Claude Stephens: We want to build the next generation of individuals that cherish the planet and that have a connection to planet and are spiritually aligned with being outdoors in mud and wind and water and rain and bird sounds. So how do we build playgrounds that focus around that set? Of ideas.
Rusty Keeler: Hi, this is Rusty Keeler and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast, where we talk about play, where nature, playing in nature, and the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen.
Claude.
Claude Stephens: Hello, rusty.
Rusty Keeler: Hello, Claude.
Claude Stephens: How are you doing?
Rusty Keeler: I’m doing well. I’m doing well. I’m, I’m going after my, uh, Claude lookalike look here with my white hair.
Claude Stephens: Or is it, am I going after the rusty lookalike?
Rusty Keeler: I know its, we don’t know. Uh, well let the listeners decide.
Claude Stephens: Okay. Who
Rusty Keeler: can’t see, uh, but yes. Oh, so, so great to be here with you and Claude.
Our paths have crossed for many years in the play world, um, and kinda the world of kind of living well or artistic living and community. And I, I really, I look up to you to somebody who, you know lives a, a creative life that is true to yourself and your creativity and connecting to. Community and, and, uh, society and, and trying to do beautiful, good things in the world.
And I always, I always learn so much from you and, and love being around you and when we’re, we’re, we’re together. And so I’m, I’m really excited to share you with listeners.
Claude Stephens: Well, the feeling is mutual, rusty,
Rusty Keeler: the Claude Stevens experience here. So why don’t I read your bio and then we can, we can dive into some conversation here.
Claude Stephens: Okay.
Rusty Keeler: So you call yourself a ologist.
Claude Stephens: So my, my academic background is in evolutionary biology and, and with a focus in ecology. And so I work at Bernheim Forest, uh, and arboretum and. The focus of Bernheim is connecting people to nature. So I am first and foremost an ecologist that then later in life became interested in play for that evolutionary part of that evolutionary biology.
And we get into that or not.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Claude Stephens: But um, so play college just is just. A mashup of play, an ecologist. Yes. And that extends over to our 17 acre playground, which we call PCO System, which is a mashup of play and ecosystem. So
Rusty Keeler: yes. Love it. Love it. Okay, so play college in our minds here. Claude Stevens is the director of Bernheim Forest and Arboretum’s Children at Play Network.
A regional effort to eliminate barriers to free play in nature. His academic background in evolutionary ecology informs the way he thinks about systems change, such as how we provision for children’s play. The Children at Play network team. Designs, play environments, trains play facilitators and nurtures regional support networks, engage in the work of valuing free play in nature so people could understand why Claude and I might like each other.
That’s up our alley. And yeah, so there’s, there’s so much and you bring so much to this. To this, the movement of, of play, supporting play in children in nature. And I’m looking forward to talking with you about, you know, a adult adult’s role, what play is, why children and nature working with communities and what, yeah, how adult intervention to kind of support play and childhood and where childhood.
Play is today and what we can do to, to support it. But maybe first just back up kind of the evolutionary lens of play itself in our past as humans, as and and, and then how it connects to where we’re at. And then do we need to support
Claude Stephens: this? Well, I guess one of the skill sets of anyone studying evolutionary processes is to understand.
Scales of time a little bit differently than most of us. Think about time. So if you think a long time is a hundred years or 200 years, then to an evolutionary focused individual. That amount of time doesn’t mean a whole lot, and yet lots of things happen in those timeframes, but from a species perspective.
So let’s take a look at us as a species.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: Uh, homosapien. And we’re not the first in the genus, homo, you know, there are homo species that precede us. Those species inform how we are as a species and our species has been here, depending on who you talk about for 350,000 years. So in that amount of time an organism changes and what we do and how we exist and what we think about and how we explore and use the landscape, all of that changes.
Our play mind is a very old mind. It’s way older than a hundred years or 200 years. Some of the way I think about this is inspired by Peter Gray, who’s an evolutionary psychologist, so thinks about things a little bit differently, but we are a playing individual, a species. Uh, we call ourselves Homo sapien, which means wise man.
That was picked by Lanius. I think probably inappropriately. I don’t know that we are very wise. I would rather think that we are playing man or Homo Lule.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: And so we come from play. Then lots of things started changing 10,000 years ago. With the advent of agriculture, I think of agriculture as a big kind of human mistake.
You can trace many of the ills that we deal with in the modern world that track back to agriculture. Agriculture is when we stayed in one place. Agriculture is when we started building city states, and city states led to war. Um, and resource use started changing. We started looking at the planet as not a place that we move around on and gather and hunt from, but a place that we start changing the landscape in order to alter it so that we can grow crops and food.
Mm-hmm. And then a whole bunch falls out of that, including the industrial revolution.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: Which is when we started. Thinking differently about education. We started thinking about education as a industrial process where we move an individual from point A to point B in the system and prepare them to support the industries.
