According to the 2010 Bio Index Report, 1 in 10 children don’t know what endangered species are, and 14 percent have the wrong idea thinking the danger to the animals is natural instead of caused by humans.
The report looked at 10,000 children ages 5 to 18, in 10 countries around the globe. The study was commissioned earlier this year by the U.N. Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which asked Airbus, a France-based aircraft manufacturer, to conduct the survey.
Manager of Communications at Airbus Americas, Mary Anne Greczyn, said the news from the report is not good.
“Our children, who are tomorrow’s citizens and decision makers show a dangerous ignorance when it comes to the natural world. This fact is doubly concerning because according to the U.N. CBD’s Global Biodiversity Outlook, humans continue to drive the rate of species extinction up to 1,000 times the natural background rate.”
According to Harvard University biologist, E. O. Wilson, 27,000 species are currently being lost per year as compared with the background rate of species extinction, which is 10 per year. In his book “The diversity of Life” published in 2002, Wilson estimates that by 2022, 22 percent of all species will be extinct if no action is taken.
The Bio Index Report cautions that in order to change the current destructive cycle, people and especially children need to be better educated. “We cannot win such an uphill battle for life on Earth if the coming generation has little knowledge of what is at stake.”
Nature and Psychology
Svetla Stoikova is a clinical psychologist at Alexandrovska University Hospital in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, where she works in the child psychiatry clinic. Walking around the clinic, she points at numerous symbols of nature—snowflakes on the window, Christmas stars, Santa’s reindeer, and toys in the shape of animals and plants.
“All of them are evidence of man’s need, and of the child’s need of nature,” she says.
“Connection with nature stimulates intellectual, socially-communicative, psychomotor, and emotional development in children.”
“If you place a bunch of flowers and a telephone apparatus in front of an 8-month old baby, it reaches for the flowers. If you give a 4-year-old girl [the choice between] sand with stones, or dough with milk to cook a meal for her doll, she will choose the former. If you offer to take a 14-year-old teenager to hike a mountain peak, or to let him or her chat on the computer, he or she will choose the mountain.”
According to Stoikova, this is because inherently they connect with nature. But, she says, this connection has to be nurtured and maintained.
Stoikova says that surveys of people living in cities show that they were more at risk of psychological problems. She says that contemporary medicine knows that nature makes children and people in general stronger; that the variety of skills children develop through interacting with nature makes them more stable when they have to deal with unstable environments like separation from parents, death, and so on.
The loss of connection with nature has a negative effect on children and on humankind as a whole, she said.
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