Emma K. Thomas

“Of all the world’s creatures, perhaps those in greatest need of rewilding are our children. The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone.

Missing from children’s lives more than almost anything else is time in the woods. Watching my child and others, it seems to me that deep cover encourages deep play, that big trees, an understorey mazed by fallen trunks and shrubs which conceal dells and banks and holes and overhangs, draws children out of the known world and into others. Almost immediately the woods become peopled with other beings, become the setting for rhapsodic myth and saga, translate the children into characters in an ageless epic, always new, always the same. Here, genetic memories reawaken, ancient impulses are unearthed, age-old patterns of play and discovery recited.

One difference between indoor entertainment and outdoor play is that the outdoors has an endless capacity to surprise. Its joys are unscripted, its discoveries your own. The thought that most of our children will never be startled by a dolphin breaching, a nightingale singing, the explosive flight of a woodcock, the rustle of an adder, is almost as sad as the disappearance of such species from many of the places in which we once played.”

From Feral, Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot.

Published by Penguin.