There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather

by Linda Åkeson McGurk

  As Beery and other researchers have pointed out, children explore nature in a more sensory way than adults, and when doing so they will inevitably cause some damage to the environment. In school forests like Nora’s, some of the plants have been trampled where the kids have run over them, the soil is compacted in the heavy-traffic areas, and some of the weaker lower branches on popular climbing trees have broken off when children scaled them.

  But just how much harm do children really do to popular nature play areas? Matthew Browning, an environmental scientist and assistant professor in recreation, sport, and tourism at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, set out to find out. In 2009, Browning, a former state park ranger whose conservation ecologist mother raised him to love and respect nature, went to Sweden to study forests around schools, where a lot of children gather to play with little to no adult intervention. After collecting and crunching the data and comparing it with similar nature play areas in the US, he found that although there is some initial damage from the children’s activities—mostly loss of soil and ground cover, and some harm to trees—it plateaus after the first couple of years. As he had suspected, the areas very much remain functioning ecosystems. He also noticed that in Sweden adults didn’t seem to be all that concerned about children’s rampages through the woods. “There is not this ‘leave no trace’ mentality here,” he says, and adds that the US code of ethics is misunderstood. “Leave No Trace is really about promoting land ethics. It’s not saying that you should never, ever have an impact when you’re going out and recreating. It’s more about reducing that impact and knowing what it does.”

  Back at Nora’s school forest, Barbro is finishing up one of the homemade muffins she brought for her coffee break while the other teachers keep an eye on the kids. Nora has finally come down from the tree, and a boy has taken her place. Another boy is playing with a charred piece of wood from the fire pit and contentedly shows off his blackened hands. In Barbro’s opinion, it is all good. “I think it’s very important for children to feel joy in nature,” she says. “We want them to have positive memories from this, and hopefully later they will become interested in protecting it.”

  Among Swedish early childhood educators, Barbro is far from alone in feeling that children should regularly be given an opportunity to learn in and connect with nature. In fact, in Scandinavia this idea is so pervasive that it has birthed a revolutionary preschool model that places the classroom directly into the heart of nature: the forest school.

  The Forest School: Trolls and Tree Climbers

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  At eight o’clock in the morning on an overcast and chilly late-winter day, about a dozen children are getting ready to start the day at their preschool in a residential neighborhood on Lidingö, an island just east of Stockholm. Except instead of having their morning gathering on an alphabet rug on the floor of a classroom, they are sitting on cushy pads in a teepee, seeking warmth from a fire that is burning in the middle. For a while, they talk about the weather and sing songs about snow. Then, when the gathering is over, they disperse in the yard, a large, craggy space that besides the teepee sports a rustic shelter, a woodshop, some log steps, a chicken coop, a few pine trees, and some homemade toys, like a train made of pallets. A line of prams, where the youngest children take their naps, sit under a small roof that is attached to the wall of the main building, a low-slung house with red wood siding. In the center of the yard, the few remaining patches of ice have become a popular sledding course. Five girls, who look like they are between the ages of three and four, grab a couple of sleds and start tying them together, then race down the hill. On the other side of the yard, a boy is surreptitiously circling the shelter while holding a piece of bark up to his ear, like a cell phone.

  Preschool teacher Anna Mållberg takes the children at one of Sweden’s many forest schools for a walk in the woods.

  Linda McGurk

  “Calling all ninjas!” he shouts into the phone. “There are snakes on the loose in town; can you come over?”

  Another boy, who has climbed up in a gangly pine tree, jumps into the game:

  “Danger in town! Tons of pythons on the ground! Be careful!”

  Scenes like these play out daily at Mulleborg, the first forest school in Sweden. Most days, the children and teachers spend their entire day in the nearby forest, where the children themselves have come up with names for some of the most popular spots: Blueberry Mountain, Sunny Hill, and Silja Line. Naming their favorite spots is not the only way they take ownership of these places.

  “Whenever we go to a new place in the woods, the first thing the kids do is to collect sticks and build a fort,” Maria Mårtensson, one of the pedagogues at Mulleborg, tells me while she watches the children playing from a distance. “It’s almost like they’re marking their territory.”

  Four boys at a Swedish forest school play and look for frogs in a creek that meanders through the wooded property.

  Linda McGurk

  There are about forty-five thousand residents, eight forest schools, and countless forts on the island of Lidingö, making it a hub for this type of early childhood education in Sweden. It all started in the 1980s, when two outdoorsy preschool teachers dreamed of immersing children in nature and educating them about the environment on a daily basis.

  “When you spend time in nature you learn to understand and take care of nature,” says Susanne Drougge, a self-proclaimed entrepreneur and cofounder of Mulleborg. “It’s almost impossible not to. You automatically create an interest in nature and the environment, without preaching to the children.”

