Extinction Of Experience Research Articles

Birds in the playground: Evaluating the effectiveness of an urban environmental education project in enhancing school children's awareness, knowledge and attitudes towards local wildlife.

Children nowadays, particularly in urban areas, are more disconnected from nature than ever before, leading to a large-scale “extinction of experience” with the natural world. Yet there are many potential benefits from children interacting with nature first-hand, including via outdoor learning opportunities. Urban environmental education programmes typically aim to increase awareness and knowledge of local biodiversity and to promote positive attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, limited research has been conducted evaluating to what extent these interventions achieve their goals. Here, we explore and assess the influence of a six-week bird-feeding and monitoring project conducted within school grounds (“Bird Buddies”) on individual awareness, knowledge and attitudes towards birds by primary school children. This initiative was conducted across eight (sub-)urban primary schools within Brighton and Hove (UK), with 220 participating children (aged 7 to 10). Via pre- and post-project questionnaires, we found evidence for enhanced awareness of local biodiversity, alongside significant gains in both bird identification knowledge and attitudes, which were greatest for children with little prior exposure to nature. Many children expressed a keenness to continue improving the environmental value of their school grounds and to apply elements of the project at home. Student project evaluation scores were consistently positive. Mirroring this, participating teachers endorsed the project as a positive learning experience for their students. One year after the project, several schools were continuing to feed and watch birds. Collectively, the findings from this study highlight the multiple benefits that can be derived from engagement with a relatively short outdoor environmental activity. We therefore believe that such interventions, if repeated locally/longer term, could enhance children’s experience with nature in urban settings with combined positive environmental impact.

Drawing care: the illustrated journal’s “path to place”

ABSTRACTNaturalists argue that the greatest threat to the natural world may be our “extinction of experience” with it. We know that place matters, but what can work to restore care between people and place? In this article, I will argue that illustrated journals can reinvigorate our experience with the world. By including text and image, science and art, illustrated journals incorporate different ways of knowing. Drawing draws us into the world as we pay attention to easily missed details. Writing complements drawing by providing a space for synthesizing or imagining about the observed. Like any skilled practice, journaling transforms our understanding of the world. My illustrated field journals began when I sensed that care for today’s world demanded more tools than what my training as an ecologist, alone, could offer. Illustrated journaling can begin with a few simple drawing and writing exercises – several of which I will describe in this article. As an immersive practice in place, the process of illustrated journals matters more than the product. Page by page, illustrated journals recognize the interpretive encounters so foundational to worldmaking and, in doing so, cultivate the deep attention to, and experience of, the world that is our first step toward care.

Impacts of nature imagery on people in severely nature‐deprived environments

An estimated 5.3 million Americans live or work in nature‐deprived venues such as prisons, homeless shelters, and mental hospitals. Such removal from nature can result in an “extinction of experience” that can further lead to disinterest or disaffection toward natural settings, or even biophobia (fear of the natural environment). People who infrequently – or never – spend time in nature will be deprived of the numerous physical and emotional benefits that contact with nature affords. We report on the effects of vicarious nature experiences (nature videos) provided to maximum‐security prison inmates for one year, and compared their emotions and behaviors to inmates who were not offered such videos. Inmates who watched nature videos reported feeling significantly calmer, less irritable, and more empathetic, and committed 26% fewer violent infractions as compared to those who did not watch the videos. Prison staff corroborated these findings. This research reinforces the value of nature exposure as a powerful tool not only for corrections administrators, but also for urban planners and policy makers, to promote socially desirable behaviors.

Both Direct and Vicarious Experiences of Nature Affect Children's Willingness to Conserve Biodiversity.

