Interview with Jon Young

Author, Coyote Guide to Connecting with Nature and

&RIRXQGHURIWKH(LJKW6KLHOGs Institute
By Charles Yaple

Jon, before we begin our interview, please accept a Coalition for Education in the
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Your work (1983) and the Coalition’s (1987) go back 25 years - long before people were
Jon Young
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Your Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature… book and 8 Shields Institute both
strive to reconnect people to nature. How do you respond to people who believe
humans no longer need such connection on an individual basis - that human
intelligence, ingenuity and technology can solve environmental issues?
Interview with

Well to begin, I don’t run into many non-believers. Most people I encounter absolutely
believe nature connection provides necessary nutrients, if you will. I use those words
metaphorically. I think what people hear in my nature connection presentations is the
need to nourish the human condition. It is similar to what water does to clean air. I
think nature connection is an ergonomic power that we need. We can’t do without
nature connection.

Photo courtesy Jon Young

16 Taproot
It’s not a philosophical or ideological thing that I am referring to. It’s much more on the level of sitting up in
your chair. If you hunch over you are going to end up with a bad back and pains. Once people understand
what I’m talking about is not ideological or philosophical and I’m literally describing human bio-physiological
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of nature connection.

Once we talk awhile, people acknowledge that connecting with nature does them good. I often get comments
like, “I live in the city and am a busy person, but a walk, even on the sidewalk on a nice day really does me
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prescribe.

Suburbia was just beginning to spread when I was a child and no one raised an eyebrow when I went around
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whole kind of different ultra-modern mindset against such activities had settled into my region. It had become
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I have to admit that I had some plot assumptions from the “get go.” One of them was the mistake of thinking
that being raised and mentored as a tracker by Tom Brown would make the nature connection through tracking
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really was going with my nature connection work.

The popularity of hunting was already gone when I started working with high school kids so I didn’t even
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of hesitantly because there was a cultural backlash against cruelty to animals at that time. So, I lost that
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there is probably no better activity than those things.

Is that when you moved into tracking as a way of mentoring nature connection?

Yes, tracking animals is just hunting without the trapping or harvesting gear. Like hunting, tracking involves
stalking and moving through the woods invisibly, trailing and getting to know animals and the ecological
context in which they live. For a while though I was kind of “out there by myself” so to speak. The hunting
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purists wondered if I had ulterior motives with my tracking activities. I was a lone boy from the wilderness
without a doubt.

Jon, let’s say we agree wholeheartedly about the need for people to reconnect with nature. Could
you speak a little about the role of public schools in fostering that reconnection?

A lot of people have asked me about that and sometimes I don’t see the relevance of public schools in this.
That sounds like a harsh statement so let me explain. With all the pounding of pavement that Richard Louv
has done since the 2005 publication of his best-selling Last Child in the Woods… book there hasn’t been a
great shift in the behavior of teachers.

I’m not saying that we are not making progress because we are. It’s just that there is sort of a “we just can’t
do it” attitude that goes like this: “This stuff is for people who are in rural areas. This is for people who
actually have access to nature. This is not for public school; I already have too many things on my plate as a
teacher trying to do this no child left behind thing. I’ve got to get my students past the state standard. I can’t
even keep up with my current assignment. I’ve got too many papers to grade and it just won’t work here.”

Spring/Summer 2011 17
 I was a classroom teacher for
three years and know that
nature connection oriented
curriculums can work in the
classroom. I know it can
work in public schools, but
there is a giant barrier and
I don’t know yet how to
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bridging concept that gets
us excited to work together.
We have a lot more work to
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let me just make sure your
readers understand that I do
believe it is very important
to somehow reach public
educators. I just have not
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I’m saying. I’m not saying
that we have given up.

Thanks for your candid comments. Let’s move on to discussing the role of parents in reconnecting
children with nature.

Yes, parents can play an important role, but in my experience they often don’t. My own childhood experience
may be typical of modern parent attitudes toward nature. I can remember having had deep connecting
experiences in nature and coming home to tell my mum and dad about them. They would listen without
making much eye contact and say “that was nice” and ask what else happened that day. So the message to
me as a child was this is nice for you, but it has no relevance in the “real world,” so we are waiting for you to
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the mindset that nature is great for little kids, but it really doesn’t have any relevance beyond nine years of
age. Parent orientation in our culture is clearly focused on the importance of preparing children to get good
jobs and is very unsupportive of nature connection. And if there is no grandparent, which is the case 99 times
out 100 today, to support the child’s interest in nature it more or less dies.

It’s like the teacher who has a classroom with no natural things in it and a wonderful window view of the
natural world but never takes the children outdoors.

Yes, and there is an even worse phenomenon that I have encountered with parents who dismiss the deep
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experiencing, but for the busy working parent, death is just a fact of life. That treatment of the child’s
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layered strategy when doing nature connection community development projects.

We work with the children as one layer. We work with the parent as another layer, and we don’t work with the
kids and parents at the same time too often because the kids needs are different from the parents. We teach
parents the basics of quality mentoring - how to be good listeners, to just hear the story and empathize with it.

