(…) The Haley school is in the vanguard of a national back-to-nature movement - often called “No Child Left Inside” - that within the last two years has seen the creation of dozens of regional programs to draw families and students outdoors.

This is not the environmentalism of the past, which usually argued that children need to appreciate nature so they will help protect it. Instead, the new sales pitch is based on self-interest: Walking in the woods, smelling the roses, and digging in the dirt are good for mental health, learning, and brain development. Being close to nature may foster people’s ability to concentrate, improves the behavior of children with attention disorders, and boosts science test scores, research shows.

“The tragedy we are facing in this generation is that there is no time for children to explore, to play, to go outside,” the influential pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton said before a panel discussion this month at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. (…)

At Haley, where students don’t have ready access to the woods or lush backyards, studies often involve long-running themes relating to animals, habitats, and the human impact on the environment. The school has wetlands and gardens, and it is building an outdoor classroom. Students often visit the neighboring Boston Nature Center, and fifth-graders take a week-long trip to Camp Beckett in the Berkshires, where they explore and study forest ecosystems.

Explaining his approach, principal Ross Wilson cited a 2003 paper by Harvard researchers Christopher Wimer and Ronald F. Ferguson, who argue that students learn more when their daily lessons, stored in the brain’s short-term memory, are placed in a larger framework, allowing them to enter the mind’s long-term memory. (…)

Nature may help children in other ways. In 2004, a University of Illinois study found that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder experienced “significant symptom abatement” after spending time outdoors.

A California Department of Education study from 2005 showed that sixth-graders improved their science scores by 27 percent after taking week-long outdoor education classes. Several University of Michigan studies have suggested that proximity to nature enhances people’s ability to concentrate. (…)

“In terms of our recent American experience, this has been a big change in the last 30 years,” said Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” a keystone text of back-to-nature advocates published in 2005.

“The era of kids going outside and not coming back until the streetlights are on is unlikely to return,” said Louv.

“The 1950s aren’t coming back.”

But getting outdoors is still crucial to the human experience, and early contact can go a long way, said E.O. Wilson, the subject of an upcoming PBS documentary that updates the life story he told in his own memoir, ‘Naturalist.’

“There is no substitute for having your personal, precious body out there in the middle of nature,” he said. (…)

Source: Boston Globe, United States
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