How to save nature by playing the long game

One woodlouse-cradling child at a time

Dear friends,

Since I started with something sad last week, this week, I’d like to treat you to something heartwarming.

In the queue for an outdoor ticket desk, I found myself stood behind a mother and a young child of about seven. As the mother started to move forward to the desk, the child stopped, pulling on her hand.

“Look! There’s a woodlouse down here,” she pointed to the gravelly ground where there was indeed a sturdy looking woodlouse bulldozing its way away from the nearby flowerbed.

“Lovely,” said the mother, somewhat dismissively, eager to move forward in the queue and not hold me up.

“I need to move it back to its soil,” the little girl stated, bending down towards it but slightly unclear how to go about retrieving the small animal from the floor.

The first of a variety of ways to spell woodlouse: wood lous.

What followed was an exchange in which the mother tried to convince her daughter that the woodlouse would be alright, increasingly apologetically glancing over her shoulder towards me. Meanwhile, her daughter continued to explain, with genuine concern, how she didn’t want it to get squashed since it was heading in the wrong direction, towards the gift shop.

I continued to smile patiently, reassuring them I was not in a rush and feeling somewhat like a wildlife camera person, trying their best not to get involved with the wildlife I had come along to observe.

Eventually, filled with joy and a renewed faith in humanity, but seeing just how unsure the child was to pick the woodlouse up—I think out of worry of hurting it more than fear, I stepped in. I bent down and showed her how to gently collect it, letting her carry it cradled gently in her little hands towards the flowerbed, where she dutifully picked out a good spot to set it down—on a small, flat rock beneath a flower. This seemed to bring her a great sense of accomplishment, relief and happiness, as she watched it scurry off.

Another good spelling option: wood las.

I share this story with you not because it’s surprising, but because these moments are so often overlooked. For those of you who spend any time at all with children, their instinctual capacity to care for the smallest living creatures will come as no surprise. But this is so often brushed aside, pushed down the priority list of things to learn or nurture.

I cherish moments like these because they give me so much hope. Talking with adults about the natural world can be disheartening. It is so often impossible to move beyond people’s learned fear of things that are unfamiliar and different from us—things that scuttle around on the ground in a world that is smaller and slower than our own. Adults often can’t get beyond learned axioms like ‘flies are bad because they carry germs’, ‘worms are gross because they’re slimy’, or ‘spiders are scary because they have lots of legs’. This is no one’s fault—it’s simply the inevitable outcome of living a sanitised life separate from the natural world.

All of this might seem far away from the large-scale problems of biodiversity loss and nature declines, but we have no hope of having these broader conversations with anything like the ambition, creativity and determination needed if people’s natural reaction to the majority of nature is ‘yuck’, even if they, in principle, like going for the odd trip out of town for a country walk.

This time, one word: woodlows.

Glimpses of children’s natural tendency and fascination for the natural world serve to top up my motivation and hope. So often, our conversation around solving environmental crises centres around education. Of course, this is important, but the underlying philosophy and principles of caring for nature, so often missing from policy-makers discussions that focus instead on the monetary value of nature, is already there. We just need to nurture it, encourage it and praise it when we see it. And that is a very easy and enjoyable job indeed.

That is your good deed for this week—take time to nurture this within yourself or someone else. It has the added bonus of slowing time down and gifting you a pause. If one less woodlouse is squashed after your reading this, my job is done.

If you nurture any special moments, I’d love to hear about them!

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