 Debbi Brainerd '79 has turned 255 acres on Bainbridge Island into a
place where urban schoolchildren can play, learn, and explore in the
natural world.
The Brainerds are no strangers to big projects, education, or
the environment. Two years before, Paul, who grew up in the
forests of southern Oregon, had started the Brainerd
Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission of safeguarding the
environment and building public support for conservation.
After graduating from Washington State University with a degree
in clothing and textiles, Debbi landed a job with Nordstrom, where
for 12 years she worked in community relations and special events.
The job gave her strong ties within the Seattle community. But an
itch to learn more about the natural world sent her back to school,
this time at the University of Washington, where she earned a
degree in molecular and cell biology.
Tying together her interests in science, education, and the
environment, the thought of turning the Bainbridge Island site into
a nature-based educational facility became a full-time
preoccupation for Brainerd. She started researching the feasibility
of the project, and worked with the Washington State Department of
Education to decide if what she imagined was what Washington school
children needed. She found that no one was serving children from
schools in low-income neighborhoods.
The Brainerds bought the property for about $5 million and set
about raising five times that amount to bring IslandWood to
life.
 Visiting children plant and tend the fruits, herbs, and vegetables in IslandWood's garden.
Nature deficit disorder
AT THE TIME Debbi Brainerd was imagining how this property might
serve children, teachers and naturalists in the Northwest were
noting how disconnected children have become from the places where
they live.
A century ago most children had parks, yards, and vacant lots to
explore, and an intimate connection with the outdoors, says David
Gruenewald, a professor of education at WSU and editor of the book,
Place-Based Education in the Global Age.
Now schools are islands in their own communities, where security
guards watch the doors, and children are cut off from the world
outside.
"Schooling as an institution has developed a set of rules and
routines that pretty much exclude meaningful community
involvement," says Gruenwald. "You go into any school, and what are
kids doing? They're in classrooms doing worksheets."
In 1998 the Pew Charitable Trusts funded a study called "Closing
the Achievement Gap." The study showed that children who were taken
outside the classroom and had hands-on experiences in place of
reading and lectures improved their academic performance.
It is a state mandate in Washington that students at all grade
levels receive instruction in conservation, natural
resources, and the environment, but there isn't funding for it. And
when the environment does become an area of study, it's often a
far-off notion, like saving the rainforest, says Gruenewald.
Children today are also kept from nature by scheduled supervised
play, television, and video games. For this generation, parks and
woods are scary places. They don't play outside, and have very
little opportunity for independent exploration.
In the introduction to his book Gruenewald talks about how our
society is losing its roots by the mere fact that our youngest
members aren't encouraged to connect with their communities and
environments. When individuals are not tied to their communities,
things start to suffer—the wildlife, the ecology, even public
issues and politics, says Gruenewald.
Using terms like "extinction of experience" and "nature deficit
disorder," the experts describe a situation in which children's
lives are largely out of balance. They have no independence, and
the activities they do take part in don't allow them to use all of
their senses at the same time. ". . .what we desperately need, if
the society is to persist in the face of climate change and every
other challenge to survival, is a strong sense of our
more-than-human neighborhood," writes Robert Michael Pyle in his
essay "No Child Left Inside."
The way Brainerd saw it, many of the children she encountered in
King County never really had the opportunity to see or develop an
understanding beyond a 12-block radius. "They don't have a
perspective of how the world or the greater environment is really
responsible for supporting their every day in terms of the food on
the table or the water they drink," she says.
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