18 Taproot
The third layer we train are “empty nester” parents whose kids have been deeply nature connected. That
usually means those families have a history of deep connection. We train those parents to work with the
younger parents, the younger children and try to build respect between generations.

The fourth layer includes involving the community to provide meaningful support in a lot of different ways,
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overworked, underpaid and generally stressed and tired.

Thanks for sharing those insights. It shows you have put a lot of thought into the process of nature
connection. Moving on with our list of questions, what role do you see the medical profession playing in
reconnecting children and adults to nature?

That’s a great question. I haven’t thought about this much or really worked a great deal with the medical
community. It is interesting you bring this up because I do have a couple of MD’s that are participating in
one of our extended mentoring programs. They are family practitioners and are taking it upon themselves to
encourage families to include nature in their lives. I know Richard Louv is trying to encourage pediatricians
to take more of a philosophical and visionary role in telling parents that nature experience is good for kids.

The occupational therapist is another professional that can help our cause. They are in the classroom in
California. Their job is to help kids with things like sensory processing disorder, which is a neurological
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These children can’t use their bodies the way you and I did when we were little chasing animals through the
woods and planting trees. Nature activities are very good in helping them overcome their disabilities. Some
of the OT’s are using Coyote’s Guide… to great effect in treating the disorder. I fear with all the indoor
screen time children participate in today we will see more sensory processing disorders.

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they went home. They all did for a while but fell back into their old habits of spending many hours per day
in front of a screen. Do you have a remedy to prevent such relapses?

We call this Monday syndrome.

The author Robert Greenway, who
is also an ecopsychologist, has a
quote that I probably beat to death.
But, it describes the situation you
bring up. He says, “A functional
man can only remain functional
for so long in a dysfunctional
culture or dysfunctional household
or dysfunctional environment.”
Another words, it is the group and
things we return to that win over the
long haul.

Wilderness experience providers

have been trying to deal with this
for a long time. You take ten people
backpacking for fourteen days in

Spring/Summer 2011 19
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occurred but when they get home and go to work on Monday their old lifestyles begin to take over.

I didn’t know I was solving the Monday syndrome, but I was addressing it all along without knowing it. And
what it boiled down to is there is a difference between attributes of stimulation. For example, you go to a
great workshop for a weekend or you are in an amazing wilderness, canoeing adventure or a great hunting trip
or whatever, and you are with friends, you reach a common plateau – an inspired attribute if you will. The
energy gets really high, and a sort of mutual stimulation occurs, and you vibrate with this entire frequency.
But when you get home it disappears.

So, there is a difference between an inspired attribute, those moments of inspiration, and an embodied attribute
which will not return you to old ways on Monday. I don’t mean that everything will involve happiness on
Monday, but you also don’t settle back down to original states of consciousness.

What’s required to achieve embodied attributes is immediate and long-term mentoring. Therefore, we have
developed a Monday night conference phone call to help people maintain their inspired attribute. And on
Thursdays we offer a group session in the community to keep building embodied attributes. Some people
come to both, but most people pick one or the other. We also use a platform on maestro.com to provide
breakout rooms where three or four participants can keep talking to one another. This forum of mutual
support helps people not to backslide. It’s messy, and it’s slow, but it works, and it’s a strategy that we really
standby.

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by becoming part of a support group.

I guess it is therapy but we don’t really look at it that way. We kind of just look at it as mentoring. The critical
path is both in time and regularity and support from others, so you are right and it is a similar treatment.
Perhaps we should called it post-modern disconnected anonymous.

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You refer to resiliency in the Coyote Guide… Could you share some thoughts concerning how nature
connection can help children develop resiliency?

We know that by using nature connection experiences attributes will emerge to foster a happy child. One of
them is a sense of excitement about the natural world. It is an attribute two to four-year-olds still have before
they get culturally cultivated into disconnection. They are just full of wide-eyed wonderment and innocence.
There is a curiosity and excitement that moves within them. To me right there, if you can keep that particular
attribute alive in a child throughout their childhood, it will stay into adulthood and they will become very
creative, curious, life-long learners. That is one attribute needed in building an individual’s foundation of
resiliency.

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by nature that are noticeably more responsive, almost like a wild animal quickness. If you put a person with
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One of the elders I used to work with referred to it as an abundance of electricity in the body. But it is not
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peers in music and other muscle memory activities. We see this again and again and again.

And I hear this also from martial arts teachers. They want to know what I’m doing with the kids because

20 Taproot
they are superior martial artists. They are just more in their body, and they have more resources available, it’s
almost like they are able to see who is behind them. I believe human beings are not tapping anywhere near
their potential. That’s why I say nature connection is a nutrient. Those deeply connected to nature will not
only care for it but also have a better personal life.

The third nature connection attribute has to do with a sense of wanting to pass on what has been good for you.
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directly connected to resilience but it involves a commitment to mentoring. You get out of yourself and start
watching people differently and think about how they can develop their skills. But over time that commitment
to mentoring others increases your problem solving skills because you are exposed to many different kinds of
people.

The fourth attribute is a deep compassion for living things and it emerges real quick. That one is quickly
observable in person, as soon as you give them a high quality experience with wild nature such as watching a
spider weave a web or seeing a clutch of baby birds. You can almost see a beautiful feeling develop in their
heart. I think that’s an important one.