Those, some of those industries then shifted over and started. Commodifying play and building play equipment that’s manufactured by companies. And then there’s litigation and lawsuit. I mean, all kinds of things fall from that. Mm-hmm. And so my evolutionary mind is looking at how did we get to a point and our evolution where we build a kind of a playground.
That looks all the same, go anywhere around the United States, and 90% of the playgrounds are pretty much exactly alike except for placement and color.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: Why is that? How did we get to that point? And if you understand how we got to that point, you can use that information to deconstruct that to get to a different point.
What different point do we get to. In my mind, that’s a point that cherishes the natural world more than most of our playgrounds cherish the natural world today. So that’s a perfect place for someone who works in a, a forest and an arboretum with a mission of connecting people to nature. So we got at play, uh, not because we’re play people, but because we want to build.
The next generation of individuals that cherish the planet and that have a connection to planet and are spiritually aligned with being outdoors in mud and wind and water and rain and bird sounds. So how do we build playgrounds that focus around that set of ideas and not around the set of ideas that some of the more traditional.
We often talk about traditional playgrounds. I think the playgrounds that we’re designing that are, that are nature focused, those are traditional playgrounds.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yes.
Claude Stephens: And that the playgrounds that we all think of as the dominant paradigm, those are not traditional at all. Those are new. Those are manufactured playgrounds.
So I am at odds with the playground manufacturing industry, which I call big play, and I welcome them into the conversation. I don’t dislike those people or what they’re building, but I think that there’s room for a conversation between that industry, big play and nature play.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yeah. I remember having experience, uh, some of my aha moments when I was, uh, designing play equipment in the Netherlands, and this was for the European market.
And at that stage I was, I loved being a designer. I loved play, learning about play, designing for play, and you know, I was kind of. La la, la doing my thing. But the more I spent time like in the factory, the more I spent like in, in natural play settings in Europe, the more I, in one of a kind places or community built places, I suddenly looked at the, the playground factory, the industrialized factory.
I was like, wait a second, are we designing for play or are we just designing like metal thing? We have the tools to bend metal in this way and mold plastic in that way. And suddenly it felt like, wait, you know? Children play in all different ways with all different things. We are kind of, because this company specializes in metal and plastic and powder coating and all that kind of stuff, we’re kind of just selling this stuff.
And really, how do you step back and think, okay, what is, what is play on a deep level? How do you s how do you kind support the play? How do you connect kids then to the land where they live, nature, where they live? Um, that has nothing, it doesn’t have anything to do with the industrialized process.
Claude Stephens: I agree.
I agree. And I don’t think most play happens on playgrounds. I mean, playgrounds are wonderful places for play, but children play everywhere, especially if you break out of the United States and you think globally. Um, and I’d love to bring up the documentary work of, uh. David Meeks Les in in Brazil, if that’s an appropriate thing to do.
But yes, children are really good at finding those interstitial spaces where they are out of direct supervision of adults. If it’s in a house, they know where they can go in the house, where they can get away with things that. Parents may not allow because they’re being quiet down in a corner of the basement or something like that.
If they’re outside, they figure the corners of the yards where the trees may not, you know, may grow up weedy, and they can develop a little forward or hiding spot. If it’s at the community level, it might be the one vacant lot in the neighborhood. If it’s in the woods, it’s that. Corner back somewhere in the woods where nobody’s watching or or checking to see what they’re building.
And, um, I wish more of that play was embraced culturally so that at the home level, the community level, the ecosystem level.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Like those are the hotspots. Those are, yeah. The places that. Might be more forgotten by adults. Like, so the adults don’t care about these places. The back, the little backwoods, the scrubby area, the, the vacant lot.
And so it’s like, oh, well kids have freedom.
Claude Stephens: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Or they did, or certain communities they do. Or, you know, I mean, certainly my, my childhood, we roamed fields and had our bikes and we went where we wanted to go, and certainly had those scrubby, scrubby places that no one else cared about.
Claude Stephens: The play provisioning in those interstitial spaces is provided by the children themselves.
It isn’t built by big people. They find, yeah. Scraps of, I remember as a kid, building tree houses, and if we found a board that was more than a foot long and more than four inches wide, bingo, we can use that piece of That’s right. You know. That’s right. I remember, uh, when I was growing up, there was a lot of construction going on and so, um, there were scrap lumber piles and where the workman had tossed all their bent nails.
A bent nail was just an opportunity to bang it straight again and then use it. It was as much fun to get the nail straight as it was to use it. And we built all kinds of things. Added nothing.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. Yes. I just saw an article, uh, written by, I don’t know, it was a New York Times opinion person, and they were talking about watching again as an adult with their child.
