There is dirt on my kitchen floor again. My 17-month-old son, Calvin, tracked it in and I am delighted: My plan is working.
These days there is no shortage of ways to indoctrinate a child into climate dread. I could stack my son’s nursery shelves with titles such as “Climate Change for Babies” or “Baby Loves Green Energy!” I won’t waste my money. The two very small cowboy boots sitting by the door are the best environmental education I can give him. His childhood is the largest conservation project I will ever run, and it costs me nothing but time.
Nearly every policy I’ve ever worked on expires in an election cycle or two. My son will defend Daniel Boone National Forest for the next 80 years. This is where he first watched his daddy build a campfire, and he learned to love it before he could say its name. I hire young conservationists constantly and can tell within 10 minutes who spent time outside as a kid. Those are the ones who feel responsible for a place and take action. The others just feel guilty about existing.
As an employer, I am not paying people to feel bad. Climate guilt is cheap, it is useless, and it burns young people out so fast that they go looking for a new cause within three years. I would rather hire people who view the land as their national inheritance, as a part of themselves they need to protect. This is why my organization has never bet everything on what happens in Washington, D.C., but instead has built a nationwide grassroots network of people who love their hometowns. Durable policy is the result of people like them, not the other way around. Policy may come from Capitol Hill, but the conservationists who write it are made outdoors. The problem is, we are making fewer of them every year.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of 2021 survey data showed that nearly four in 10 kids aged 3 to 5 get an hour or less outside on a weekday. Fewer than half get three or more hours on any given Saturday or Sunday. Screens are the easy answer. The bigger problem is that childhood is more structured than ever. As I wrote for the Institute for Family Studies, our children are being supervised, programmed, and scheduled nearly all of their waking hours.
Their childhoods also lack the risk and independence that shaped previous generations. American parents know that if the helicopter parents don’t get you, the legal liability will. As The Atlantic has documented, a preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence and risk-taking without making it safer. This culture of fear and risk aversion also extends to how we’re teaching kids about the natural world. Today’s climate curriculum leads with catastrophe and alarmism, so children learn to feel guilty about nature before they ever learn to like it.
I am raising my son to love nature the way I did as a child. No indoctrination necessary. He’ll be in good company: conservationists born and raised hunting, fishing, hiking, riding, and caring for the land. Affection cannot be assigned. When we indoctrinate a child into caring for the land instead of letting him find it himself, he becomes compliant. But conviction works better than compliance. The difference in mindset between “you bear responsibility for this land” and “you are part of a plague on the land” matters, and I know which I’d rather send my son into the world with.
Those with conviction care for the land in tangible ways. Last year alone, hunters and anglers put roughly $1.3 billion into state wildlife conservation through Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson excise taxes. No one shamed them into it, but their idea of a good weekend is one spent in a stream or a tree stand, and they pay for the privilege through hunting tags and fishing licenses. An afternoon outside shows up as a funding stream.
None of this is complicated. It is a habit, and habits are set at home.
The numbers are moving our way. Participation in outdoor recreation hit a record last year, and youth participation rose 5.6 percent. That trend will become a fad if we fail to cement it. This is the responsibility of parents. Calvin doesn’t have the words to express his love of the outdoors yet. But each morning he grabs my hand and leads me to our back door, then looks up at me expectantly. Soon he will work the latch himself, and then it is out of my hands. I am not raising an activist. I am raising a boy who will notice when the creek runs low.
So here is my environmental agenda, and it will cost you an afternoon: Take a child outside this week. Do not actively teach him anything. Let him get muddy, and let him track it back into your kitchen.
The opening and closing of your screen door will do more for our future than any government program could.
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Danielle Franz is the CEO of the American Conservation Coalition.
This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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