A 2025 survey showed that 71.2% of Americans support the conservation of fish and wildlife habitats. In 2023, 86% supported actions that promote wildlife recovery, habitat connectivity, and pollution reduction. Almost 70% of Americans supported the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a federal initiative to identify new sources of conservation funding.
All well and good, yet other data suggest that something important is amiss.
The premise behind Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods (2005) is that modern children are spending less unstructured time outdoors. The result is what he called “nature-deficit disorder”, with harms to physical health, emotional well-being, and cognitive development. Moreover, studies show that the English language is losing or sidelining words that describe aspects of the natural world. In recent years, ‘acorn’, ‘pasture’, ‘fern’, ‘heron’, ‘otter’, ‘willow’, and other words that describe animals, plants, landscapes, and weather have been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary and replaced with technological words like broadband, blog, database, and chatroom. Perhaps even worse, the frequency of words like ‘river’, ‘meadow’, ‘beak’, ‘coast’, and ‘bough’ in books has declined by more than 60%, with most of the decline occurring after 1850, the year most commonly associated with increasing industrialization and urbanization.
These changes matter more than you might think because words shape reality. The psychological term for this is ‘linguistic relativity’.
In U.S. high schools, core biological course requirements are set by the Next Generation Science Standards. The core requirements are cell biology, genetics and heredity, evolution and natural selection, human biology, scientific practices, and ecology. The ecology coursework focuses on: energy flows (e.g., food webs), matter cycling (e.g., water, carbon, nitrogen), biodiversity and, sometimes, interspecies relationships. Rarely, if ever, do species conservation issues arise. When they do, it’s usually in abstract case studies that involve charismatic species and spectacular settings (e.g., polar bears and sea ice, African game mammals, coral reefs).
Across the Midwest, no state public school system requires more than three high school science credits distributed across physical, life, and earth/space science, and there is little or no instruction devoted to how North American species are managed for sustainability, why conservation is important, or how the work is funded.
The threat to fish and wildlife conservation should be obvious (although, apparently, it’s not) to the 148 million Americans (57% of the population) that hunts, fishes, or watches wildlife. To address this public education crisis, the Nimrod Society and several other non-governmental organizations have taken the lead. Nimrod, for example, is underwriting a conservation education program for non-majors at Hillsdale College, and is preparing a text book on conservation designed for high school students. Hillsdale has committed to inserting fish and wildlife conservation lesson planning into the curricula of its’ network of public charter and private schools.
Belatedly, a few states have begun putting conservation into coursework, although few mandate it. Maryland, for example, mandates environmental literacy as a high school graduation requirement. Illinois requires that every public school include instruction on the conservation of natural resources, including topics like wildlife and forest management. And the South Carolina DNR Conservation Education Program provides schools with free, standards-aligned, hands-on conservation lessons for both the classroom and at wildlife management areas.
Now that public education seems to have become a priority at the national level, perhaps it’s time for a change to the national standards. After all, a basic understanding of how the natural world works is probably as important as posters of the 10 Commandments in classrooms. If Argentina, Finland, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Italy can do it, why can’t we?
Bottom line, America’s rise to global powerhouse was (and still is) a function of the wise sustainable use of its’ natural resources. It’s time to move past hand-wringing and blue-ribbon panels to actions that effectively reform the educational process. If the next generation doesn’t know the names of plants and animals and lacks appreciation for the habitats on which sustainable populations of fish and wildlife depend, then we’ve lost something fundamental to our culture and future success because nature ‘out of sight’ is nature ‘out of mind’.