The movie Stand By Me. It was a Stephen King short story that wasn’t a horrific, it wasn’t like a horror movie. It was more autobiographical about his life. But the stories like. Four boys best friends going out on a camping thing. They’re, they have a big mission that they’re going on. But what struck the, you know, with the message of the story was like, wait, they had that kind of freedom and the daughter was asking the writer like, did you have that kind of freedom just to be out and your parents didn’t know where you were and you were just doing things and you know, kind of on the edge?
And, you know, that kind of freedom. And I, I remember that kind of freedom, but I know that for many kids they don’t have that kind of. You know, they’re not, they’re not pulling boards out as much and, and nails and, and building their own kinds of things. So it was almost like, and even that idea of like Stranger Things, the movie, stranger Things, especially like with like what season one, when the kids are all on bikes and everything and the, I heard people saying the stranger thing isn’t that there’s some big monsters around.
It’s that these kids have this freedom and they’re riding their bikes through town with no adult supervision.
Claude Stephens: Yeah, the adults are like minor characters and they were in my life too, and they could be again. Mm-hmm. But that, that’s gonna, that’s societal work. That’s systematic work, and I’m interested in that aspect of play work as well.
Um, I, I believe that. Play work done well can address systemic challenges and it can pull communities together and it can build bridges between organizations and it can address equality. And there’s all kinds of work for play. People that is play adjacent that. Brings us into communication with the larger structural issues of communities.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. You’ve been working for many years on like a long-term project that kind of an evolutionary project of, of play, network of play and community systems change.
Claude Stephens: Yes. At, you know, at, um, there’s lots of places that have really amazing playgrounds. What Nobody owns the market on an amazing playground because yeah, that one’s amazing.
So is that one? Yeah. Here’s one I don’t even know about. That’s even more amazing than anything I’ve ever seen before. So what needs. To happen is to build relationships between all of those efforts so that those people doing amazing things support people that may only have. We worked on a playground here in Louisville for Catholic Charities, and they moved into an existing building.
They had a little area that’s no bigger than a large room in a house, and it was asphalt covered, but they, but that it was off the doors of their early childhood support room for the work that they were doing, and so. Volunteer, um, support appeared to pull up the asphalt, put down soil and mulch, bring in trees and rocks, and in an area no bigger than a room.
It feels very different than an asphalt parking lot. It feels like a place you actually wanna sit in and kind of hang out for a while and kids and watch kids or be a child and play. Yeah. So that’s very important work. ’cause they serve immigrant populations, you know, children coming from who knows where with who knows what their play was like.
Mm-hmm. Um, and then what do we give them an asphalt parking lot or do we try to upgrade that?
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Claude Stephens: And um, all of that work come happens because people doing one thing can support people that don’t have the resources to do much of anything at all.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: So build those connections, build those bridges between groups of people, and that’s the real work to build relationships that are durable and ultimately helpful.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. ’cause you’ve been branching out for years with different organizations and different communities and neighborhoods to, not to push agendas, but to kind of meld agendas maybe, or to bring in play or support the missions that other groups are doing, but with, with your interest of in play. Community.
Claude Stephens: Yes. And building those relationships takes thoughtful work. So one, one thing that we’re very careful about doing is we don’t go to an organization and say, Hey, look at us. We’ve got the answer to your problem. Let us show you how to build a natural playground here.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Claude Stephens: What we do is we go and we say, Hey, here’s who we are and we like what you’re doing.
Would you like to come out and play at Bernheim? And then let’s talk about how we might be helpful. You tell us what you need and if you even want a relationship at all, and if you do want the relationship, tell us how we can help. As opposed to, here’s the answer to your problem. We’ve built some really.
Amazing, durable relationships by being authentic about wanting to be in relationship with another group of people.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. And certainly organizations are gonna know right away, like, are they, is this group pushing something on me? Do they think they have the answers? Or, or do we genuinely, you know, do, does this, do Claude and Company genuinely care or share goals or respect and honor.
Honor the work that’s already happening? And yeah, how to have a relationship. Because it, I mean, in some ways we, it feels like we’ve gotten to a place, you know, society-wise, where everyone’s just like scrambling doing their own thing, siloed here and there and, you know, there, there could be the feeling that we’re, you know, everyone’s just doing their best and busy and, and yet, if.
Mental health, children’s mental health, and they’re not getting the chance to have the kind of free play or you know, there’s pressure at school or in neighborhoods. You know, it just kind of. PE we could just keep, keep going in our individual silos more and more, and then you know what’s gonna happen.
But it takes like this work of like, wait, we gotta, you know, to stop at the opposite of turn it around. And I, I feel like community of like, who are the people in the community? Who, who share values? Who, who, who can you connect with? Yeah. But it is stepping out.
Claude Stephens: That analogy is also. A similar thing is happening in the ecological world.
