Mother Nature’s Child Film Premieres Jan. 12 in NH, Available Now on DVD
Monday January 10th, 2011
This summer, Camilla Rockwell, director of the documentary Mother Nature’s Child, went with her two-year-old grandson on a walk at Shelburne Farms on Lake Champlain. “You get to choose where you go,” she told him. And he did, following a meandering, exploratory path, very much on his own time, that didn’t observe straight lines or signs or adult clock-watching. It was a reminder of both a child’s innate curiosity and the power of discovery.
“I was just amazed watching what a human animal wants to do,” Rockwell, who lives in Burlington, said in an interview at the home of the documentary’s co-producer Wendy Conquest, who lives in Hanover.
Mother Nature’s Child will be screened on Jan. 12 at 7 p.m. in Dartmouth College’s Loew Auditorium. The screening is co-sponsored by the Dartmouth Outing Club and the Wellborn Ecology Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. A panel discussion, featuring some of the people who appear in the documentary, including local participants, will follow the screening.
The impetus for Mother Nature’s Child came from a trip Rockwell made to Seattle in 2007 when she picked up a copy of the influential book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv, who writes that children raised today, while entirely comfortable with technology, are not so comfortable with, or even interested in nature.
They are not experiencing the outdoors or unsupervised play in the way many of their parents and grandparents did, partially because so-called “helicopter” parents are more reluctant to let kids outside on their own for safety reasons; and partially because of the wealth of technological entertainments available to today’s children that were unknown to the generations before them.
Louv calls it a “disconnect,” and contends that the phenomenon has serious ramifications for the nation as a whole. Among the consequences of the nature deficit, he argues, are rising obesity rates, health problems, attention-deficit disorders, learning difficulties and alienation from the natural world.
Inspired by Louv’s ideas, Rockwell decided that exploring how children adapt to being out in nature would be the focus of her next film. “I’d just finished a film on aging and dying. I really wanted to do another film that touched my heart in some way,” she said.
Rockwell’s previous directorial credits include the films Holding Our Own, a documentary about aging and death, and Stone Rising, a portrait of the Vermont stone mason and artisan Dan Snow, both shown on PBS. With filmmaker Bob Drake, Conquest co-produced the documentaries Buying Time: The Media Role in Health Care and Burden of Knowledge, about genetic testing. She has also produced and written for the PBS series, The Doctor is In. Both women have worked with Ken Burns on a number of his documentaries, Rockwell as a producer and Conquest as a writer and voice-over artist.
In Mother Nature’s Child, Rockwell and Conquest examine how the pervasiveness of technology is changing the experience of childhood, how that may feed into a child’s lack of exposure to nature and what the implications might be for future generations of children. The film includes interviews with educators and writers, including Richard Louv, and footage of kids playing and working in a variety of natural environments.
Rockwell recalled that when she and her siblings were children, her parents pushed them out the door with the expectation that they wouldn’t see them again until dinner time.
“My parents never knew where we were. My grandson is growing up without that experience. He will probably always have a cell phone and his parents will always know where he is,” she said.
“Richard Louv really tapped a nerve or vein in the culture,” said Conquest. “He identified an anxiety among parents of our generation.”
Still, Rockwell emphasized, the documentary is not purely an exercise in nostalgia, postulating that all American children’s lives would be better if they simply played outdoors, the way some of their parents did. It acknowledges the reality of where American children are now, but asks what they might be losing or gaining as a result of how they use electronic entertainment and communication. It asks how constant adult supervision affects a child’s ability to work independently, outdoors or not, to solve problems.
“The film is not intended to suggest how people should do things,” Rockwell said. “It’s intended to mark a moment in time.”
“We’ve gone through this huge change,” Conquest said. “It’s not as if these forces are evil but we’re living in a different world.”
The film looks at three stages of development—toddler, middle childhood and adolescence—to see “what a child might receive from nature in each phase,” Rockwell said. It was filmed in rural Vermont and New Hampshire, suburban Washington D.C., and urban Baltimore and Albany, N.Y. The children come from families affluent enough to send them to Montessori schools in Washington, D.C., or on wilderness camp expeditions, but also from parts of Baltimore and Albany where kids might not be expected to have much interaction with nature, or the desire for it.
“Fifty or 60 percent of world’s population lives in an urban environment,” said Conquest. “We wanted to make the point that … you can experience, enjoy and play in the natural world even if you do live in the city.”
One of the persons Rockwell interviewed was Brother Yusuf Burgess, who lives in Albany and works with kids who have been underserved by traditional conservation or environmental groups. These include pre-teens and teenagers who may come from single-parent households, or who have experienced the pull of gang culture, or are growing up without any role models. He takes them fishing, hiking, kayaking, canoeing and mountain climbing in the Albany region and in the Adirondacks, calling it, in the vernacular of the get-back-to-nature movement, Leave No Child Inside.
“I recognized in urban youth particularly that some of them had not been five blocks from were they lived,” Burgess said in a telephone interview. “Kids came from blocks where mayhem, police, dysfunctions and fights were the order of the day.”
These are kids, he said, whose “territory is the corner store or bodega or the basketball court. That’s their sense of place. When they see salamanders in Vermont or catch a bigmouth bass in the Adirondacks they broaden their sense of place.”
What such experiences give them, he said, is a feeling of empowerment, and a sense of the transformative power of nature. Take kayaking: “It’s one paddle, it’s you very close to the water. (The kids) have a oneness and a focus. Some kids haven’t given themselves a break from the noise in their heads,” he said.
Getting children outside may also include hunting, of course. A section of the film shows a young girl from Thetford going deer hunting with her grandfather, although we do not see her killing a deer. Audiences see her watching and waiting in the woods, and looking down the sights of a rifle. Later, she is shown with a deer she has shot.
A little to Rockwell’s surprise, this has turned out to be one of the most controversial aspects of the documentary; one foundation that she approached for possible funding told her they would donate money, but only if she dropped that section. Rockwell refused, and looked elsewhere.
“I felt very strongly that should be included. You can’t talk about nature without talking about the life cycle,” she said.
“Hunting is an elemental part, a fundamental part of mankind’s relation to the natural world,” Conquest added. “But now cultural attitudes toward hunting are so complicated.”
For example, Rockwell asked, why do audiences balk at a girl going deer hunting but at not the scenes of the boys, under Burgess’s guidance, hooking fish on a line. Both the deer and the fish were alive, both were hunted, and both are dead. But why do audiences respond strongly to one and not the other? “Where is the point when you begin to react?” Rockwell said.
What the research and filming have shown her is that in its infinite variety and complexity, nature may not be a panacea for human problems or the only factor in a child’s development, but it is, or ought to be, an integral and valuable part of the human experience.
Rockwell hopes that screenings of the documentary, which will include future dates at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier, the NorthWoods Stewardship Center in East Charleston, Vt., and Shelburne Farms, as well as screenings in Washington, D.C., Connecticut and on New Hampshire Public Television, will lead to continued discussion of the issues the film raises. “We just had to skim the surface,” she said. “We’re hoping that it will open the door.”
Adults may worry about letting children go out into the world unattended, but as Rockwell pointed out, “There’s no guarantee. Life is life. You can’t protect from life.”
