How To Raise A Wild Child: The Art And Science Of Falling In Love With Nature

Table of Contents Title Page Table of Contents Copyright Dedication Epigraph Preface Acknowledgments Introduction NATURE, LOST AND FOUND Wilding the Mind The Power of Place ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS The Way of Coyote Hitched to Everything Mothers All the Way Down LIFE STAGES The Playful Scientist The Age of Competence The Social Animal OBSTACLES AND SOLUTIONS Dangerous Liaisons The Rewilding Revolution Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index About the Author Copyright © 2015 by Scott D. Sampson All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.hmhco.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-0-544-27932-2 NOTE: Readers and the children they mentor should give due regard to safety in all interactions with nature. “Ich lebe mein Leben . . . / I live my life in widening,” from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, translation copyright © 1996 by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Used by permission of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. eISBN 978-0-544-27919-3 v1.0315 In wildness is the preservation of the world. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU For my mother, Catherine June Sampson, nature mentor extraordinaire, and for my sister, Kerry Dawn Sharpe, who taught me how to live with grace and grit. I miss you both terribly. Preface LIKE MANY CHILDREN, I developed a passion for dinosaurs as a kid. Without exaggeration, paleontology was one of the first words I learned to spell. By the tender age of four, I had memorized dozens of multisyllabic names of prehistoric creatures. I dug for fossils in the backyard (unsuccessfully) and came home from family camping trips with assortments of rocks (and occasional fossils), most of which were banished to the backyard. A black-and-white photo taken when I was four years old shows me hugging a cement Stegosaurus—true love. Unlike most children, I never lost my passion for dinosaurs. Some say I never really grew up. After contemplating several alternative careers, I eventually chose to pursue a doctorate in zoology at the University of Toronto. My dissertation involved naming and describing two previously unknown horned dinosaurs discovered in Montana. In 1999, I accepted a dual position at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City as a paleontology curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History (now the Natural History Museum of Utah) and an assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. It was a dream job for a dino-guy like me, with museum resources for fieldwork and fossil preparation, access to graduate students, and plenty of amazing fossils to be discovered within a day’s drive. I also took advantage of opportunities to hunt dinosaurs (or at least their fossilized bones) in far-off lands, enjoying many seasons in Africa and elsewhere. It seemed I was set for life. But in 2007, now a tenured professor and museum chief curator, I gave it all up. Well, most of it. I kept fossil hunting in Utah, but my wife Toni and I decided to move to northern California, where I devoted the bulk of my energies to public science education and fostering nature connection. Many colleagues thought I was nuts, and so did I for a while. Why make such a drastic change? It came down to a pair of compelling insights. First, the current disconnect between kids and nature threatens the health of children. A childhood lived almost entirely indoors immersed in technology is an impoverished childhood, with numerous negative impacts on growth—physical, mental, and emo