So conservation work of the past century was to purchase land and protect it, and individuals do that, and private nonprofits do that, and governments do that. But it’s the work of like purchasing land and then working with that land to. Conserve it, preserve it, restore it, whatever is the, uh, appropriate action, the conservation work of this in the next century.
’cause there’s not much of that land left to buy. There’s not a lot of natural areas out there in large amounts that someone could purchase and then start to preserve it. So the conservation work. Of the future will be to figure out a way to connect those places. So protect places was past work, connect places is future work.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Claude Stephens: And the same thing, it just, uh, exists for, I think the Play Community Build Places for Play is the work that many of us are still in Connect Places for Play is the work of the future so that every child has a place outside where they feel free and safe and empowered and joyful. Which by the way, that’s a paraphrase of the vision of the children at Play Network.
Which is the play network at Bernheim where I work is to, every child has a place.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: It doesn’t matter who you are, there should be a place outdoors. Where you can experience free play, and that’s another conversation, but I bet that’s already been explored in your podcast, the kind of difference between free play and directed play.
We don’t need to get into that, but um, we want every child to have a place where they decide how to use a natural area to play the way they want to play.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. So at Bernheim you’ve created like a high level model of rootsy play connection to nature. And it sound, you know, it sounded like you said like first, first step is inviting some people in or organizations in and saying, Hey, check this out.
And I know when I was there, uh, uh, the PCO system, um, you’re once. Taken by the scale of it. Um, some of the key, you know, there’s some big artistic wow features, but you’re also taken, I was taken by like, at the same time, feeling simple. There’s simplicity to things where people might get wowed by some of the big stuff, but at the same time, they might get wowed by like.
Oh, these logs and stumps and the wave. You have some that are big in can climb on or sit on or or loose ones. And kids are, and you’re seeing what kids are doing. Or organizations who come to visit might see other kids playing in ways like, oh, they’re letting them just roll logs around or be risky or, and I think people would walk, walk away with feeling like, oh, we could do some of this stuff.
It
Claude Stephens: feels like, oh, absolutely.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Right. It’s got
Claude Stephens: both of them. We don’t even think where. Experts in it. Bernheim is a fairly large organization. It’s it’s large in just geographic size. So as a private organization, we own and protect about 18,000 acres. That’s big. Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Claude Stephens: I don’t know of another private institution that has that much acreage.
So we build a 17 acre playground, and that doesn’t feel like anything to us. We’ve got way more than that to play with.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: Mm-hmm. But that’s a big playground. That’s more land than a lot of organizations even own.
Rusty Keeler: Oh, yes.
Claude Stephens: Our scale is skewed. And when an organization like Bernheim builds a place like PCO system, the way that most typically happens is you hire someone to do it.
Um, you hire a landscape design company. You hire Rusty Keeler. You hire, um, you know, someone who has done these before to do it. And they come in and they design it, they talk with you, but they design it and they figure out all the problems and, and it kind of gets all built at once. Then it all opens at once and that team of people goes away and with them goes all the knowledge of how this happened.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: And when we built our playground, we looked at that as an option, and everyone we talked to was designing playgrounds that looked like a lot of other very nice playgrounds. Nothing wrong with them at all. They didn’t feel bernheim, they didn’t feel like what we were thinking we might want. They didn’t feel messy enough.
They didn’t feel like they had loose parts. It felt like they were being designed for the adult gaze. Like, um, I want this to look. Really nice and pretty and focused on the curve of the sidewalk or the, and we thought, well, that’s not really what we’re going for. What we are going for is to build an environment for the child’s cave that they look at it and they go, oh.
I get this place, or at least they could potentially get that place, it might take a little help because it doesn’t look like their typical playground. So at first they don’t know what to do with it. But um, so we jumped in and did it ourselves, and as a result of that, we had to, out of necessity, understand that we were gonna make a bunch of mistakes.
And so as soon as we were done with the first build out, we knew we were gonna have some things that were wrong, some things that were right, and a whole bunch in the middle that could be massaged either out of the project or changed so that it becomes more right than wrong. And we keep it. And we also knew that it was never gonna be done.
We were always gonna be building. And, uh, getting rid of, and adapting and changing. So it’s, it becomes play for us, the people that work there building the playground, that’s our play.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. You get to a, as opposed to someone I, like me, who comes in, works with communities, falls in love with the community, does a project and then leaves, and then I’m like, oh, I miss the community, or I miss the, you know, how’s that thing evolving?
And here you get to live it every day. See it every day, see the people using it, see how it, it evolves on it own, on its own how, how you wanna be a part of the evolution and change. And I think for so many people who have. Playgrounds or a childcare center or a community center, it’s like it’s, it’s okay to be out, to be changing.
It’s okay to try things out and observe, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I mean, certainly people with their classrooms, you know, are doing that. They’re setting things up and seeing how it works and changing things around. Sometimes playgrounds feel like they have to be like, this is permanent and this is gonna be the way it is.