Children are becoming less likely to have direct contact with nature. This ongoing loss of human interactions with nature, the extinction of experience, is viewed as one of the most fundamental obstacles to addressing global environmental challenges. However, the consequences for biodiversity conservation have been examined very little. Here, we conducted a questionnaire survey of elementary schoolchildren and investigated effects of the frequency of direct (participating in nature-based activities) and vicarious experiences of nature (reading books or watching TV programs about nature and talking about nature with parents or friends) on their affective attitudes (individuals’ emotional feelings) toward and willingness to conserve biodiversity. A total of 397 children participated in the surveys in Tokyo. Children’s affective attitudes and willingness to conserve biodiversity were positively associated with the frequency of both direct and vicarious experiences of nature. Path analysis showed that effects of direct and vicarious experiences on children’s willingness to conserve biodiversity were mediated by their affective attitudes. This study demonstrates that children who frequently experience nature are likely to develop greater emotional affinity to and support for protecting biodiversity. We suggest that children should be encouraged to experience nature and be provided with various types of these experiences.

Reducing the extinction of experience: Association between urban form and recreational use of public greenspace

Halting the ‘extinction of experience’, the progressive disengagement of people with the natural world, is vital to human health and wellbeing and to public support for global biological conservation. Home to the majority of humanity, urban areas are the key for engaging people with nature, raising the crucial question of how cities should best be designed to facilitate these experiences. For the purposes of maintaining local biodiversity, intensive development within a small area (land sparing) has been shown to be better than extensive development over a large area (land sharing). Here, we investigated for the first time how different city forms affect people's experience of nature, measured in terms of their use of greenspaces. We selected five pairs of land-sharing and land-sparing study regions with different coverage by greenspaces within the city of Tokyo, central Japan and used a questionnaire survey to determine the use residents made of these spaces. We found the frequency of people's recreational use of urban greenspaces was higher in urban land-sharing than land-sparing regions. Moreover, satisfaction with local green environments was also higher in land-sharing regions. This suggests a potential conflict in the design of cities between the urban form that is most desirable for the direct protection of regional biodiversity, and that which best promotes people's nature experiences and the support for its wider protection. A strong emphasis on the advantages of land sparing may increase the separation of humans from nature, and further reduce public interest in, and awareness of, biodiversity and its benefits.

Wired People in Wired Places: Stories about Machines and the Geography of Activity

This article examines the relationship between the technologies of communication and mobility and the geography of everyday life. Centered on the period from the Industrial Revolution to the present, stories about machines contribute biographies of several technologies leading to contemporary intersections among communications, transport, and geography. The advance of technology has recently been marked by the production of hypermobility where, in some places, the numeric majority access and make use of a nearly ubiquitous supply of communication and mobility infrastructures and devices. Data from the International Telecommunication Union, the U.S. Federal Highway Administration, and the Canadian Internet Project support observations regarding the rise of hypermobility in the United States and elsewhere. The geography of action and activity continues to evolve within a hypermobile present where information and communication technologies intercede between people and place, producing digitally augmented metageographies and the potential extinction of experience.

