The Wonder of Childhood

Pioneering conservationist Rachel Carson, who sparked the modern environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring, wrote a little known essay a few years earlier called “The Sense of Wonder.” The piece describes her attempts to help foster and preserve her young nephew, Roger’s, sense of wonder and awe in the face of the natural world. She understood the necessity of protecting wonder – a way of being toward the world that tends to get stamped out of consciousness by the time we hit adulthood. Sixty years later, in the midst of our hyper-technoscientific culture, it seems all the more urgent that we remember what’s too often lost, and the price we pay for this loss.

Carson writes:

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Rachel Carson yearned to endow each child with an “indestructible” sense of wonder that can be carried into adulthood. In some sense, this sense of wonder is indestructible, still with all of us, only it has been repressed to our consciousness. Living as we do in an almost exclusively human-centric/human-made bubble, we forget how to truly see the world outside, a world which is turned into material objects – natural “resources” – under our gaze. We forget that, as animals, the world of nature is our home. We forget that we belong here.

Sequoia’s Treehouse aims to reconnect children to their natural world.