Americans Spending Less Time in Nature

From NPR's 'Morning Edition':

'Every year, a smaller percentage of Americans are fishing, camping or engaging in other nature-based activities. Since the late 1980s, the percentage of Americans taking part in such activities has declined at slightly more than 1 percent a year. The total effect [...] is down 18 to 25 percent from peak levels.

Mark Barrow, a Virginia Tech environmental historian, says the changes described in this paper are potentially historic. He says it's worth remembering that Americans have changed their attitudes toward nature many times over the centuries: It has been seen as evil, something to be tamed, a source of wealth, and as what Barrows calls a romantic playground.

In that view, Barrow says, experiencing wilderness was "connecting with something divine, something that was primal and part of who you were as a culture."

But Barrow says this study makes him wonder whether a new era may be dawning, one in which the wild is a place best seen at zoos or on plasma-screen TVs. "It clearly seems to be the case that we seem to not need to experience the natural world in the ways that we did previously," Barrow says.

The new study also says Americans might not be the only people changing in this way. Numbers from Japan show similar declines in things like park visits.

This evidence of losing touch with nature does not bode well for the Earth's future or children ever wanting to learn any of the sciences like biology, geology, or botany. Ancestral Knowledge is dedicated to bringing the "wildness" experience back to where it belongs in the American Psyche by teaching our children to see the wonders in nature and fostering that spark of curiosity.