Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together by Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments 23(1), 2013 Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert, eds. (2012). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 304 pages. $21.95 USD (paperback). ISBN 978-0-262-51690-7. The title of this book is intended to resonate with the seminal essay by Rachel Carson, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” later published as the 1956 book The Sense of Wonder. Carson wrote that, “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder..., he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” Companions in Wonder focuses on this relationship. The editors frame its 30 essays between an introduction about what a sense of wonder means and why it matters and an afterword with suggestions about what readers can do to support getting children outdoors into nature. In the middle, an essay by Kellert on “The Naturalistic Necessity” provides a conceptual framework for the wide range of experiences that the collection of essays describe. This book is important not only because it examines with precision how this relationship unfolds, as adults record their forays into nature with children or remember their own mentors when they were children, but it does this with attention to different contexts: how it unfolds in privilege and poverty, in the natural world as a place for recreation or a place for labor, in families whose names or skin colors mark them as insiders or outsiders on the land. It covers early childhood when bonds between families and children are close, the middle years of children’s growing competence and independence, and adolescence when these bonds often fray. It examines the complexities of this relationship from the side of both adults and children. Research on people’s developing connection with the natural world demonstrates that two factors most frequently distinguish people who show significant interest and care for nature. People who take action to protect the natural world are likely to report having had special childhood places in nature for routine play and discovery and special people who affirmed nature’s value (Chawla and Derr, in press). Research has not yet examined in detail, however, what happens when children enter special places with special people. This book suggests aspects of this experience that future studies might fruitfully explore. Equally well, it can be read for sheer fascination in the variety of its accounts. Anyone who would like to understand this relationship better will find much to engage them, whether they are academics, environmental educators, parents, grandparents, or anyone else who likes to head for open spaces in the company of a child.© 2013 Children, Youth and Environments Book Review: Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together 222 The essays cluster around four themes. First, most of the essays describe deliberate processes of introducing children to nature through activities such as gardening, tracking, fishing, hiking, collecting, wild harvesting, and species identification. They range through a variety of moods from the didactic to the ecstatic and the problematic. Michael Branch dilutes the seriousness of didactic approaches with riotous humor when he tells how he determined to plant a vegetable garden for his preschool daughter in the Great Basin Desert at the feet of the Sierra Nevada, where birds, mice, voles, moles, kangaroo rats, packrats, pocket gophers and ground squirrels were equally eager to enjoy his enterprise. Gretel Van Wieren communicates exuberant appreciation for all things wild, wet and riverine as she recounts learning to fish with her parents and grandparents and passing the art of fly fishing on to her daughters. The magic of creek and woodland save Rick Van Noy from the risks inherent in his policy that his children are going to hike whether they like it or not. One essay, “The Big Talk,” shares Sandra Steingraber’s struggle with a new aspect of nature experience where children need adult leadership: making sense of menacing stories that they hear about climate change and their own observations of the weather. A second theme probes parent-child relationships outdoors. In pieces by Richard Louv, Scott Russell...