Kids lose interest in nature, but love video games, TV

One of this year's most popular new video games, Endless Ocean for the Nintendo Wii console, has a minimal storyline beyond sending a diver into the vast sea to discover marine life and experience natural beauty.

And that, say conservationists, is precisely the problem with today's kids. They'd rather experience the wonder of nature through their TV sets, remote in hand, than in the flesh.

The video game's popularity underscores a broad new study that, looking at everything from national park visits to U.S. fishing licenses, found a persistent decline in the public's interest in nature. According to the new research, participation in outdoor recreation has fallen by as much as 25 percent in the last two decades.

"We were surprised by the results, and in some sense, quite frightened," said Patricia Zaradic, a Bryn Mawr College biologist and coauthor of the study, which appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new research has alarmed conservationists as a raft of studies have found that childhood exposure to nature promotes environmentally responsible behavior as adults. It may also have implications for physicians confronting childhood obesity, as pediatric societies recommend an hour of outdoor play every day.

Two years ago, Zaradic and her colleague, Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois-Chicago, first published a study that strongly linked a decline in visits to national parks with a rise in Internet use, video-game playing and movie-watching at home and in theaters, a trend they termed "videophilia."

That study faced several criticisms, chiefly that national park attendance wasn't a reliable barometer for public engagement in outdoor activities.

'Not a good substitute at all'

The new work, partly funded by The Nature Conservancy, appears to address those questions, measuring variables in four categories: visitation to public lands in the United States and national parks in Japan and Spain; the number of types of U.S. game licenses issued; indicators of time spent camping; and indicators of time spent backpacking or hiking.

All categories — except backpacking and hiking — showed declines since the mid 1980s.

"I think it's a characteristic of the world we live in," said Stephen Kellert, a Yale University professor of social ecology. "It's an increasingly urban built world, and the prevailing paradigm for the urban world has been not just one of degradation of natural systems, but increasing separation of people from nature."

As with their earlier work, Zaradic and Pergams suggested that videophilia was largely to blame for declining interest in outdoor activities.

In addition to video games such as Endless Ocean that substitute an electronic experience for the real thing, Zaradic said there are other examples, such as Web cameras trained on Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park.

"Were increasingly using these kinds of media as a replacement to the real deal, but I think it's not a good substitute at all," Zaradic said.

Different ways to entertain

Although the new study takes a broader look at outdoor activities, not everyone is convinced that younger people are less in touch with nature.

"I believe that Generations X and Y have chosen very different ways to entertain themselves," said Hal Halpin, president of the Entertainment Consumers Association, an advocacy organization for consumers of interactive entertainment including video games.

"For instance, hunting, fishing and traditional camping may be on the decline, but I'd imagine that the number of people engaging in alternative forms of outdoor activity — such as hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, mountain biking, surfing and snowboarding — is on a steady increase."

But a number of public agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, have taken the apparent downward trend in outdoor activity seriously.

The agency has partnered with the advertising agency GSD&M to create the "Life's Better Outside" campaign to motivate urban Texans to spend more time outdoors with their children.

And last year the state agency launched an "Outdoor Family" program to provide adults with essential training in skills such as camping, paddling, archery, fishing, youth nature education and more. The department will offer Houston-area Outdoor family programs in Huntsville on April 5-6, and Missouri City on April 12-13.

Such skills would traditionally have been passed down from generation to generation, said Tom Harvey, a spokesman for the state parks department.

"But we're finding that many in the current generation of parents don't know how to bait a hook," he said.