Lawrence, Kan., native Kevin Armitage, assistant professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, describes the background for the current environmental movement in The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America's Conservation Ethic (University Press of Kansas, 2009).

In this well-researched book, the first comprehensive examination of nature study, Armitage places this movement in its historical context and describes how important heroes of the environmental movement such as Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold were well-grounded in nature study as children.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the second industrial revolution brought dramatic advances in science and technology. As Armitage notes, "Nature study attempted to embrace scientific modernity while simultaneously recoiling from the narrow, instrumental, and ugly society engendered by industrial civilization."

Many Progressive Era educators encouraged Americans to head to nearby forests, prairies, rivers, and mountains with their guidebooks, curiosity, cameras, and collecting jars in hand. School gardens and plant and animal identification and observation were central to the movement. A primary goal was to help children—indeed, all Americans—become "active citizens who were skilled in reasoning and were committed workers on behalf of their environments."

In a comment that sounds remarkably current, Charles Scott, in his book Nature Study and the Child, written in 1902, lamented that "We have adapted ourselves to our physical environment by stripping our land of its forests, our air of its birds, our waters of their fish, by using up in the most reckless manner our natural resources. Nature has been our slave, from whom we could take anything, to whom we owed nothing." Nature study convincingly demonstrated that "What we do to nature, we do to ourselves."

The nature study movement began in July 1873 on Penikese Island, off the Massachusetts shore in the Atlantic Ocean. Louis Agassiz, Harvard professor of zoology and geology, welcomed almost four dozen students, most of whom were public school teachers and a third of whom were women, to train them in natural history instruction. Agassiz advocated that the "book of nature" be read as diligently as the printed word.

The nature study movement also drew on transcendentalist writers and themes. Henry David Thoreau, for example, took students on field trips to immerse them in local natural history and using their senses to interpret it. Cornell University horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey, a prominent advocate of nature study, asserted that the beginning of the movement was certainly as old as the "time of Socrates and Aristotle."

Armitage presents biographic sketches of some important contributors to the movement, including Bailey, Anna Botsford Comstock, Gene Stratton Porter, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Mabel Osgood Wright.

As a woman who came of age in the mid-20th century, I was drawn to the life experiences of Comstock. Although I had not heard of her, I will never forget her now. Like Bailey, she had a Cornell University connection. She used her talents as a biologist, writer, and educator to create a model for women who sought careers that pushed the traditional barriers. Botsford was born in a log cabin in Cattaraugus County, New York, the daughter of prosperous farmers, and her Quaker mother often took her on rambles through the countryside, imparting a love of nature.

One of Cornell University's early woman students, Botsford took a zoology course from John Henry Comstock, whom she married. Like others who followed similar career paths, she became immersed in several demanding roles: faculty wife, science student, and research assistant for her husband. She collaborated with him on entomology publications, providing beautiful illustrations and text. Unlike many male scientists of that period, her husband recognized her publicly for her contributions and listed her as co-author. Her professional activity increased when she became involved in the nature study movement, and Cornell, which had become the "intellectual center of the nature study movement," promoted her to professor when she was 65 years old.
As the nature study movement grew in influence, a number of events such as Bird Day, supported by at least 25 state legislatures, were held. Nature study movement advocates including Seton were also instrumental in founding the Boy Scouts of America, the Camp Fire Girls, and the Junior Naturalist Clubs, which preceded present-day 4-H clubs. African-American notables Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver also spearheaded nature study efforts that served blacks in the rural South.

After declining in the period following World War I, nature study reemerged in "many different guises of contemporary life," including the wilderness movement, conservation, and environmental education. Comstock asserted that "ecology is merely nature study grown to robust middle age."
As Armitage suggests in his conclusion, perhaps an open and loving knowledge of nature—a necessary part of being fully human—is the most important legacy of nature study.

Related Readings
Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder, Harper and Row, 1965. Carson already knew of her coming death from cancer while writing this book, which is an unfinished essay. As Carson says, "If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder...he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in."

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, Ballantine Books, 1970. First published in 1949, this environmental classic describes the changes in seasons and how these contribute to ecological balance. Leopold makes a still-timely plea for a wilderness esthetic that would lessen the human destruction of nature.

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Teaching Children Science: Hands-on Nature Study in North America, 1890–1930, University of Chicago Press, 2010 (available in print and e-book versions). A useful companion to the Armitage book, Kohlstedt's study emphasizes the scientific, pedagogical, and social incentives that encouraged teachers to explore nature in schools and outdoors.