A National Trust survey, for instance, showed that half of children couldn’t tell the difference between a wasp and a bee, yet almost all could name a Dalek and a three-year RSPB research project found only one in five children in Britain are ‘positively connected to nature’. “Online culture has boomed, screen time has soared and the ‘roaming range’ within which children can play and stray unsupervised has shrunk by more than 90% in 40 years amid parental fears about traffic, ‘stranger danger’ and the pressure of school work.”Īfter Macfarlane read the ‘Pokémon paper’ (a study published in Science in 2002 by Professor Andrew Balmford from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology), he started to gather other evidence of a loss of ‘nature-literacy’. “What we might call the ‘nature of childhood’ has changed dramatically in Britain over recent decades,” says Macfarlane, a Reader in Environmental Humanities in Cambridge University's Faculty of English.
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