By Deborah Huth Price
Berthoud Recorder

A few nice days, and I’m ready for spring to arrive. I’m ready to enjoy the warmth and the gift of new life. Going outside seems like a simple matter, but more and more, it is not on many children’s agendas.

At a recent retreat for the City of Fort Collins Natural Areas Program staff, we were asked to bring an object to represent our vision for the future of the Natural Areas Program. I told a story, with the help of Monopoly game pieces.

The little green house took me back to my childhood, living in a modest one-level home, with a one-car garage. We played out in the backyard with our dog, climbed trees, made up adventures about trekking through woods pulling our red wagon, made mud pies and watched birds fly through the yard. We couldn’t wait to get outside after our snack at the end of the school day.

Then I fast-forwarded to present day. The little green house was replaced by the big red hotel game piece, only now the red hotel represents the homes that many of us live in. Bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and even closets have grown tremendously in size; three car garages are considered average, while yards have shrunk to the size of postage stamps. What this means is that many people come home from work, drive into their garage, enter their house and never have to go outside.

A co-worker told a story about a child who was asked if he liked to be inside or outside better. He replied, “Inside, because there are electrical outlets.”

The book “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv addresses this issue, and it has drawn national attention to what is referred to as nature deficit disorder. With bigger spaces to spend our time indoors, computers and technology to capture attention, and fear of what lies beyond the walls of home, many children have forgotten their connection to the earth itself. (For more information, go to http://www.childrenandnature.org.)

I was lucky. My grandfather farmed his entire life. Even though we lived in the city, we made frequent trips to spend time there, watching crops grow, getting familiar with livestock and riding bicycles on endless dirt roads. We took vacations to national and state parks, went camping, and spent an incredible amount of time in our backyard.

There are many ways to be connected to the earth — through farming and ranching, watching wildlife, fishing and hunting, bird watching, hiking, camping, and just climbing a tree. The earth provides roots that tie us together in unseen ways.

My story ended with a very large tree that I placed next to the house to represent a natural area, or open space of land. My dream was to help people remember to incorporate natural spaces into the blueprint for their lives.

We can all help with this by simply taking a child — our own or a neighbor’s — outdoors. It doesn’t have to be much. Digging in the dirt will do just fine.
Deborah Huth Price is Education Coordinator at Bobcat Ridge Natural Area near Masonville, and also does education programming at Discovery Science Center in Fort Collins.