Nature “Dis”-Connect

Nature “Dis”-Connect

As a devil’s advocate, we asked a famous Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) programme, a simple but profound question, most relevant to the present times:

If the “devil” wanted to destroy a child’s connection to nature, what would it do?

The below answer has been copied and pasted without any modifications.

🏙️ Living in Concrete Jungles

• Devil move: Design cities and neighborhoods with barely any trees, birds, or open sky. Make playgrounds into shopping malls.
• Effect: Kids grow up with no sensory relationship with natural elements — no muddy hands, no tree climbing, no stars.

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🖼️ Replacing Nature with Screensavers

• Virtual nature documentaries, nature-themed apps, or animated forests instead of real forests.
• Devil move: Give a digital substitute and call it “just as good.”
• Effect: Kids think they’ve “experienced” nature without ever stepping into it. Sensory numbness creeps in.

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📚 School Curriculum That Ignores Ecology

• Nature is reduced to diagrams, definitions, and grades.
• Devil move: Make nature a theoretical concept, not a lived relationship.
• Effect: Kids don’t form emotional bonds with animals, soil, or trees — so why would they protect them?

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📵 Fear-Driven Parenting

• “Don’t go out, it’s dirty.” “You’ll get bitten.” “You might fall.”
• Devil move: Create fear around the outdoors, making it seem unsafe or inconvenient.
• Effect: Children stay indoors, sanitized, risk-averse, and disconnected from the wild beauty of life.

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📱 The “Indoor Generation” Lifestyle

• AC rooms, screen time, 24/7 artificial lighting, and junk food deliveries.
• Devil move: Make indoors so stimulating that outdoors seems dull.
• Effect: Kids don’t notice the sky, breeze, or birdsong. They grow up unaware they’re part of an ecosystem.

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🧼 Sterile, Over-Clean Environments

• Antibacterial everything. No playing in dirt. No bugs allowed.
• Devil move: Associate nature with “germs” and discomfort.
• Effect: Kids miss the micro-interactions that build immunity, awe, and love for life’s tiny miracles.

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🌐 Tech as the Only Source of Meaning

• Metaverses, AI companions, augmented reality, NFT pets — more attractive than the messy unpredictability of real nature.
• Devil move: Convince children that artificial is superior to the real.
• Effect: The forest becomes irrelevant, the river just background noise, and silence — unbearable.

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💭 Colonizing the Imagination

• Children’s stories, toys, and media filled with futuristic worlds, robots, and concrete cities — rarely meadows, rivers, or animals as protagonists.
• Devil move: Remove nature from their myths and dreams.
• Effect: A generation that doesn’t dream in green — and therefore, doesn’t grieve when it’s gone.

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And this was a revelation as we see all of this happening to our children where digital and virtual have become the protagonist and real nature and environment has taken a backseat.

At Paper Ball Educational Innovation, we are helping the current generation (and previous too) strengthen their bond with nature in multiple ways, so that nature does not remain in the realm of imagination but is the true and lived experience of each generation. So that children play and connect with nature and do not just see trees and rivers in movies and photographs. So that children develop a bond with nature and take real actions to preserve and conserve nature. So that nature and all living beings can help us see how our lives are really interconnected to each other. So that spirituality is not just another realm, but one that is enshrined in nature.

We do that because “UNLESS Someone cares, nothing is going to change”!!