Forever.
Claude Stephens: Yeah. Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: But that that’s also part of the beauty of like the nature connecting to nature. Yeah. Is that It is all right. It’s change. It’s all change. And to be okay with that, the dreaming big, starting small and then never stopping that. That’s what you’re talking about. The not stopping. Yeah.
Like don’t wanna stop.
Claude Stephens: It’s also important to keep in mind who’s deciding this is perfect or this needs work if it’s an adult. I’m skeptical. If it’s a kid, I listen. Yeah. Um, so, you know, an adult will say, Hmm, kind of messy. A kid goes, perfect. You know? Yeah. It’s
Rusty Keeler: like,
Claude Stephens: all right, it’s perfect.
Rusty Keeler: Yep, yep. Yeah.
And so some of the, some of the perfect messy things that, that I remember seeing there, you know, multiple water shoots, multiple water play, water and sand. Um, yeah. Loose parts galore. Where kids are really getting into it and make damning and, you know, making floods and lakes and all sorts of stuff and yeah.
And, and that could push adults buttons or it could have adults remember, touch their own childhood or their own memories or, or they, or they don’t and they just say, oh wow. Look how engaged the kids are.
Claude Stephens: Right.
Rusty Keeler: We try to say, keep it tidy at home, but. Look at this.
Claude Stephens: Yep. And the other thing we did, which has changed our work, is with our offices for our team.
There’s three of us, myself, Zach, and Jenny.
Rusty Keeler: Yes.
Claude Stephens: And Jenny is the play Environments manager. And Zach is the PLA assistant coordinator, and I’m the director of the Children at Play Network. But our offices were distant from the playground. Not very distant, but we weren’t on the playground. Yeah. And we’re kind of office challenged at Bernheim anyway, because our staff has grown, but space is for people is finite.
So I said, well, let’s just build a new. Place where we call it the trading post. The rationale is to have a place where we can store lots of loose parts and. You know, kind of, we built our offices there too. So now our offices are literally in the middle of a playground. So when we’re working, we’re hearing screams and kids are knocking on our door and smearing mud on the window, and that changes the way we work for the better.
It puts us in the middle of play as we’re working, as opposed to kind of a. Nothing’s very sterile at Bernheim, but a more sterile office environment,
Rusty Keeler: so that’s right removed. Like, oh, we’re the designers, we’re the administrators of this thing. We’re over there. But the idea that here you are in the heart of it and with, with your hearts in it while, while everyone’s experiencing it.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s, I love it. And so I got to experience that a bit because Bernheim, uh, was hosted. They, they did a day of hosting at the interna. The I-P-A-U-S-A International Play Association USA conference. Last year, the national conference was in Louisville, and we got to be at bernheim. So we all. Got to have the Bernheim experience and I did.
I loved being in your office. ’cause it just felt like, oh, we’re in It. Just gaze out the window and their, their children and families are getting, getting into it all and yeah. You, you feel like you’re a part of it. Can I tell you another thing that I really loved? I had a really nice little experience
there.
Rusty Keeler: Absolutely. Yeah. Um, you know, you talk about how, how big bernheim that area is. The, the PCO system is, you know, 17 acres. It, it’s almost, you can’t even picture what that is. And, and there are like dedicated play areas that, where there’s lots going on and there’s places to, for adults to sit in. There’s sand and there’s water and you know, all that kind of stuff.
And then there’s some bigger things and then there’s trails. But also like within for our listeners, there’s then there’s. Acres of just woods that is fenced in. And so it like allows children, allows parents to feel comfortable like, oh wait, we can just, that’s part of it too, like, okay, there’s, there’s the sand pit, but wait, we could just go in the woods.
And so I, I love that idea of like, you’re just inviting children and families to just have a nature experience if they want it. So there was one time between sessions I just kind of wandered and was checking it out and, you know, it’s almost like you’re climbing a mountain. And so I was like, okay, let’s just check it out.
And, you know, it’s different ecosystem. What similarities to upstate New York are there? What trees are different and the same? And then I saw something I’d never seen before. Well, yeah, I, I saw a box turtle. Just walking up the mountain right nearby where I was, maybe I was sitting and suddenly I saw some movement and it was a box turtle and, and upstate New York, most of the turtles are, are aquatic and maybe box turtles go near water.
But this was like just in the woods very, very far away from. From, uh, water or, you know, so that’s me not knowing about box rooms. But there it was and it was just like such a magical thing that I never experienced before. And it really, you know, just that idea of like, it was, I had that experience because you all thought, let’s, let’s connect kids to nature.
Let’s create a safe space where adults could feel comfortable and then just explore how often you just feel like, oh, I’m just gonna explore. And so, you know, for me to just have that. That experience of like wonder and, and wondering like, wait, what, what is this? What am I seeing? Could this be real? Could this be true?
