Editor’s Essay

Leave No Soul Inside

I’m not sure exactly when I became an “environmentalist,” but I’m pretty sure it was up at summer camp. Maybe it happened while canoeing up the Manitowish River, listening to the wind in the pines. Maybe it was while rolling head-to-toe in mud, chanting and singing like a madman and stomping in puddles with 50 other kids on one of camp’s fabled “roves.” Maybe it was while listening to loon calls with a handful of other seventh graders who in most other contexts wouldn’t be caught dead being so reverent. Though it only lasted a few weeks each year, my camp time in the Northwoods turned me on to nature at a deep level and led to a lot more.

My experience agrees with the assertion by a growing number of researchers that early, positive exposure to nature is essential to later environmental stewardship (not to mention personal health and a range of other issues). In the last of our series of special reports funded by the Grand Victoria Foundation, Katherine Millett addresses a central challenge we face as a society — “nature-deficit disorder” — and how parents, kids, and institutions are working to keep us connected to nature in this increasingly plugged-in, heads-down world of iPods and text messaging. Early efforts have led to a nationwide “Leave No Child Inside” campaign, and Chicago Wilderness is making it a core priority. Starting in June, look to the consortium for resources to help reconnect kids with wild places and wild experiences (visit the campaign’s new Web site).

Plenty of parents ask their kids about grades. But how many ask them, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” That’s the question poet Mary Oliver asks, and her question contains the answer, at least to my mind: making time to appreciate nature is one of the most vital things we can do.

In this issue, we encourage you to grab hold of summer. Use it for pleasure, fun, being outside, swimming, hiking, exploring, growing, even if it’s only for a moment here or there. Take vacation. Go to camp. Go sit in a field and look at wildflowers. Yes, you, kids. Yes, you, adults. (And when you go, bring along 11 Fresh Ways to See Nature.)

Think such activities are too frivolous for this world of serious problems? Consider Dr. Bob Betz. His passing in April inspired many comments from naturalists, stewards, and others across the region whose lives he’d touched. As a child, he was given the freedom to explore overgrown lots in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, where he gave names to all the weeds he found. Now he’ll be remembered as one of the most powerful advocates for prairie restoration in the Midwest. His childhood “dalliances” eventually led to the preservation of some of the last and best remnants of our natural heritage.

Simple nature appreciation is also shaping the future of Wolf Lake in the heavily industrialized Calumet region, detailed by Greg Spyreas. As leaders make plans for the area, figuring out how best to integrate human industry and nature, the shape of the entire Calumet may be determined as much by fisherman, birders, and plant lovers as by captains of industry. (And in the best cases, these will be one and the same.)

With some city leaders talking about extending the school year through the summer, I worry about missed opportunities for kids to step outside the four walls of school, to be exposed to what is every bit as much “the real world” — natural systems that, in fact, are what we rely on for clean air, clean water, and so many other things. To me, hope for the future comes from people like teacher Ryan White, who actively moves school beyond the built, controlled environment to the places that make him feel most alive.

We can be “outdoor people” living in cities and suburbs we’ll even show you how to get there by public transit. Let’s leave no one inside, and help shape the future of our best places and our best selves.