  The first modern forest school was founded in Denmark in the 1950s, but when Drougge and her colleague Siw Linde proposed the idea in Sweden in 1983, it was a radical break with the prevailing traditional municipal preschool model of the time. The premise behind the forest school philosophy was simple: Stimulate children’s physical, cognitive, and social development by spending as much time as possible in nature, every day, all year-round. At forest school, nature becomes a classroom with no walls, where children learn through self-directed play by using their whole bodies and all of their senses, in an environment that nurtures their curiosity and strengthens their self-esteem. In the process, the thinking goes, they will become responsible stewards of the land. Drougge and Linde—who met at a car repair class and immediately hit it off—quickly got local parents and the Swedish Outdoor Association to support the idea. Convincing the local Lidingö government was tougher, but after the pair jumped through all the regulatory hoops, Mulleborg opened its doors in 1985.

  “When I feel that something is right for the children, for society and nature, I’m hard to stop,” Drougge says.

  Through the forest school, she found a perfect outlet for her love of nature and the outdoors. The practical aspects of keeping kids outside most of the day, often in the woods away from the preschool building and any type of indoor or outdoor plumbing, didn’t scare her. On the contrary, she felt like being outside was often easier, as there were fewer things that interfered with the children’s play, and they had more space to move around.

  “You become really good at changing diapers outside and cooking food using a camp kitchen,” she says. “Everything becomes so simple when you’re outside, and there’s always something for the kids to do. Ultimately I think it comes down to whether you’re willing to get out of your comfort zone and learn new things in life.”

  The opening of Mulleborg, which translates to “Fort of Mulle,” had a ripple effect, and today there are more than two hundred forest schools in Sweden and thousands more internationally, sometimes under names like nature kindergarten, nature-based preschool, outdoor school, forest kindergarten, Waldkindergarten, and bush school. Outside of Scandinavia, forest schools are particularly popular in the UK and Germany, but interest is also growing considerably in Japan, Australia, Canada, and the US.

  A vast majority of the forest schools in Sweden have a waiting list, and the parents who see
k them out generally fall into one of two categories: They’re either very outdoorsy themselves, or they want their kids to enjoy the healthy benefits of an outdoor lifestyle but don’t feel like they have enough interest or time for it at home. Many parents also enroll their children in forest schools because they want them to learn how to take care of nature.

  Just how popular the Swedish forest school model is became clear in 2014 when it came time for Sweden’s heir to the throne, Princess Victoria, and her husband, Prince Daniel, to choose a preschool for their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Estelle. It was a sign of the times that they chose not an academic prep school but a local forest school. “For us it is extremely important that nature becomes a natural part of our children’s everyday life,” Princess Victoria told reporters at the time of the enrollment. “[Forest schools] use a pedagogy that I think is very sound, especially when it comes to their attitude toward nature.” Because only in Scandinavia is playing with sticks, eating your lunch under a piece of tarp, and pooping in a hole in the woods considered a life fit for a princess.

  To teach students—princesses included—how to take care of the environment, Swedish forest schools have a special tool at their disposal. His name is Mulle (pronounced moo-le), and with his shaggy moss-green hair topped by a cone-shaped hat made of birch bark, he looks like a subtler, more domesticated version of a good luck troll. Mulle, or Skogsmulle (Forest Mulle), is a symbol of outdoor ethics and is generally recognized as the father of outdoor education for children across the country. (The closest American equivalent might be Smokey Bear, who educates the public about forest fires.) Conceived in the 1950s by Gösta Frohm, who at the time was the director of the Swedish Outdoor Association, Mulle uses stories, songs, and games to teach children about nature and how to take care of it.

  “Mulle is a pedagogical tool that we use,” says Kajsa Källström, the manager of Mulleborg. “The children read books about him and they know that it’s somebody that dresses up as him. Mulle almost has a Santa Claus effect; he triggers their imagination.”

  Gösta Frohm, the original “Mulle,” the friendly forest troll who educates children about nature.

  Svenne Nordlöf

  By the Swedish Outdoor Association’s accounting, as many as two million children have at some point been educated by this raggedy forest troll either by going to a forest school or joining one of the association’s many nature groups for children, so-called Skogsmulle schools. It’s hard to overestimate the influence of Mulle on outdoor education in Sweden, and the phenomenon has spread internationally, to Norway, Finland, Latvia, Russia, the UK, and Germany. In Japan, he’s led the upswing of outdoor education and almost garnered a cult following as more than five hundred Japanese educators have flocked to Sweden to receive training in Mulle’s simple philosophy, which goes something like this: “If you can help children love nature, they will take care of nature, because you cherish things you love.”

  Drougge, Mulleborg’s cofounder, goes as far as calling this doctrine the “pedagogy of Mulle.” “Mulle teaches children to care about nature and how to see the difference between different plants and animals,” she says. “We need this today more than ever. We need adults who still have one foot in nature, who understand how nature works. We can’t go on using up all our resources without giving anything back to the planet. With Mulle, this comes automatically, without preaching. You just create an interest in nature and the environment.”

  Where Did Your Breakfast Come From?