And I got to kind of relive what might be from some families and children.
Claude Stephens: Yeah. So, um, there’s, we’ve intentionally developed across a spectrum of ecosystems.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Claude Stephens: Uh, the. The first area we call the nature Play area, and that’s kind of designed human planned landscape and um, we’ve got a lot in that area and it’s fenced because we have a lot of, uh, parents that appreciate a fenced in area, especially parents of children with autism.
Then there’s a second area that is, we call the adventure play area, and it’s more park-like. It’s got pine trees and. Other hardwood trees and things, but they’re spaced out and you know, not a lot of understory. It’s kind of mowed and very park-like. And then that transitions into a, a, actually a very nice, about 11 acre area that we have put a fence all the way around.
A nice big. It’s actually a deer fence, so it’s eight feet high.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Claude Stephens: Um, and that bounds, that upper wooded area so that parents will feel more comfortable. Not all parents feel comfortable at all. Even in zone, that first zone, that nature plays zone. Sure. But what, but having that spectrum that gets kind of manicured to park, like to wild.
Allows individuals that come to us many times. Some, some families come daily, the ones that live near us. Some families come weekly, some, you know, come four or five times a year. Some ne have never seen it. Um, so, um, that spectrum of ecology allows people to enter that natural world in a place where they feel most comfortable and then evolve their behavior in their comfort.
Toward the wilder and wilder parts, and as you get into that wooded area, we don’t provide anything. Things happen like little building areas develop and trails start appearing and some kid goes up there and claims territory and starts to build a fort and everything, just using the materials provided by nature.
But that’s the way I grew up playing. Go into the woods and make of it what you can. So what we do in that third zone where you found the turtle, the box turtle, eastern box turtle,
Rusty Keeler: eastern box turtle
Claude Stephens: was, is we let it evolve and then we go, go up in there. Periodically and we kind of observe the evidence of play so we can kind of tease out how we think it might be used, and then we support that.
We scaffold that, um, or we deconstruct. So if some kid built. Essentially a deadfall trap. We would, uh, probably scatter that, you know?
Rusty Keeler: Yes, yes.
Claude Stephens: Um, so we’re looking for safety through our, our eyes. Mostly. We just leave it alone. So that area evolves on its own.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. It’s like a slightly curated or barely curated, but still it does have, yeah, it has your eyeballs on it and seeing what’s there.
The people of Louisville and and the surrounding areas have bernheim and. People are being inspired by Bernheim to do their own nature play, even in room size, asphalt areas. So you are having a big impact. And you know, I know, I remember years ago, you know, we were talking about Buckminster Fuller and his, uh, on Bucky, uh, you know, on, on his tombstone that, that with the saying of call me trim tab.
Claude Stephens: Or it just says trim tab.
Rusty Keeler: TRIM
Claude Stephens: tab, T-R-I-M-T-A-B.
Rusty Keeler: So I think about that and the work that you do and the work that all of us are doing to try to make big change, but we, we do it in a small way. You want, you wanna tell us about that and just how you see your systems change, uh, in, in that kind of evolutionary terms as we, you know, as life gets.
M you know, we talked, you talked about kind of humans and agriculture and industry and playgrounds, and now we’re in technology and I feel like there’s this, it, it could just be speeding up and going further and further and further with technology and engulfment of it. But we’re talking about, okay, how do we wanna steer the ship?
We wanna help balance that out. And, and how, how, how do you, how do you see all that?
Claude Stephens: Well, going back to the Buckminster Fuller one, one of the things that I like reading is stories of people who have made some significant changes in the world. And
Rusty Keeler: yeah,
Claude Stephens: Buckminster Fuller had told this story to his students about the trim tab, um, on boats, rudders.
On airplane air Leons or whatever they’re called, um, things that make the wings tilt or move or ships curve on those bigger things that make things move quickly. There are very small little rudders within the rudders that are called trim tabs, so they might use the rudder to get the boat going on a curve.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: But then they use the trim tab to kinda make minute changes to that. But the ma, but you can change the direction of an airplane or a boat just by moving the trim tab, the smallest kind of moving part that is used to steer or direct something. You don’t need the whole rudder. You don’t need the whole airly on.
Given enough time. That little change to a little thing will move the entire ship in a whole new direction. And
Rusty Keeler: yes,
Claude Stephens: that caught my imagination. So it allows me to think that the, even the smallest things that I’m doing, if done well enough and kind of shared. Have the possibility of major impact that I will never know.
Don’t even need to know, don’t care. But if we’re taking care of the trim tab work, we’re steering the ship in a whole new direction.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it every, every little shift matters.
Claude Stephens: Yes.
Rusty Keeler: That everybody’s doing.
Claude Stephens: Positive and negative. Ah, you know, and so you’re constantly having to make some judgment calls on, did I move the trim tab the right direction or not?
