Companions in Wonder: Children and Adults Exploring Nature Together - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 026251690X ISBN 13: 9780262516907

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2012

Synopsis

An anthology of adventures with children in the natural world, from capturing fireflies to encountering a grizzly bear.

Rachel Carson's classic 1956 essay “Help Your Child to Wonder” urged adults to help children experience the “sense of wonder” that comes only from a relationship with nature. It's clear we haven't succeeded in following her advice: eight-year-olds surveyed in the United Kingdom could identify more Pokémon characters than common wildlife species; and Richard Louv's recent best-selling book Last Child in the Woods identifies a “nature deficit disorder” in children around the world. But today a growing number of environmentally minded parents, teachers, and other adults are seeking to restore nature to its rightful place in children's lives. This anthology gathers personal essays recounting adventures great and small with children in the natural world.

The authors―writing as parents, teachers, mentors, and former children―describe experiences that range from bird watching to an encounter with an apple butter-loving grizzly bear. Rick Bass captures fireflies with his children and reflects on fatherhood; Michael Branch observes wryly that both gardening and parenting are “disciplines of sustainability”; Lauret Savoy wonders how African American children can connect to the the land after generations of estrangement; and Sandra Steingraber has “the big talk” with her children, not about sex but about global warming.

By turns lyrical, comic, and earnest, these writings guide us to closer connections with nature and with the children in our lives, for the good of the planet and our own spiritual and physical well-being.

About this title

About the Author:

Julie Dunlap is the author or coauthor of many children's books about nature and the environment, including Louisa May and Mr. Thoreau's Flute and Parks for the People: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Review:

This is a superb and timely collection, filled with excellent contemporary writing on childhood and nature. I found all of the essays of great interest, covering a range of perspectives, unified by a common theme: how the milieu of place-based, outdoor learning is crucial to developmental well-being. I am particularly impressed with the multicultural, intergenerational depth of the book.

―Mitchell Thomashow, author of Bringing the Biosphere Home and Ecological Identity

I would recommend Companions in Wonder to any parent, friend, teacher, or other adult seeking to nurture more confident and joyful children, children who are not freaked out to be outside, children who can draw on nature as a source of physical, emotional, cognitive, moral, and social development. In an increasingly digital world, this book proves there is still magic in fireflies, solace in a winter lake.

―Chris Myers, Professor of Zoology and Director, Project Dragonfly, Miami University

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 026251690X
• ISBN 13: 9780262516907
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Dunlap Julie, Kellert Stephen R.