Please check out this great article about one of our members, and about the Collaborative’s efforts!

Abbie Orsborn, 4, left, and her sister Ellie, 5, romp along a path at Inniswood Metro Gardens in Westerville. The Orsborn family visits the gardens weekly to try to stay connected to the outdoors and nature and avoid a modern, sedentary lifestyle. They are part of a new nature club for kids and parents.

KYLE ROBERTSON/DISPATCH

A little fresh air

Parents finding ways to give overscheduled kids a taste of nature

Monday, August 11, 2008 3:15 AM
By Dana Wilson
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Abbie Orsborn, 4, left, and her sister Ellie, 5, romp along a path at Inniswood Metro Gardens in Westerville. The Orsborn family visits the gardens weekly to try to stay connected to the outdoors and nature and avoid a modern, sedentary lifestyle. They are part of a new nature club for kids and parents.
To three young girls, the woodlands and lawns of Inniswood Metro Gardens in Westerville are one giant playground.

The Orsborn sisters create adventures along every bend in the trails: hunting for frogs in a dried-up pond, tossing sticks into the trickling stream and rolling down a grassy hillside.

This fall, the girls’ parents are inviting other families to join them on hikes and other outings they will organize each month through an outdoor explorer club.

Nature clubs are emerging nationally as a way for today’s overscheduled families to reconnect children with nature, said Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. The best-selling book has inspired parents and educators to take action through local grass-roots campaigns.

“This is a cultural change,” Louv said. “It’s people doing it themselves. We don’t have to wait for big organizations to do this.”

Dave Orsborn, a fan of Louv’s book, and another dad will lead the new nature club at Central College Christian Academy. The club is for elementary-age children and their parents.

“We don’t want to have a lot of structure around it,” he said. “We just want to go outside and have fun.”

Orsborn and his wife, Karol, make weekly family visits to Inniswood with daughters Katy, 8, Ellie, 5, and Abbie, 4. They live about a mile from the 121-acre park.

“When we go to the park and just walk around, it’s, ‘Let’s find a frog or pine cones or cool rocks,’ ” Mr. Orsborn said. “Their minds are so open.”

People, especially children, in the U.S. and other developed countries are spending less time outdoors, according to a study funded by the Nature Conservancy and published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers examined camping, backpacking, fishing, hiking, hunting and visits to national and state parks and forests. They found that between 1981 and 1991, per-capita nature recreation rates fell 1 percent to 1.3 percent per year, depending on the activity studied.

The shift in the past 30 years is taking a toll on children’s health, said Cheryl Charles, president and CEO of the Children & Nature Network. Charles and Louv founded the nonprofit organization in 2006.

“Children today are just more sedentary,” Charles said. “They’re in the house more, they’re hooked up to the electronics. Their lives are out of balance.”

That correlates with increasing childhood obesity and other health problems, including more diagnoses of diabetes and attention- deficit disorder among children, Charles said.

Experts agree that advances in technology, such as video games, the Internet and text-messaging, are partly to blame. But there are other factors, too.

“The overstructuring of our lives and the fear of dealing with strangers,” Louv said. “Clearly, electronics aren’t doing it by themselves.”

Raising awareness about the nature deficit will be the focus of a summit hosted by the Leave No Child Inside Central Ohio Collaborative, which formed in Columbus last year. Its list of members includes the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, the Franklin County Board of Health, and Metro Parks.

The event is scheduled for Sept. 26 at the Governor’s Residence in Bexley.

For more information on the summit, visit www. kidsandnature.org.

dwilson@dispatch.com

“We don’t want to have a lot of structure … We just want to go outside and have fun.”
Dave Orsborn
co-organizer of an outdoor nature club for families