But you don’t have to change the whole system. In fact, if you change systems too dramatically too quickly, the plane can crash, the boat can run around. So it’s, it’s actually that well reasoned small work. That I think has ultimately equal impact to really large gestures and, and, and the work of ego. So the other thing that trim tab work allows you to do.
Is kind of surreptitiously changed the direction of systems. No one’s watching the trim tab work. Everyone’s watching for the big movements. And so within those big movements, well positioned trim tab work can actually have more survivability because it’s under the radar. Yes. And I love working under the radar.
Rusty Keeler: Yes, me too. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like our, our secret plan. Yeah. Uh, to make, to, to make big change. But it’s done, you know, one mud kitchen at a time or one mud pie at a time, or,
Claude Stephens: yeah,
Rusty Keeler: yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so I mean, that can be encouraging for people who might feel alone. What they’re doing or they don’t like the state of affairs or, you know, the way things are or, or like have grief over, you know, kind the changes of childhood and technology and time and all that.
But this is saying that little things that people do can make a difference.
Claude Stephens: Yeah. And it also makes it affordable. So we have a common friend, Kim Taber, who has a new early learning community. That she started here in Louisville and she has zero budget for a playground. Okay. And went over and chatted with her just a week ago, Friday, uh, one week ago.
And you know, we looked at what the kids were already doing and on a fairly flat. Lawn like area, a little bitty hole had developed and water was standing in it and all the kids were playing in that hole. And so we just said, well either add another hole or make that hole bigger. You know, that’s just, you know, an afternoon, some shovel work, bring in a stump, one stump, if that’s all you’ve got, you know, five stumps and arrange them if you can.
You know, there’s so much you can do. With no budget, but a little bit of luck and effort. If you get the stumps in there, then talk to a, an arborist that you might have a relationship with and tell them, Hey, next time you’re cutting down a big oak tree, save a section of the oak tree, which is a branch that then wise out and instead of hauling it off to a dump somewhere, haul it here.
And that’s right. Um, you know, just. Do it. One log, one stump, one hole at a time, and pretty soon you’ve got a pretty cool natural playground. No money.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes we feel like we want, we wanna, hey, big impact and make big change. And as in from the adult eye, it feels like, oh, I’m not really doing that much if I’m just doing little things, but.
To, to the children. Every little thing is big. Every little change is big.
Claude Stephens: Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: And even that idea, you know, we’re, if we’re talking about like societal change and trim tab, tabbing making incremental, you know, small change that. Can ultimately change the whole thing. But that could be for individual people with their at childcare centers that don’t have a natural playground, but they want to, you know, you just start to introduce little things and it starts like a trim tab.
It also applies to everybody’s circumstance. Like you can make your place more natural. One log at a time, one shovel full of dirt at a time, sand a time, um, planting, planting a thing. So I like that too, of like, okay, we can talk about trying to make big societal change. By doing good stuff. But you can also do backyard change or cultural change with the, the play culture of, of a, of a center or a school recess, community center.
By trying things, every individual,
Claude Stephens: it makes this work accessible to anyone.
Rusty Keeler: I mean, ’cause right now how many people have outdoor play spaces? How many childcare centers, how many schools? How many, you know, family backyards or neighborhoods? And you know, lots and lots.
Claude Stephens: Yeah. Now build networks between all of those people so that they’re sharing ideas, sharing resources, encouraging each other, figuring out the workarounds for licensing or insurance or the adult things.
You know, the management, the maintenance. Mm-hmm. Share contact for the arborist that brought you a log with someone else. You know, all that networking stuff builds a bigger movement.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, and I feel like so much with all this and where we’re at or the way people, you know, are kind of feeling with society or, or our country and people in their own camps again, and social media and information and all that, it’s like.
Putting that stuff aside and remembering like, oh, we are all human. We all wanna be happy, we want our children to be happy. And it’s like, how do you move that stuff to the side? And it’s still important, but still move it to the side and concentrate on like the stuff that we really believe in and, and that we can share.
No, no matter what. You know, are you with the blue team? Are you with the red team? But we’re all, we all want our children to be happy and grow healthy and strong and curious and, and so I think these kind of things of like, yeah, connecting the dots and through that you’re building play stuff, but you’re also building your community.
You’re also
Claude Stephens: Yep.
Rusty Keeler: Feeling like, oh look, look, we have more connections and I don’t even know what their political, you know, beliefs are. It doesn’t matter because we share other common themes. And humanity. So what are you, what are your dreams for, you know, maybe we can, before we look at pictures, I’m excited to, you know, just look at a few pictures here as a bonus slideshow.
But what, what are you hopeful about and what are you, what’s your vision for the evolution of play and play work in North America? What you’d like to see happen
Claude Stephens: functionally? One of the things that I would like to see is, um. Rework of the playground safety guidelines that have kind of taken a focus more toward manufactured equipment and reworked them for natural playgrounds.
