise. That's very rich. And also reminds us of the episode we did with the poet Kim Stafford where we talked about Rachel Carson's Sense of wonder, for example. The great little book. And the general topic of retaining the ability to experience wonder, but also the ability to experience sorrow, or sadness. And that's one part of the creative work nowadays in environmental education. Trying to think about encounters with sadness and loss, like the death of a small animal, which is a very common experience that children experience sometimes. So how can the adults be with the child in a way, which builds up skills of encountering grief constructively. So also, for the listeners, that's one sort of practical example. And it requires also from the adults, you know, sort of resistance to the desire to move away from sometimes either difficult or boring subjects. So much comes up. Much goes back to certain quite fundamental basics in education and patience seems to be one of them. And I've really enjoyed this conversation. Our time is running out. And we have to wrap up soon. But what's on your mind, Thomas at this point?
Doherty: Yeah, as it often happens, I want to talk more and more because we've opened up such a rich thing. So we can go maybe a little bit longer today, because it's such a great topic. But it's the best of times in the worst of times here. Because in these times of fraught relationships with nature and climate change it does help us to remember what is important. And come back to the basics of what healthy parenting is. You know, we're all I think. Are you a parent, Louise, I don't know your background, yourself, do you? Are you a parent yourself?
Chawla: Yes, I have a grown daughter.
Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. So we're all parents here. And all of us have had this experience. So I think of the challenge of being a parent and well, let me rephrase that I was about to say something that kind of has a blind spot, because I was gonna say, the experience of parents today is that we have to hold all this negative stuff, and all the joy and the wonder. But as we know, and as you know, Louise, that's always been the case, depending on the neighborhood you're researching, right. So that's another big piece, as we understand globally, people have always struggled with environmental degradation and threats. And also found a sense of wonder. And that's one of the great resilience of children is they will find nature and wonder, no matter where they live, anywhere.
And all of us will find a pocket of nature and play and magic, and things like that. So as the listeners think about this, just realizing that we, you know, kids are actually quite resilient. And that's developmentally part of their lives. Like they actually can talk about death. They just reason about it in their own ways. So just opening, you know, as families, we need to all kind of open up to these things. And then listen to each other. Like one of my sayings is validate, elevate, create. So it's like validating what the person is talking about whatever it happens to be elevated. Put it on a pedestal. Let's look at this. And then let's get creative about it. How do you know about it? What should we do about it? And things like that.
Chawla: Yeah, yeah. I would just like to say that, of course, they say it's always been the best of times, and the worst of times, at least in our Western society. But, we have to face our relations with the planet now. There's not going to be any way out. And I think that yes, that calls on great creativity from parents, teachers or institutions or children. Children like creative challenges, in my experience. It really gets back to opening up a space to discuss feelings. That's going to have to be part of it. And I think that is at the center and moving from there. And parents can share their own ambivalence and their own, you know, sense of confusion. And children can understand that. They are very familiar with confusion and ambivalence. But I think a critical piece is that the things we're asked to do are actually, that are good for the planet and are good for us too. And I think one very important piece is helping families and helping children recognize that the changes we need to make in our lives, some of them can actually make our lives better. We improve the quality of our lives. And, you know, choosing lives of voluntary simplicity for the planet's part. Choosing to invest some of our time and finding projects where we can all work to care for our local worlds together. Those make our lives better. So the paths we need to take are actually good for us as well as good for the larger world.
Doherty: Yeah, co-benefits. Yeah there's all kinds of co-benefits to all these sustainability things that we talk about. Yeah. Panu, what are you thinking about as we wrap up here?
Pihkala: Well, I think that's a very important and also nice point to end this very fascinating discussion, which could go on for a long time. And think with Thomas, whether we get the chance to talk with you again sometime. That would be lovely.
Doherty: Yeah. As we close, we're gonna put some links to some of Louise's work, and her research that's available online and some of the stuff that she's doing in Boulder, Colorado. You know, reminding listeners about the episode we had recently with Susan Bodner. The psychologist in New York City, who is working on a very parallel path about people's attachment to nature. And they're using the psychological concept of attachment to natural places. And she's listening to people in New York. Just listening to what they say. And my insight. And, Louise, you can tell me what you think. I mean this is extending out of the research. But the classic takeaway of unhealthy attachment is that if a child has at least one caregiver of any kind, whether it be an aunt or a grandparent. It doesn't have to be a parent. If you have one healthy relationship that usually leads to resilience in someone's life. And so I think if we have just at least one healthy mentor. Or one healthy nature mentor, I think that will be enough to give you a healthy connection with nature. I don't know if those two things are exactly similar.
Chawla: I think they totally get together, Thomas. Because all the things we were talking about in terms of going out and noticing things in the natural world and encouraging a sense of kinship. And bonding with it. And taking action to care for it. Those all are done in the spirit of companionship. Respect for the child's interests and feelings. Acknowledgement of the adults interests and feelings. And they're being in that kind of positive, very interactive relationship that's respectful of both sides. And respectful of the natural world. And that is at the very center of what you're talking about in terms of secure attachment theory.
Doherty: Great. Well, that's a good takeaway. We'll wrap it up for today. But, Louise, I know you're busy with, you know, even though you say you're retired, it sounds like you're actually quite active. And doing a lot of neat stuff. So I really am impressed. And I've learned so much from you. I wouldn't be doing the work I'm doing without the work that you have done in the past. I think Panu can say the same. So I really appreciate having time to chat with you. And that you're still in the game here just as much or more than ever. So thank you very much. And you both have - Louise you have a good you have a good rest of the day. And Panu, you have a really good evening. The Climate Change and Happiness Podcast is a self funded volunteer effort. Please support us so we can keep bringing you messages of coping and thriving. See the donate page at climatechangeandhappiness.com.
