Transcription of Nik Charov and Dr. David Johnson for the show Outdoor Education #141
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show #141, “Outdoor Education,” airing for the first time on Sunday May 25, 2014. It’s spring and the perfect time to get back out into the Maine outdoors. There are numerous benefits to being outside: emotional, physical, social, and spiritual. Today we discuss these benefits and the work being done by two special Maine places with Nik Charov and Dr. David Johnson of Wells Reserve at Laudholm, and Eric Topper of Maine Audubon. Join our conversation and be inspired. Thank you for joining us.
I’ve always been a huge proponent of getting kids outdoors and also getting adults outdoors. Today I have with me two people who feel this is equally important. We have Nik Charov who is the president of Wells Reserve at Laudholm and has worked in science education and environmental preservation for nearly a decade. He’s no stranger to Maine and has spent more than 30 summers exploring the tide pools, pines, and breakwaters on Peaks Island. He lives with his wife and two sons in South Portland. Nice to have you with us.
aNik: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: We also have Dr. David Johnson who is a local orthopedic surgeon and Laudholm Trust board member. He’s a former Outward Bound instructor and teacher of environmental science. David lives with his wife and four children in Kennebunkport. Good to have you in today.
David: Thank you, Lisa.
Lisa: We’re all individuals who love to be outside and Wells Reserve at Laudholm is a perfect place for that. For people who are listening, tell us a little bit more about the Wells Reserve at Laudholm.
David: The Wells Reserve, for short, is a nature center, an outdoor recreation site, a coastal science research facility, and a National Historic Register place. I think of it as a metaphor, really. It’s an estuarine research reserve. That means that it encompasses the place where three rivers actually come into the sea, into the gulf of Maine. These estuaries are fresh water rivers coming down to the salt water sea and so they mix. This dynamic place on the coast where certainly the tides going not all day, but the waters are mixing, is home to migrating birds, to rare plants, to some very rare and unique individuals as well, some of our scientists who work there and our researchers.
It’s all there to preserve and save this place but also use it as a platform to teach people about coastal science, about climate change, and about history as well. It’s an old 18th century farm that’s been restored and that’s our headquarters at the Laudholm Farm campus. I think with this salt and fresh, this past and present, with art and science all mixing together – it’s like yin yang. It gives us the opportunity to talk about so many things and teach people so much. Plus, there are seven miles of trails, a beautiful pristine beach, and forests, fields, all kinds of places to walk and recreate.
Lisa: Nik, you’ve spent some time not in Maine doing some very interesting urban activities, in fact having to do with the New York Restoration Project. You were greening up the city before you came to Maine.
Nik: I worked for Bette Midler for almost 5 years. New York Restoration Project is her non-profit. Bette grew up in Hawaii. She wants everywhere to look like Hawaii, but as a singer, actress, entertainer, she’s spent most of her life in Los Angeles and New York – two places that aren’t really renowned for their nature. She’s a passionate, committed, committable – sometimes – woman. She wants everywhere to be as green as the plants here in the studio, even eventually Hawaii.
We were building gardens, we were planting trees, we launched a compaign called Million Trees NYC which was an effort begun under the Bloomberg administration to plant a million trees across all five burroughs, so this is not just Manhattan, but is really just fitting in greenery wherever we could. When I left back in 2012 and moved up here to Maine, we were just past the 600,000 mark and I think they’re now getting close to finishing it as well. I’ve been doing this, I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been out there preaching it and also getting my hands dirty and putting in trees and gardens for a while.
Lisa: Dr. Johnson, you’re a fellowship-trained orthopedic sub-specialist. You’ve completed a fellowship in shoulder and upper extremity surgery in San Francisco and you do a lot of work with sports medicine. Why is the green outdoors and getting people into the green outdoors so important to you?
David: I think it began a long time before I became an orthopedic surgeon, so out of college I went and was a teacher for environmental science and I worked for NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School, and I worked for actually New York City Outward Bound, which is … I didn’t know this but similar to what Nik did. We took inner city youth and took them on Outward Bound experiences to expose them to the outdoors.
