LOCALadk Magazine
Issue link: https://localadkmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1508038
LOCALadk 16 Today was one of those perfectly lazy summer days that we try to hold onto in our memory banks through- out our lives. I spent the afternoon at the Paul Smith's Visitor Interpretive Center (VIC) in Saranac Lake with my daughter and two grandchildren, ages 2 and 10 months. On our great adventure into the wilderness, all three generations were entertained, inspired, and full of peace. We had meaningful conversations about the mating rituals of damselflies and the timing of lilypad flowering. We explored the bounciness of the bridge and practiced our balancing skills on the rocks. Nature has a way of reaching out to our souls, re- minding us of our connections with the air, the water, the soil, the plants, animals and to each other. If you close your eyes, you can almost hear the life sustain- ing oxygen coming off of the rustling leaves that sur- round us. Of course with a two year-old, there is very little time for closing your eyes. Instead, your eyes are opened wider allowing you to see the perfectly cam- ouflaged tiny spider crawling on a blade of grass, and you are reminded of the wonder and awe that you had as a child yourself. There was no need to Google the answer to our questions or to talk to someone that was not present in the flesh. Those artificial means of communication would have diminished the experi- ence and taken away from the precious time we were having together. Author Richard Louv first coined the phrase "nature deficit disorder" in his bestselling book, Last Child in the Woods (2010). The term describes the human impacts associated with an increasing disconnect from the natural world. The USDA Forest Service's National Kids Survey provides ample evidence that even if kids are spending the same amount of time outside, there has been a decline in free unstructured leisure time experiencing nature 1 . The survey shows that most of the time students are spending outside is in organized sports. Nature- Based Learning by Tammy Morgan with photos from The Wild Center Photo courtesy of Tammy Morgan