Redeeming the Nature of Childhood

Children, Youth and Environments 17(2), 2007 Redeeming the Nature of Childhood Emily Stanley Antioch University New England Keene, New Hampshire Citation: Stanley, Emily (2007). “Redeeming the Nature of Childhood.” Children, Youth and Environments 17(2): 208-212. “Welcome back, Ivory Bill!” This sign on my classroom door one spring morning several years ago greeted students with bold red letters and a picture of the longunseen woodpecker. I could barely contain my excitement as each group came in for science class. How often do we get to tell such a gripping tale of loss and redemption? I described how much of the ivorybill’s habitat had been destroyed by logging, that it hadn’t been spotted for many years, and now, when all hope seemed gone—a sighting. “So,” I wound up with a celebratory flourish, “the lost bird has been found!” Some of the children cheered and clapped. Six-year old Jonathan, listening intently with hands clasped, responded gravely, “But, that bird wasn’t lost. The people were.” Two simple sentences; one unexpected, illuminating lesson. The ivorybill’s status has since remained in question, but I will forever imagine it obscured in the thick tangle of its own Arkansas woods, keeping a wary eye out for the lost people. How often do we allow the firm lens of our adult world to be inverted by the perspective of a child? Not often enough. In the 20 years that I have been teaching and parenting, I have filled many a mental bulletin board with snapshots and stories of how children have shifted my focus on the world. These help to counter the dismal, pervasive accounts of loss that top educational and parenting agendas, such as attention deficits, the evaporation of imagination, and vanishing opportunities for play. This discourse of loss has recently gained another member: the extinction of experience in nature, a phenomenon characterized by the everdecreasing time spent by successive generations in outdoor settings. What one generation does not experience, it will likely not value, and therefore will not bequeath to its children, suggests the idea’s originator, Robert Michael Pyle. Accordingly, our very evolutionary heritage as a species adapted to intimate contact with the natural world is at stake: as each new generation of nature-deprived adults takes the parenting stage, it raises another generation of children who lack sensitivity to the natural environment.© 2007 Children, Youth and Environments Redeeming the Nature of Childhood 209 Evidence of this decline is mounting, according to writer Richard Louv, and is characterized by a new phenomenon of loss: nature deficit disorder. The condition can include mental and physical health impairments (i.e., attention deficit, depression, obesity) resulting from parental and societal apathy toward or fear of the outdoors. It is poignantly expressed in images from Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (2005), such as the boy who says he prefers playing inside because of the electrical outlets there. Louv (2007) has even invoked the human child in nature as “the most important indicator species of future sustainability.” Search Images I listen to this discourse of loss and endangerment with growing uneasiness. Partly, this is due to having witnessed firsthand in my classroom and neighborhood some of the same disturbing trends cited by Pyle and Louv. There was, for instance, the girl who came happily to school on her first day, then declared that she wouldn’t be going outside for recess or for science class. “Bugs are out there,” she whimpered. Her mother’s response, when we called to ask for advice, was a flat, “She got Lyme disease last year, and we’re paving over the yard.” No further insight was offered, or needed. Being outdoors meant exposure to the threat of disease. I have also had students who claim allergies to nearly every living—and sometimes non-living—thing outdoors. They are miserable, unable to function in a stimulus-rich environment that provokes, for them, a sense of discomfort rather than discovery. These children are the rare exception, but they make me question the strength of the rule that all children, in every setting, crave and need the outdoors. The greater part of my discomfort comes, however, from...

Biodiversity conservation and the extinction of experience

Biodiversity loss is a matter of great concern among conservation scientists, but the wherewithal to reverse this trend is generally lacking. One reason is that nearly half of the world's people live in urban areas and are increasingly disconnected from nature. If there is to be broad-based public support for biodiversity conservation, the places where people live and work should be designed so as to provide opportunities for meaningful interactions with the natural world. Doing so has the potential not only to engender support for protecting native species, but also to enhance human well-being. Accomplishing these goals will necessitate conservation scientists forging new collaborations with design professionals, health practitioners and social scientists, as well as encouraging the participation of the general public.

Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary on Peter Kahn's “Encountering the Other”

Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary on Peter Kahn’s “Encountering the Other” Robert Michael Pyle Gray’s River, Washington Citation: Pyle, Robert Michael. (2005). “Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary on Peter Kahn’s ‘Encountering the Other’.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 398-xxx. Peter Kahn’s close encounter with the wild via hard, sharp objects in a backcountry river certainly caught my attention. My foot still hurts just thinking about it. I was also taken with how he is blessed with such a loving and prescient young daughter. Most of all, I read his essay as an eloquent entry in a gathering conversation about the separation of modern humans from the wild matrix of the world itself. The great publicity and enthusiasm for Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods (Algonquin 2005) shows that many people, including child development specialists, are thinking along these lines. Even the Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled, “Plugged in, But Tuned out: Getting Kids to Connect to the NonVirtual World” (Jeffrey Zaslow, October 6, 2005). When I introduced the concept of the “extinction of experience” before an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in 1975 and published it the following year, some people scratched their heads, yet many others expressed eager agreement with my premise: the depletion of diverse natural and cultural experiences within people’s easy radius of reach (much smaller for the very old, very young, disabled, and poor) can lead to alienation, apathy, and lack of involvement in conservation, therefore to further extinctions: a cycle of disaffection and loss, sucking the life out of the land, the passion out of the people. Since I elaborated the idea in The Thunder Tree (Houghton Mifflin 1993), interest and understanding has mushroomed in direct proportion to the loss of children’s special places of connection and the explosion of electronic blandishments. Another decade on, few children have tangled habitats close to home, or a free hour a day unplugged from soccer or a scintillating screen of some sort with which to explore them. Thanks to parents’ fears of abduction, fewer still anymore own the freedom of the day (“Bye, Mom, see you at dinner!”) such as many in my generation did—boys and girls. No wonder the time is right for Louv’s book, Finding the Wild in a Pavement Crack: Commentary… 399 and for general recognition of the new condition named in his subtitle: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. Time, too, when “no child left behind” must be augmented by “no child left inside,” if we're to retain any hope of keeping the wild in the child. Peter Kahn’s essay is his own experiment in blending personal ethic and experience with ideas and factual evidence, and it is an elegant and successful one. Out of the canyon of bliss and injury, Kahn travels literally and metaphorically to the high ridge Nabokov posits where “the mountainside of scientific knowledge meets the opposite slope of artistic imagination.” From there, through the accommodating medium of a rattlesnake seen close and well, he enters the Other and re-realizes its essentiality. But he worries that teleological reasoning, should it become widespread, might remain vacuous or flaccid “because of the paucity of content.” I'm afraid this has already come to pass. A great deal of contemporary environmental thought, none more so than the New Age variety often called “Deep Ecology,” too often suffers from deep ignorance of the actual working parts of the world. Practitioners adopt and preach an admirable ethical framework that seeks to suppress biocentricism; this is right and meet. But because many may be no more acquainted with natural history than with NASCAR, they are no more able to “speak cogently about the teleos of nature” than to understand ecology deeply. And when Paul Shepard (quoted by Kahn) laments “failed ontogenies” that “yield havoc” entirely out of “compliance with the wild world,” he is presaging Nature Deficit Disorder. When Peter and Zoe get back to civilized safety, he watches her reading a magazine and reels at the sexually-charged...

Nature matrix: reconnecting people and nature

Many individuals and societies are no longer connected to the more-than-human world in such a way as to ensure a sustainable future. As such connection has diminished, environmental challenges have multiplied and influences for estrangement intensified. I review the importance of direct, intimate encounter with places and organisms on the attitudes of the young, as well as the significance of biophilia. The result of the loss of contact and subsequent alienation is the Extinction of Experience: an inexorable cycle of disconnection, apathy, and progressive depletion. I describe an effort to demonstrate this effect. Small, humble habitats, especially in urban settings, can be as important as big reserves in awakening biophilia. Biophobia, abetted by the loss of such habitats, the rise of the virtual in place of actual experience, economic inequalities, and overpopulation, further feeds the downward spiral of extinction and disaffection. The climate of global corporate growth that now prevails is inimical to sustainability, as is the current state of ecological illiteracy. Radical change is therefore necessary to address both economic disparity, in the direction of minimal ownership rather than maximum consumerism, and educational reform that places nature at the centre rather than the margin of the curriculum. I present a six-point programme, called Nature Matrix, for an alternative social and ethical paradigm. Rather than a pragmatic plan for the near future, Nature Matrix is a model for essential, incremental change, a dream whose eventual adoption may enhance chances for reconnection and for ecological survival itself: at present, a deeply uncertain prospect.

Cultural Integrity in Non-Traditional Societies

Discussions concerning the impacts of current neo-liberal economic policies on `endangered people' have focused on `traditional' cultures and the `extinction of experience' from loss of cultural knowledge. There is little consideration of non-traditional societies and their efforts to maintain collective socioeconomic rights outside of the western, individualist, neo-liberal development paradigm. Cuba presents one example of a society successful on many counts in providing human services, especially in the areas of public health and education, that are unavailable for millions throughout Latin America. Cubans provide an alternative vision for them and many impoverished people in the Third World, who now face threats from pressures for global neo-liberalism. This article explores the implications of the `extinction of experience' for collective cultural and economic rights under threat from modern corporate consolidation of global economic power, consumerism, and the presumed `failure of socialism'.

