Press N(ature) to Play

What do spittlebugs and kids from the 1960s who lived around areas with Jatropha curcas hedges have in common? Bubbles. They could conjure up bubbles using a combination of air and plant fluids.

Spittlebugs, are the nymphs of froghopper insects named for the protective, foamy, spit-like cocoons they enclose themselves in until they become adults. They feed on watery plant fluids and excrete copious amounts of urine which they turn into a form of protection. Secreting a sticky substance from its abdominal glands into the urine, the nymph simultaneously blows air from its abdomen to generate a casing of bitter-tasting, protective bubbles. Kids in the 1960s, like my uncles and mother, employed a slightly different technique to generate their bubbles, which were in no way protective, just fun. They scoured the area where they played for hedges of Physic nuts, J. curcas. Once located, an evening filled with bubbles and sensory play was as easy as snapping off the leaf petiole and blowing air (from the mouth, mind you). The plant’s bubble power comes from its milky sap, which contains natural surfactants (chemicals that reduce the surface tension of water) called saponins, a property that finds use in detergents and other household cleaners. The front door was all that stood between entertainment and you.

Dactyloctenium aegyptium, the Egyptian crowfoot grass, is a common sight along footpaths and roadsides. Common, that is, until the municipal sweepers descend upon it and pluck out the grass as punishment for disturbing the aesthetics of a swarth of concrete. The name comes from the seed head, which resembles a crow’s foot. Originally from Africa, where it moonlights as a famine food, the grass seems unaffected by the uprooting, later colonising piles of soil that lie forgotten on the side of the roads by those very same sweepers.

I grew up in an era when the TV was called the idiot box and was far less ubiquitous than it is today. A time when kids socialised outside after school, unsupervised, not just in parks or during play dates but in colony streets and gardens attached to homes, when house-house and five stones were just as popular as cricket or hide-and-seek. I grew up in a time when boredom was easily dissipated by a mountain of sand outside a neighbourhood construction site. Or a guava tree that was fiercely guarded behind a wall of middling height by a fire-breathing Tamil professor. Or armoured pill-millipedes that curled into a tight ball when gently poked. Or a game of seven tiles where as much time would be spent on gathering the right set of seven flat(ish) stones to balance atop each other in ascending size as was spent playing the game. Or Egyptian crowfoot grass flower picking...

After we picked crowfoots, my mother showed me how to amuse myself with the seed heads. We would place two inflorescences in opposing directions atop each other like you would clasp palms together. Lightly bunching the arms of the upper inflorescence at the base, you could move the lower inflorescence, which then resembled, in appearance and touch, a hairy spider, most effective for terrorising nosy, annoying younger siblings or cousins. She also kept me occupied with the clever repurposing of vegetable odds and ends. The inedible tops of okra pods, when dipped in paint, made beautiful flower prints on paper. That year, every family member received homemade cards dotted with multi-coloured okra flower prints on the outside and absolutely nothing written on the inside. The supply far exceeded the demand, prompting drastic measures. Okra was not purchased or consumed in the house for a whole year.

I grew up in a time when mischief abounded, and plants and animals were our allies in covert deeds. Take the velvet bean, Mucuna pruriens, an important forage, fallow and green manure crop in many parts of the world. To adults, maybe? But to children, the fuzzy pods were the perfect weapons to exact revenge on a mean teacher. The pod extraction had to be conducted with the skill of Tom Cruise in his Mission Impossible stunts because, you see, the pods itch! They itch so terribly that they are called the “Mad” or “Devil” bean in some parts of Africa. Responsible for the itchiness, the hairs on the seed pods contain mucunain, a proteolytic enzyme that can cause blindness if transferred to the eyes. Some companies in the 1950s even used the hairs in itching powder, sold as a practical joke. The very same effect can also be achieved with hairy monkey moth caterpillars if one desired a more animate prop.

The world (well, our slice of it) truly was our playground!

Several modern environmental issues have been attributed to declining rates of environmental literacy in the general population. This is no longer something particular to city folk but also to village residents. I have been documenting biodiversity-related traditional knowledge for People’s Biodiversity Registers for some years now in Goa. The register is a tangible record of how people related/relate to nature. As I journeyed into landscapes where forests have been replaced by mines, beaches by hotels, fields by houses, villages by urban centres and time spent in nature by time spent on phone screens, I noticed how wisdom is being replaced by clout, how common sense is being replaced by WhatsApp forwards, and how the connection to our land is being replaced with tech savvy-ness. Outside of a handful of septua- and octogenarians, very few people seem to know or care about living in and with nature. 

According to a sizable body of research, nature connection depends on the time a child spends outdoors for development. This, in turn, has an influence on pro-environmental beliefs and behaviours as an adult. Beyond environmental stewardship, studies are also uncovering a cause-and-effect relationship between nature and learning, strongly suggesting that “experiences of nature boost academic learning and personal development”. Add to this the evidence that playing in a nature-based environment motivates children to engage socially with peers, allows them to practice skills in communication, negotiation, symbolic and creative thinking, and lets them FEEL joy, well-being and enthusiasm.

“Umwelt”, a term coined by Jakob von Uexküll in 1909, describes the world as what is perceived or experienced by a particular organism. A point of view. As an organism interacts with the world, its umwelt or perceptual world changes. In his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s book The Living Mountain, Robert Macfarlane echoes something similar: “The body is a fabulous sensorium, an auxiliary to the intellect.” The book is an account of Nan’s embodied experience, offering glimpses of her understanding, exploration and reception of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, her slice of the world. To Nan, nature was “endlessly relational” and not some passive object to be interacted with as just landscape.

Experiencing nature-connectedness comes in various forms, but we often overlook the power of play in nature. It can reconcile our perception of the world with the concepts we develop to understand the world better. It is transformative, diversifying our lived experience, engaging all our senses, enabling us to recharge, create, and feel wonder and connectedness.

When you play with, and in nature, it plays back…which is far more than I can say for our phone screens.

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