How is the COVID 19 pandemic reconfiguring the understandings, relationships and experiences around children and nature?

COVID-19 is unveiling a paradoxical relationship between children and nature. Opportunities. for bodily-entanglements with others in what is usually understood as ´natural´ or any kind of public spaces have been restricted for children living in urban confinement. This is precisely what social distancing measures seek to accomplish. The virus embodies a dimension of nature darker than and usually ignored by idealised understandings of nature: entities with whom entanglement might imply a threat against health or life; and human responsibility for environmental processes that facilitate the spread of these entities. At the same time, natural, open-air spaces have been elevated as the safest for re-encountering with others in a post-pandemic world. Is it possible to imagine this reappreciation of nature reconfiguring our understandings and positions within it, and our responsibility to find new ways of living in a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017)?

References

Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press.

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