The most haunting part of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, a remarkable book about how the notion of place shapes our thinking, is a passage about what our attitudes about the natural world have done to children.
A 2012 ‘Natural Childhood’ report recorded that between 1970 and 2010, the area in which British children were permitted to play unsupervised shrank by 90 per cent. The proportion of children regularly playing in ‘wild’ places fell from one in two to one in ten. In another study, participants from three generations were given maps of the places in which they grew up, and asked to mark with crosses where they remembered playing. The spread of the crosses — the so-called ‘roaming radius’ — tightened from generation to generation, until in the third it was cinched right down to house, garden and pavement. Screen-time has increased dramatically. Environmental literacy has plummeted.
What we are doing to the environment we do to our children and their children. They, like us, are part of the natural world. It’s not just the loss of habitat, although that’s tragic. It’s the loss of imagination.
Macfarlane tells another version of this story at the start of the book in discussing the revisions to the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Children now can look up blog, broadband and bullet-points but can no longer find acorn, ash and beech. That’s a bad trade.
If your kids and grandkids don’t know how to play in the natural world, show them.
• Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, pp. 323, 3.
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