Spending time outside will make you care more about the environment. Caring more about the environment will make you want to spend more time outside. While not exactly synonyms, environmental education and outdoor education are closely related, and both help improve your life as well as the environment.
Nature can have a profound impact on your physical and mental health. Just two hours of nature per week is associated with good health and well-being. Introducing you to the great outdoors can also lead to higher academic performance, reduced stressed levels, improved social skills, and more.
Nature offers you the freedom to be children. Remember as a Kid, you explore, run, shout, and laugh and hop over puddles and climb up trees; they invent games and fictional worlds. These activities let kids take risks, discover things, question, and experiment. This self-expression is invaluable to their development and allows kids to discover themselves while interacting with their natural surroundings.
This interaction instills a love of nature and inspires you to do you part to give back to the environment that has done so much for them.
Form Sustainable Habits
Knowing much about the environment can help you develop sustainable habits that are likely to stick with you as you grow up. Even small actions have large impacts over time.
Some simple sustainable habits can be performed at any age:
- Recycling
- Bringing reusable bags to shop
- Turning water off while brushing teeth
- Keeping lights off when not in use
- Using reusable water bottles
Lead by example and take the time to explain that keeping the lights off not only conserves energy, but also improves air quality by limiting the amount of work that air-polluting power plants have to do. Explain how the entire life cycle of a plastic bottle uses large amounts of fossil fuels that contribute to climate change, and how your reusable bottle keeps plastics out of landfills and moves us towards a circular economy.