  * * *

  If Mulle helps establish an environmental ethos for the youngest children, their education soon gets more sophisticated than that. Today environmental education is a mandated part of the national curriculum not only for preschool but also for grade school in Sweden. And the message in the curriculum is clear: Understanding how your own lifestyle affects your health, the environment, and society at large is considered just as important as, say, mastering math problems and knowing the difference between past and present tense. This message is reinforced by the media as children’s programming on TV regularly brings up different environmental issues. In the months that we spend in Sweden, the young reporters in one of the most popular kids’ shows, REA, will investigate the consequences of food waste, show how computers are recycled, question why children don’t have more influence over land use (for example, when a forest is threatened by development), and sample worm burgers, as protein from insects is sometimes touted as part of the solution to world hunger.

  By the time they hit third or fourth grade, many Swedish kids already sound like budding environmental activists. When Mattias Sandberg, an associate senior lecturer of cultural geography at the University of Gothenburg, interviewed ten-year-olds in Gothenburg and Stockholm for his doctoral thesis, he found that those who played regularly in nature near their homes felt strongly about protecting their own neighborhood and the environment as a whole. Several were concerned about littering, land exploitation, and pollution. Most of them also felt ambivalent about cars, which on the one hand are useful for getting around, but on the other hand contribute to pollution.

  One boy named Benjamin said, “I didn’t like it when we were in preschool and they cut down a forest there. And then they built weird houses.”

  When Sandberg asked the children why they don’t like it when the forest is cut down, he noted that the children weren’t just concerned about losing a place to play. They also made connections to larger global environmental issues like pollution and climate change. “China and many other countries don’t have a lot of forests, they have more cities, and that causes the air to become polluted. In the forest the air is cleaner,” said a girl named Lina, who wanted to write an ad to encourage people to ride bikes.

  Another girl, Natalie, chimed in, “If we cut down all the forests and build roads, we take the freedom from the animals, and then there will be a lot of pollution and cars.”

  “That’s not good; haven’t you heard about the earth’s surface and the warming effects?” Lina responded.

  Growing up in Sweden, I, too, had been acutely aware of environmental issues from an early age. Six days after my eighth birthday, on April 26, 1986, an explosion in reactor number four at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine caused radioactive fallout to quickly spread over Europe. Five percent of it fell over Sweden, lacing our milk, fish, venison, reindeer meat, and wild mushrooms and berries with the radioactive compound cesium 137, limiting our ability to forage for food in the wild. The cesium levels in these foods eventually came down, safety restrictions were lifted, and life went on, but as a child I couldn’t help but notice that something sacred had been tainted in the worst possible way.

  And it didn’t stop there. Acid rain, species extinction, the thinning ozone layer over Antarctica, and the clear-cutting of the rain forest were other threats du jour that became harder and harder to ignore. In the span of a decade, the environment went from being a marginal issue for most Swedish voters to being a top concern. At school, a surefire sign of this green awakening was the rain forest purchase certificate that every self-respecting classroom in the country at one point had on proud display.

  Global climate change is undoubtedly a more complex and difficult concept for this generation of children to grasp than the threatened rain forests that we fought for in the ’80s. After all, you can’t buy an iceberg, and even if you did, how would you stop it from melting?

  Maya is still blissfully unaware of the potentially life-altering effects of climate change, but at her Swedish school she is already being prepped to fight it and other threats to the environment, one small personal act at a time. Some of these acts are happening in an unexpected place—the school cafeteria. My own children rarely rave about the food I cook at home, unless it’s pancakes, so when Maya writes to her classmates in the US that she likes the school food in Sweden, I decide to come try it myself.

  The cafeteria at Maya’s school is definitely homey; only forty-some children eat at a time
, and in the center of each white-cloth-covered table sits a glass vase with a fake pink daisy. The food is served on ceramic plates and eaten with real silverware. Since the school is a small one, the kitchen staff knows the students’ names as well as their likes and dislikes. Most days, the students can choose between a meat or fish dish and a vegetarian dish, but on the day I visit both options are vegetarian: a potato-and-leek soup served with bread and cheese, and a bulgur-and-vegetable casserole. I choose the soup and find that it’s hearty and full of flavor, and has a homemade texture to it. Maya, who’s notoriously picky, chooses the soup, too, and eats every spoonful of her serving. When I ask the kids, they all say that they like the food, but can’t explain why. Sure, the menu contains some given kid-pleasers, like meatballs and macaroni, but many of the dishes are heavy on vegetables and some are downright exotic, like the Asian casserole with coconut flakes and bamboo shoots, and lasagna New Delhi.

  Perhaps what’s most noticeable about school lunch in Sweden—and maybe why the kids like it so much—is that none of the food is prepackaged, not even the milk, and there is little to no processed food or refined sugar. “We don’t roll our own meatballs and we don’t bread the fish, but everything else is pretty much made from scratch—soups, sauces, casseroles,” says Eva, one of three food workers at the school. This reminds me of conversations I had with Maya’s teachers back in the US. “If it doesn’t look like it came out of the microwave, the kids won’t eat it,” one teacher had complained to me. Another staff member once jokingly said that the cafeteria workers might as well throw the vegetables straight in the garbage, without even serving them to the kids, because that’s where they’d end up anyway.