I would also like. Some kind of helpful research to evolve that helps people understand how safe some of these natural play environments are. Because a couple of the barriers that we run up against when we’re trying to do these is licensing. I think that needs to change.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Claude Stephens: Which can be state by state.
So I think there’s some structural work where people can come together and that’s a great place for. Industry professionals, you know, playground, manufacturing industry, and kind of the nature playground thinkers to kind of come together and think about things. And then I think one of the other things that would be helpful is.
For there to be a rethink of how all of this work is connected to the universities that have early learning departments. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity for some of those departments to kind of think about this evolving play landscape. Differently than they have in the past. Um, I think there’s some storytelling work that can be exciting to, you know, it’s already happening, but to get more people understanding the value of play and that it’s the work of childhood and not.
Kind of frivolous work that this is where child development take healthy child development takes place. So I think there’s still a lot of really cool work to do and fun work and trim tab work, but also kind of big gesture work. Um, and I think getting more and more people kind of interested in this as a way to think about their adult life.
I never thought about this. I was an ecologist. It wasn’t until. A 17-year-old who’s just over there working in her room, came along and I started thinking about, okay, what is my role as an adult in a young person’s life? So I think it’s. I think there’s a lot of exciting work ahead. And then for me personally, I’m on a trajectory toward retirement from Bernheim.
I’m 11 months away from that. Oh
Rusty Keeler: my
Claude Stephens: goodness. But I wanna kinda stay connected in this world of play. I don’t know exactly how or how people might want me, but.
Rusty Keeler: We want you, we want you,
Claude Stephens: um, want me and pay me. Um, that’s
Rusty Keeler: right.
Claude Stephens: But I think that, you know, that’s a fun thing to have time on my hand to explore this in a d Wow.
Rusty Keeler: That’s
Claude Stephens: right.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you’ve, you’ve done. Trim tab plus. You know, I, I, I feel like the, the rudder, you know, the work that you’ve been doing for so long and then all the people that you’ve touched, not only regionally, but you know, all of us, you know, nationally and internationally. Like, I feel like we’re in your wake and that we’re working, we’re working together, and yeah, it feel, no, it’s always hopeful to see your vision.
And hear your vision and feel it and feel like, oh yeah, wait, no, there is, there is something under the radar, under the headlines that is happening, but it, it takes, it takes all of us, you know, continuing and, and not getting discouraged or, you know, yeah. To, to feel hopeful, to feel like every little thing works.
Claude Stephens: Yeah. This work is good. Antidote work. You know,
Rusty Keeler: antidote to, yeah. Yeah. It’s like, what’s the opposite of doom, doom scrolling? It’s like what’s, yeah,
Claude Stephens: yeah,
Rusty Keeler: yeah. Joyful or
Claude Stephens: screens or,
Rusty Keeler: yeah. Yeah. It’s somebody I was just hearing somebody about, like talking about humans is like, now we’re these creatures that just star at our hands all day.
So you go outside, no matter where. Look, people are staring at their hands, staring at their hands and you know, we wanna help people stare at the world or the sky or the sand or the puddle or the, and not stare or, you know, breathe in and be human, homo. Ludo Houdin and, and the playful, the playful part that we are, that is there, that even, even if technology is like, you know, engulfing and there is that pole and that draw and there’s this momentum beneath that.
We are right. We evolved in nature around nature. Like before our thumbs were scrolling, we were grabbing branches and we were digging and fishing and, you know, all that stuff. And so it’s in there and it, it feels like just all of us just. Like, how can we feed that? How can we, you know, it’s almost like remembering, it’s almost like, you know, and it, and it’s every generation too, like is being born, born, next generation.
Born, born, but there is still right the, the thread of play in our DNA in our, in our genetic makeup to do that. And yeah,
Claude Stephens: one of my heroes, he’s crazy as a loon and I love him, is Jim McCulloch, who, uh mm-hmm. He’s out there with the kids in the woods doing that work. So. I’d love to be it. An 8-year-old under his
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Claude Stephens: Guidance out in the woods and where he is. Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Adventure walking. Great. Well, Claude, there’s, there’s a million, billion things to keep talking about, but why don’t we close this down. Alright. And thank you for, you know, giving us a little window to your world. And we will have like, in show notes, bernheim links to Bernheim and so people can see what you’re up to and everything.
And follow along. And
Claude Stephens: then, well, when somebody watches this, if you wanna come and visit Bernheim, please do and let us know. We’ll, we’ll play with you.
Rusty Keeler: Yay. That’s great. Alright, thanks Claude.
Claude Stephens: Thank you.
Rusty Keeler: Alright. Thanks for listening. Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at Play Nature podcast@gmail.com. You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide, fun stuff in there.
And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures. And when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is dream big, start small and never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
