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Visit the Baker Creative |
Pennsylvania Conservation Ecologist Patricia Zaradic, a Bryn Mawr Environmental Leadership Program fellow, has coined the phrase “videophilia.” As she explained in the April 2008 Smithsonian, this is the “increasing love and fascination that the American public has with electronic recreation.”
While there is nothing inherently wrong with electronic entertainment, Zaradic’s concern is that such activities are replacing our time outdoors. Her research has found that outdoor recreation and visits to state and national parks have declined nearly 25% since the mid-1980s, according to the Smithsonian article.
“They won’t develop a relationship with [nature] and be good stewards of it in the future,” she warns. “Going out into nature, particularly as a child, has the strongest impact on developing environmental consciousness as an adult.”
Baker Creative owners, Brad and Dina Baker, have long believed that giving kids a strong dose of nature is critical. On family vacations, their children have gone without TV, computers, cell phones, hand-held video games. Even landline phones at times. And the result has been a greater appreciation of the beauty around them … as well as each other’s company … always feeling that they had been enriched, never deprived, by the experience.
Now, Brad is working with local schools to develop and implement curricula that make horticulture, and an appreciation of the natural environment, accessible to children throughout our community. This began several years ago. In 2004, he built an innovative, award-winning garden-classroom for the Mary Bert Gutman Early Learning Center, to teach 3- to 5-year-olds to grow vegetables and flowers which they sold to their parents in order to raise money to provide food for the hungry. For the past several years, he has been instrumental in the Beth Sholom Congregation Mitzvah garden, which brings out families to plant vegetables for the congregation’s food pantry.
With this newest endeavor, Brad is targeting upper elementary to middle school children, who are ready and open to grasping the science and the environmental implications, as they learn about the plants among which they play and study every day on their school grounds.
To learn more or get involved, please contact us.
