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Badger or Bulbasaur - have children lost touch with nature? Books. In August 1. Eleanor Farjeon visited the poet Edward Thomas and his family at their home near the South Downs. On their first walk together, Thomas’s 1. Bronwen realised that the city- dwelling Farjeon knew few of the names of the wild flowers that flourished in the surrounding landscape.

My ignorance,” Farjeon recalled later, “horrified her.”Remedial work was promptly set. Bronwen gathered a hundred different flowers and plants, taught Farjeon their names (“agrimony, mouse- eared- hawkweed, bird’s- foot trefoil … ”), and the next day sat her down “to a neatly ruled examination paper, with the numbered specimens laid out in precise order on the table”. Farjeon was given an hour to complete the test: “6. Pass, 7. 0 for Honours.” Her memory was sharp and she topped 9. Bronwen was proud of me.” Those flower names would later blossom in Farjeon’s books for children, which are twined through with natural lore, notably her chalkland fairy fable, Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep (1.

Martin Pippin stories. Nearly a century later, Cambridge researchers seeking to “quantify children’s knowledge of nature” surveyed a cohort of four- to 1. Britain. The researchers made a set of 1. British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 1.

The first feature documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin is in progress. To complete the National Endowment for the Humanities’ $600,000 grant to the project, producer.

The right names, used well, can act as portals into the more-than-human world of bird, animal, tree and insect.’ Illustration: Jackie Morris, 2017. Watch A Simple Wish Online Etonline. Watch Online fantasy Movies HD Free with Subtitles Free Streaming fantasy Movies HD online Full Movies HD with Subtitles Free Streaming Online Movies HD streaming. Josephine Reed: Now, The Big Read. KenYatta Rogers reads from A Wizard of Earthsea. Watch the air between my hands," he turned away from the others and stood still. Friday's News, Trailers, and Everything Else From San Diego Comic-Con 2017.

Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card.

The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were “substantially better” at identifying Pokémon “species” than “organisms such as oak trees or badgers”: around 8. Pokémon, but less than 5. For weasel read Weedle, for badger read Bulbasaur – and this was before the launch of Pokémon Go.

The researchers published their paper in Science. Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry.

Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),” they wrote, but they are presently “more inspired by synthetic subjects” than by “living creatures”. They pointed to evidence linking “loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it”. We need, the paper concluded, “to re- establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation”, for “we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren”?❦ ‘Where have these lost names gone?” Illustration: Jackie Morris, 2. My first response on reading the “Pokémon paper”, as I have come to think of it, was dismay. My second was a wish to write a book for children that might conjure with the magic of “living creatures” rather than “synthetic subjects”. And my third was puzzlement.

What had happened to the names and knowledge of nearby nature in the lives and reading of British children? Could they really have dwindled towards a vanishing point?

Subsequent research has confirmed the Pokémon paper’s broad findings. Watch The Baker Online Hollywoodreporter. In a 2. 00. 8 National Trust survey, only a third of eight- to 1. Dalek. A 2. 01. 7 RSPB “Birdwatch” survey smartly shifted the focus, assessing nature knowledge in parents rather than children. Of 2,0. 00 adults, half couldn’t identify a house sparrow, a quarter didn’t know a blue tit or a starling, and a fifth thought a red kite wasn’t a bird – but nine out of 1. British wildlife. A 2. 01. 7 Wildlife Trusts survey found a third of adults unable to identify a barn owl, three- quarters unable to identify an ash tree – and two- thirds feeling that they had “lost touch with nature”. The hunger is there but the knowledge is not.

Where have these lost names gone, and does their vanishing matter? If so, how might we invigorate what anthropologist Beth Povinelli calls “a literacy of nature” in ourselves and our children? Was there ever a time when such a literacy existed? We read the results of these surveys, perhaps, with a mixture of consternation and insecurity. My own children can name a moorhen but not a collared dove, a blackbird but not a starling.

They know oak but not hawthorn, beech but not ash. They like to recall the time in a wood when I confidently identified – from 1. On closer inspection it turned out to be a discarded slice of water melon (I blamed my glasses). I know I would have hopelessly failed Bronwen’s flower test, despite living on chalk myself and loving the chalkland flora. For a decade or so now I have been fascinated by the relationships of naming, knowing and nature, writing a book on the subject called Landmarks in 2.

In the past few years I have become especially interested by these questions as they bear on contemporary childhood – and how they feature in what we uneasily call “children’s literature”, but which I prefer to think of as “literature read by children”, in a wish to avoid limiting or patronising the powers of that extraordinary, diverse body of work. I am unconvinced that children need names to need nature. The last chapter of Landmarks was entitled “Childish”. There, inspired by the work of an early years specialist called Deb Wilenski, I wrote about the “fantastical travelling” of a class of four- and five- year- old children in Hinchingbrooke Country Park, north Cambridgeshire.

Each Monday for three months they explored the park, mapping it through their stories and drawings. I was fascinated by how the children wove words, images and actions together in their inhabitation of this modest landscape (bounded by a dual carriageway and a hospital car park). Given the chance, children will new- mint stories for nature and coin gleaming names for it. Given the chance, they will meet the living world eagerly with their bodies and minds, touching and eating and dreaming it: no Linnaeus necessary. The otter- spell slipped into my skull while I was walking over the Cairngorms.’ Photograph: Jackie Morris, 2. But I also believe that names matter, and that the ways we address the natural world can actively form our imaginative and ethical relations with it. As George Monbiot wrote recently, calling for a “new language” to vivify conservation, “words possess a remarkable power to shape our perceptions”.

Without names to give it detail, the natural world can quickly blur into a generalised wash of green – a disposable backdrop or wallpaper. The right names, well used, can act as portals – “hollowings”, in Robert Holdstock’s term – into the more- than- human world of bird, animal, tree and insect. Good names open on to mystery, grow knowledge and summon wonder.

And wonder is an essential survival skill for the Anthropocene. Clearly the lack of natural literacy – especially of nearby nature – is involved with the major structural changes that have occurred in the experience of minority- world childhood. Online culture has boomed and screen time has soared. In Britain, the “roaming range” (the area within which children are permitted to play unsupervised) has shrunk by more than 9.

Traffic growth, the pressures of school work, parental fears and the decrease of available green space have all helped close down wild play and the knowledge it brings. The children out in the woods, out in the fields,” said Chris Packham in 2. Meanwhile, childhood wellbeing declines, with obesity rates rising and mental health dipping. The headline of a 2.

Persil) was that British children “spend less time outdoors than prisoners”: climbing walls, not trees. Such buttonholing headlines disguise a complex picture, though. Access to nature is hugely unevenly distributed across the population, with class, income and ethnicity playing strong determining roles. Within “nature deficit” discourse, “tech” is too often simplistically opposed to “nature”, though it can act as accomplice rather than antagonist, and a lost golden age of barefoot childhood is too often presumed.