Addressing Nature Deficit Disorder in Point Schools
- susan1882
- Sep 24
- 4 min read
My father was born into a family of 9 children by immigrant parents and raised on a farm in Iowa with no water or electricity. They installed plumbing only when my father reached high school. Four of my uncles stayed farming into their adulthood; but of the 35 offspring, not a single one of my cousins went into farming. During the 1980’s Farm Crisis, we even lost the family farm.
As I grew up, I did not have a natural connection to the land. My father was a food inspector working with the USDA for his career. We lived in a suburb of Chicago. The connection to land and wild spaces was not a part of my youthful years. In fact, most of my suburban upbringing was watching farmland and empty wooded lots get converted into housing developments and strip malls. It is fair to assume that many of you reading this have similar experiences or stories.
Off to college to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, I majored in biology and chemistry, later getting a masters in environmental education. I joined Peace Corps and lived in rural Tanzania
surrounded by subsistence farming. In East Africa, everyone seemed tied to the land one way or another. With a 12-month growing season, there was always something that grew. So, I gave gardening a go, finding some success in sweet potatoes. Yet, there was something more important; I started cultivating something that was inherently within myself. I felt this connection to the world around me that deepened. A connection formed in the dirt between my toes, something took root, but I just couldn’t put my foot on it.
Richard Louv authored a book called “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our children from
nature deficit disorder” that was released in 2005. While working in the environmental education and teacher training field at the time, our industry grabbed a hold of this book. It shared what we had known and observed in our field of work. It put words and research behind what I experienced and was experiencing in my first two decades of living. Kids were being raised without a connection to the natural world, like my upbringing, and studies were finally showing the impact of that disconnection! It is no fault to my parents. We had a few outings and camping trips. There was now proven evidence of the impact on kids not knowing where their food comes from. There was evidence of the impact of not learning outdoors, let alone just enjoying time outside. Kids wanted to be inside because “that is where the video games were.” It was proven that kids indeed spent more time in front of screens and devices than in the outdoors.
My father was born around a time that an estimated 1 in 4 people in the USA lived on a farm. Today, it is less than 2% of the population. Louv’s book was a calling to the need in the USA to create more intention spaces for youth to connect, learn, and enjoy wild spaces. The research has exploded in this area. We have found that even transforming small spaces and gardens into growing places, a connection can be fostered. We can create these learning spaces at home and in schools with “pocket gardens,” small intentional spaces for growing plants and increasing biodiversity in a small area.
We are 20 years since Louv published his book, and what have we done about it? Well, actually, there has been movements and concerted efforts worldwide to counter these effects. In 2023, Recycling Connections had the opportunity to partner with the city to grow gardens at schools. We wanted to diversify school grounds for water conservation, reduction of erosion, soil health, biodiversity to support pollinators, and create learning opportunities directly on school grounds for students and teachers. Native gardens were chosen since they required less maintenance than food gardens and provide several ecological benefits and learning opportunities for schools.
Build it and they will come…since 2023, native rain or prairie gardens were added to six schools in Stevens Point adding a total of 4,100 plants, 35 different native plant species, and 29 square feet of compost. There were 630 students engaged in the actual planting of the gardens. Annually, there are nearly 4,000 students learning in schools with one of these high biodiversity, native gardens on their school grounds. Each garden has a designated garden ambassador assigned to help with continued monitoring and maintenance when needed. The gardens are all registered with the National Wildlife Federation as a Native School Garden, and they all qualify as a Monarch Waystation for having a dedicated planting design that supports the monarch butterfly’s lifecycle by providing essential food and habitat.
Our kids are being raised disconnected to the Earth. Creating opportunities to be stewards is more important today, perhaps, than any other time of human existence on Earth. Recycling Connections is dedicated to teaching stewardship through soil health, composting, and resource conservation. We hope you visit one of the schools to see the gardens at work. They serve important ecological services year-round. Here is a list of the schools to visit. (Click on the school name to read about their garden.)
Are you interested in soil heath, resource conservation, native gardens, or compost? Reach out to us! We would love to hear from you. Susan@RecyclingConnections.org.
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