Getting back to nature

Environmental educator Bill Hammond delivered the third annual Robert and Birgit Bateman Lecture, speaking passionately about the necessary links between nature and healthy childhood development.

Holding aloft a fist-sized, grey-green rock, Bill Hammond grins. “Is this rock alive?” he asks.

It’s a simple almost nonsensical question. Yet suddenly a room full of master’s students and academics have slightly pained looks on their faces, as if forced to do long division in their heads.

Hesitant hands go up. Yes. No. Maybe. Define “alive.” Educated adults may grit their teeth, but for Hammond, such questions are key to spurring curiosity in kids about nature. Without tactile, playful relationships with the forests and the trees, Hammond says the nature-deficit disorder popularized by author Richard Louv will only compound the list of developmental woes facing children today.

“Learning in nature is critical,” says Hammond, a recently retired ecology and marine sciences professor from Florida Gulf Coast University, and an RRU associate faculty member in the Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communication program. “Nature teaches things beyond just information.”

Hammond headlined the third annual Robert and Birgit Bateman Lecture Aug. 7 in the Mews at Royal Roads, which drew among other notable guests Bob and Birgit Bateman, Gordon Hogg, the Minister of State for ActNow B.C., and Guy Dauncey, a Victoria-based environmental author.

Hammond delivered an impassioned, down-to-earth talk about the necessary links between healthy childhood development and feeling the grass between one’s toes ­– or feeling the swamp up to one’s neck.

His southern Florida field trips into gator country would often involve guiding school classes for a hands-on experience in swamp ecosystems. For graduate students, that could involve wading up to their necks. Hammond would often don his best thrift-store suit and tie.

“It’s more dangerous for kids in the bus then wading in a swamp in Florida,” Hammond says. “When you get kids wading around in swamps, interacting with nature, the magic happens.”

As the world urbanizes, he says children disconnect from natural systems and are familiar only with concrete jungles and hemmed-in city parks. Citing Richard Louv, Hammond argued that without enough time exploring nature, mental acuity dulls and health problems inflate, noting the rise of obesity and type 2 diabetes in children. Further, he says kids with scant knowledge of nature will see little value in the environment as an adult.

“If you separate yourself from nature, it gives the opportunity to exploit nature without feeling guilt,” Hammond said.

Reintroducing kids into the natural environment, introducing natural environments into cityscapes and neighbourhoods becomes imperative. Hammond spoke of using “biophilic” design, which adopts real or simulated natural elements into building design, understanding complete lifecycle of all building materials and the building’s complete energy profile.

While not speaking directly to the planned Robert Bateman Art and Environmental Education Centre at Royal Roads, Hammond's remarks echoed the university’s own designs for developing an environmentally benign building.

“We have to integrate design so nature is experienced in a way that is valued,” he said. “The question is how do we design without interfering with what nature is doing? Humans and nature interacting is two interactions happening. We have to know how both work.”

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