Growing in the Woods
This work was supported by the National Geographic Society’s Emergency Fund for Journalists.
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about sudden, destabilizing and painful changes in our lives. But this epochal moment could be an opportunity to rethink our society and to give a chance to ecological education, a cultural premise towards sustainability.
The conditions are all there. In Western countries, six out of ten citizens demand education to be one of the main objectives, even before economic development, of the post-coronavirus.
The health emergency, which has overwhelmed Italy like few other countries in the world, has undoubtedly put the school system in serious difficulty. In particular, it has highlighted how this needs new, and safe, spaces, and a rethinking of the teaching method.
The lack of outdoor experiences faced by the children of today’s cities has created a new type of disorder, identified by the scientific community as “Nature Deficit Disorder”.
Immersion in nature reduces stress in children who are stimulated to develop greater intellectual qualities, health, and serenity.
Building a relationship with Nature from an early age is a prerequisite for developing a sensitivity towards the environment and a desire to protect it.
Italy is not starting from scratch in this paradigm shift. Outdoor schools, where children are in direct contact with nature, animals, and plants are multiplying from North to South.
We live in a society that has the duty to find a different relationship with nature.
Through the photographic documentation of these stories, my goal is to spark reflection and debate, on a fundamental issue.
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The schools in nature are united in Italy under an organizing committee.
Originally born in northern Europe, schools in the forests have found very fertile soil in Italy. Thanks to a more favorable climate and the great variety of the territory, they have been transformed into “schools in nature”, finding hospitality in the woods, in the mountains, by the sea, or wandering in the countryside.
The recipe is simple: allow children to spend all their time outdoors, in complete freedom, accompanied by their educators. The outdoors becomes the classroom in a real, empathic relationship with nature and its secrets.
In the outdoors, children have more incentive to be together, to be in a group, to move around in company, and to get out of the shell of the Internet and the shelter of the house.
From a “medical” point of view, the advantages are scientifically proven.
The odds of catching the coronavirus are nearly 20 times higher indoors than outdoors. In the outdoors the body is stimulated to actively maintain a constant temperature, with a better response in terms of immune defense against attack by pathogens.
From January to June 2021, I documented 6 kindergartens located in 6 different areas of the country, from North to South, in an attempt to tell the story of the diversity of the territories, the change of the seasons, and how these are intrinsically linked to the experiences of the children.