Another attribute has to do with developing a kind of higher order awareness of things that need to be done, of
being truly helpful. For example you see an elder coming to the door, and you jump up immediately, run over
and open the door for him. Or, a pregnant woman gets on the subway and immediately you get off your seat
and help her sit down. It involves the proactive mind that looks around to see what’s needed, things that boy
scouts are taught. It is related to the nature connection, but I’m not sure why. I think one of the native elders
told me he believed this attribute emerged when we used to live within small villages where cooperation was
very important. I know modern parents are very interested in developing the truly helpful attitude in their
teenagers.

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but it’s also about how nature connected children put themselves into something. So, if they are going to
sing a song they get over their
fear, and throw themselves
wholeheartedly into it. If they
are going to dig a hole they
give it all they’ve got. So
it’s basically putting 110% of
yourself into something, and
feeling fully alive. A lot of
people have told me that it’s
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of their past limitations that
release them into that feeling
fully alive space. It’s in the
throwing off of the past that
releases the present; I guess
that’s the best way to say it.

From my vantage point, number

seven is the hardest attribute
to achieve with people. It is
to have the same compassion

Spring/Summer 2011 21
and empathy for humanity that they have for
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develop deep empathy for nature are jaded
against humanity. They become cynical about
other human beings and often avoid human
contact. I call that the sociopathic naturalist
syndrome. You may also know a lot of people
in that category.

Yes, and I’ve been tempted to go there myself

sometimes.

Me too, as I often tend to avoid interacting

with many people when I’m home. Those
of us who develop this sensitivity for nature
connection often avoid humanity. I’ve met
Photo by Amy Shellman
some people who have gotten to the point of
not liking humanity wishing nature could be free from the curse of human beings. When it gets to that level I
have to work with people on the concept of forgiveness and love in order to get them to give up that attitude.
And, I’m telling you right now that’s not an easy one. It usually requires a long-term mentoring relationship.
It is important to work with them because they often can contribute a lot to the nature connection mission.

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stay in the present moment with a quiet mind and use your thoughts like a tool that you can turn on or off.
It’s an attribute that is highly prized by people and often considered sort of a cornerstone of their resilience.
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things early. You perceive things much more sensitively through use of the quiet mind and nature connection
gets your there.

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for Education in the Outdoors is keenly interested in outdoor education research, and conducts a
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research do you see as being important?

I think from an ethnographic standpoint these days. I’m getting articles and emails every month about
the relatedness of all of us on our planet right now, all the human people to the Bushmen of the Kalahari
who possess 90% of our common DNA heritage. We now know that somewhere back there our ancestors
resembled, maybe not physiologically, but at least culturally the Kalahari Bushmen. Our ethnography and
anthropology methods from the last century and a half have largely focused on things that we’ve got plenty
of information on already. To push that edge a little bit, and to really help support nature connection, I would
love anthropologists to turn to the question of how is it that these primary cultures, who have not engaged in
the post-modern world and are still as close to the original condition as possible, connect people to nature,
people to themselves, and people to one another through their cultural activities?

I’m extremely interested in this question because anthropological literature seems to have very little research
in this area. From my standpoint, now that I know the ergonomic value, the neuromuscular reality of nature
connection and what it does for us, I want to know about cultural activities that exist on this planet that could
be modeled.

22 Taproot
 I believe we need to study the
remaining primary cultures
and examine the activities and
processes, occurring in families
and subsistence groups, that
are actually building bonds
between people and people,
people to themselves and
people to nature. It is important
to document these things before
they are gone because there is
not much time left. They are
disappearing quickly.

That would be my research. I

would examine those cultural
models to see which ones
could be lifted and embedded
into outdoor education
programming or even public schools. Some of them could occur in the classroom, if research backed up their
importance, and go a long way toward building the bonds we have just discussed. I think resilience and bonds
or connections are highly related. If a person has strong bonds with his own family, own neighborhood and
himself that individual is going to be resilient in the tough times.

Would you tell our readers a little about your efforts to create a worldwide council for regenerative culture?

It’s a best practices group that will continue to assemble the things that we know work that get the results
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organizational structure yet, but it includes people from the UK with Great Britain, Scotland, Ireland and also
Sweden and the Netherlands. These are the countries that are currently represented by veteran leaders. And
people in the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa are
interested in getting involved. So, what’s beginning to form is this
network of people who are interested in getting together for regular
conferences, and forming a best practices council that can basically
be stewards of this research, and make it available in as many forms
as possible to as many as possible as time goes forward.
So, the council for regenerative culture is still evolving in terms of
an organization. I am looking forward to being on the team once its
leadership is formally put together. Its work is of critical importance
as we strive to behave as responsible elders in the creation of cultures
that are connected to nature.

Jon, we thank you very much for sharing a full hour of your time.
We wish you the very best with your mission to create a critical mass
of people who are connected to nature. The world will be much
better because of it.

Coyote’s Guide by Jon Young The preceding article is an edited version of the complete
interview with Jon Young

Spring/Summer 2011 23