We believe the reason people act badly when visiting the wild places is because they’re angry at everything “out there.”  That anger just oozes out of them when they’re out in the boonies and away from other eyes. 

Recently, in Gresham, Oregon, three young teens beat a 71-year old man half to death with a baseball bat.  He just happened to be there.  He, like the wild places, was a stranger, an unknown thing, but perhaps represented that older generation that seems to make their life so difficult.  That the teens were carrying a baseball bat to hit somebody or something - is a sign of the enormous frustration and repressed anger felt by numberless millions of teens toward the outer world; toward nature itself. 

When people, especially young people, get out into the wild places, they don’t have much connection with them.  They don’t sense a continuity between themselves and nature, or the natural world.  They look up at that immense cosmos and are baffled by their smallness and unrelatedness to all around them.  But it wasn’t always like that in their lives.

Edith Cobb, in her groundbreaking book The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, says that ALL children exhibit a sense of continuity with nature (or the ecology around them).  They use it to create their own inner world.  For it is this early connectivity with nature "that infuses them with the power to make."  They see the things out there and try to copy in their own way these very interesting things they see and feel.  Erik Erikson called it “the natural genius of children.”  This sense of the continuity (connectedness) between their inner personal state and the non personal or non human environment around them allows every child to “make up their days.”  And when you can “make up your days,” you can become a personal world-maker. 

But, of course, the school system in combination with the parent’s cultural acceptances, stops the development of the child’s imaginative powers.  They’re replaced with the world-perceptions of others.  Children are taught to accept the world-perceptions of others and find a life for themselves within those perceptions.  Society becomes rigid with fixed professions, fixed behavior, fixed ideas of what is possible and not possible.  The object is total control.  And that ‘civilization’ is now unraveling everywhere.

The Puritans believed that this “stage” of a child’s development (when a child creates make believe friends, for example) was part of “the Devil’s work.”  There has been great fear of the human imagination for millennia. To get rid of it, the idea was and is to punish the child enough so that it won't pursue “such nonsense.”  Puritans even put their children with other families to prevent the child from being spoiled through too much “natural affection.”  Much of that thinking still prevails, although it has morphed its appearance into institutions (like the school system).  But the notion that the human imagination is somehow a threat to society still prevails in the phrase “leave no child behind.”  In other words, don't let a single one escape the prevailing view.

Today, if a child daydreams they’re still scolded, or worse given some sort of punishment for not “paying attention.”  They’re made to “pay” for not “paying attention.”  Teachers are still taught how to keep each child on task.  How to present and implant the acceptable perceptions of the world.  And each child is counseled how best “to adapt their talents" to the existing 'world order'  The child is taught that the teacher and the books have the knowledge they need to be “successful” in the world.  The child is made to feel that they have nothing.  This paradigm is wrong; always has been.

What is happening in some schools is that teachers are no longer trying to teach.  They become co-learners with each child put into their charge.  They become guides for each child; resources to aid the child to discover on their own the things that interest each child directly.  As Edith Cobb put it, they perceive each child as "a specie unto itself."  The results of this form of child development (now called 'education') are startling.  Children suddenly want to go to school.  They lose their aggressiveness, their propensity to make trouble, their negative, neglectful, attitudes, and begin to make things up.  Joy takes over the classroom, much like the joy of childhood. 

From this comes a teenager that has absolutely no desire to harm others.  They’re too busy creating their own world view; their own perceptions of their place in the world.  And often that perception goes all the way out into the cosmos itself.   And from this kind of child development alone we at Ultralight Wilderness Toilet have hope for the survival of the wild places.

These words from internationally known psychologist James Hillman, when combined with the above ideas, can and perhaps already are slowly changing the world: “Since the imagination arises from the child’s contact with nature, each child is a born ecologist.  Thus save the children to save the imagination to save the planet.”