Giving Compass' Take:

• Richard Louv writes for Children & Nature Network on his own personal experiences with nature camps, how they shape childhood growth, and why they are vital to the future of our environment.

• How can educators and schools create and support programs that deal with the outdoors? What role can funders play in the revival of nature camps? 

• Here's an inspiring story from a teacher and student at nature camp. 

In addition to exciting the senses, camps can touch the heart. At a middle school in San Diego, a girl described the lasting impression of her camp experience atop San Diego County’s Palomar Mountain. “My family is not one that believes in camping or spending time in the outside world,” she told me. “The only time I can remember having lived in nature, in the open, was at sixth-grade camp. There, I was truly comfortable, walking down paths that weren’t paved. I felt I truly belonged somewhere in the scheme of things.” Even now, long after the fact, she conjures up that time in her mind. “Sometimes, I just want to get away from the world, so I dwell in nature through my thoughts and memories.”

Like many environmental educators, camp leaders and conservationists, Madhu Narayan, a Girl Scout leader in San Diego, was shaped by her own childhood experiences in nature. She was just three months old when her parents, recent immigrants from India, took her camping for the first time. In later years, her parents drove across the West, camping as they went.

Narayan figures her parents didn’t have a lot of money and camping was an inexpensive way to see their nation of choice. “We moved through days of beautiful weather, and then the rains came,” she said. During a lightning storm, the wind blew away the family’s tent, and they slept in the car listening to the banshees of wind and rain howl and crash through the woods.

Read the full article about the return of nature camps by Richard Louv at Children & Nature Network.