These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems 1955–1993 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

372 Western American Literature The twenty contributors to The Biophilia Hypothesis think they might know the answer: We can’t help ourselves; these things are in our genes and basic to the human condition. Edited by Stephen R. Kellert, Yale professor of environmental studies, and Edward O. Wilson, Harvard professor of science and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, The Biophilia Hypothesis expands on Wilson’s de­ cade-old premise that humans possess an instinctive, genetic bond with na­ ture—thus, biophilia (Biophilia, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). The eighteen essays in The Biophilia Hypothesis explore biophilia, and biophobia, in voices ranging from conversational to painfully academic. Among the most satisfying of the lot is “The Loss of Floral and Faunal Story: The Extinction of Experience,”by Gary Paul Nabhan and Sara St. Antoine, wherein the authors equate the diminishment of Sonoran Desert biodiversity—via live­ stock overgrazing and other unnatural influences—to the loss of both the traditional affinitywith nature and the oral tradition (storytelling) that invested that affinity in countless generations of southern Arizona Indians. Thus, say Nabhan and St. Antoine, environmental impoverishment leads to cultural and even personal impoverishment. Another outstanding contribution is “Searching for the Lost Arrow: Physi­ cal and Spiritual Ecology in the Hunter’sWorld,”in which Alaskan anthropolo­ gist Richard Nelson recapitulates several of the primitive worldviews he so poignantly described in his 1991 John Burroughs Medal-winning The Island Within (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989). And so on. In an age when overpopulation, institutionalized materialism and conse­ quent environmental degradation threaten our peace, happiness and, ulti­ mately, very survival, The Biophilia Hypothesis presents food for meaningful rumination.© by DAVID PETERSEN 1994 SanJuan Mountains, Colorado TheseAre My Rivers: New and SelectedPoems 1955-1993. By Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (New York: New Directions, 1993. 308 pages, $22.95.) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet laureate of San Francisco, America’s best­ selling poet of the twentieth century, shows us in his latest work that he still has the joyful lyrical voice that made him famous in the 1950s. Now with These Are My Rivers we have the completely up-to-date Ferlinghetti still speaking out against academic poetry just as he did when the Beat Movement began and showing us how in the 1990s the poets that matter have “deconstructed them­ selves on NEA grants/and joined linguistics departments.” As for the others, they have taken “to the hills chanting sawmill haikus/or opened up unisex hair Reviews 373 parlors in Des Moines.”Yes, Ferlinghetti, always the poet ofthe topical now, still sees clearly the 1990s, at one point condemning Attorney General Reno for the 1993 destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. As he approaches seventy-six, it is appropriate for Ferlinghetti to issue a retrospective volume selecting representative poems from the past forty years. As with all selected poetry volumes, though, the representation is too general. Yes, we read back through familiar selections from Pictures ofthe Gone World, A Coney Island of the Mind, and Startingfrom San Francisco and again it becomes clear why these poems changed a generation—the power of the irregular lines, the not-so-delicate wit (always at the expense ofthe middle-class establishment), the topical references to popular culture and politics (so utterly unpoetic we thought—withjoy). But naturally a volume like this omits many poems that need to be pre­ served such as “Dada Would Have Liked a Day Like This”and “Christ Climbed Down.”And surely a poem of such historical importance as “Tentative Descrip­ tion ofa Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower”should be retained. Its Swiftian satire, while dated, shook a generation from its 1950s political apathy. For many of us in the Baby Boom generation Lawrence Ferlinghetti—with some help from the other Beat poets—redefined poetry, took poetry out of the classroom and gave it back to the people. These Are My Rivers continues to give poetry back to the people if in the 1990s we can accept it. PAUL VARNER Oklahoma State University— Oklahoma City The ProperEdge ofthe Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah. By Edward A. Geary. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. 288...