Getting people outdoors, educating about the outdoors, was important to me long before I became an orthopedic surgeon, and now that I’m an orthopedic surgeon taking care of athletes, I see the benefits of activity, exercise, and the vigor it brings people, the psychological wellbeing, and it’s all even better enhanced when it’s in a great environment.
Lisa: You are an avid skier and a kayaker. Have you been able to find the time to do these activities while you’re also raising your four children and being a team doctor for Kennebunk and Biddeford and having a medical practice?
David: Yeah, I think that’s one of the appeals that Maine has had for us. We came here about six years ago and we were frustrated that I couldn’t find those things for myself or for my family readily where we were living in sort of a suburban environment. One of the great things about Kennebunkport where we live is we’re a half a mile from the ocean. For instance, my son and I will go out and go sunset surfing and watch the stars come up. It’s been amazing to me the neat effect living in that town has for us been then also those miniature experiences like that where he literally has a star that he’ll watch come up on the horizon and he calls it his own star. I just think that you can’t do that very many places.
Lisa: Nik, you originally have your undergraduate degree from Stanford, so you’ve been across the country. In fact, both of you have New York ties, you have San Francisco ties, and both of you chose to come back to Maine. What is so special about this state?
Nik: I loved California but for the same reasons I love Maine. There was the variety that was built on the natural world, the experiences of ocean, mountain, forest, and field. I’d always come to Maine as a kid and spent time on Peaks, Island. My grandparents had a cabin up there from the late 60s onward. I didn’t know you could actually work up here and spend time all four seasons. After our second winter here I’m now beginning to wonder about that second part.
I’m overwhelmed constantly and especially with having kids and hearing Dave talk about taking his sons surfing – that’s why. I was working in Manhattan everyday. I was taking the subway in seeing a few hundred thousand people going through Penn Station everyday and that’s more people than I’ll see in my entire life up here in Maine for the rest of my days. I was tired of the impinging concrete all the time, the attention that’s just getting drawn by neon and horns and filth blowing down those canyons in the city.
Up here it’s just the exact opposite. This is where I want my kids to be, where my wife and I to be, and my grandparents are also up in Topsham as well – they retired up there. This is where the family has gravitated and where we’re going to stay just because it’s got everything we want and I couldn’t ask for a better place to live and I’m evangelizing it to all my friends.
David: I couldn’t agree more. I think I started to tell you we moved up here looking for a better lifestyle and I think we were overly pleasantly surprised. I trained up here at Maine Med for about three or four months when I was in medical school so I had some exposure to Portland. A job opportunity came up in the greater Kennebunk area and we came up here hoping that we would find something that fit our lifestyles well, and it’s been magnificent. My family’s blossomed. I think a lot of it is just the integration of how much people live here with the outdoors and integrate it into their life. It’s an important part of what they do for work, and play, and function. That’s just a great integration that should be part of life.
Lisa: What did each of your families do to encourage you to work with the outdoors when you were growing up. That seems like an important influence is what our parents do with us when we’re younger. Each of you had your experience in environmental education so there must have been something within your families that was a priority.
David: I think with my parents … I was raised in New York City ironically but neither of my parents came from New York City and for them you could always see their real personalities come out when we left New York – a country home in Cape Cod. Whenever we were there you could see them transform into the people they wanted to be and therefore the people I wanted to be with. Whenever they talked about what was fun to do in their free time it was always fishing and hiking, walking the beach, and sailing and things like that. It was never the vibrant culture of New York City. Even though they sort of enjoyed that, that wasn’t what lit them up.
Lisa: How about you Nik?
Nik: My whole family’s from New York. First generation Russians, my grandparents all came over in the 50s. Especially those grandparents that bought the place on Peaks Island, they first moved out of New York City to the Berkshires and it was really my grandmother who was a gardener, a composter. They were living on 11 acres up in the Berkshires and really homesteading it. It was going up there as a kid on the weekends. We lived in a rural town, my parents and I, in Connecticut, in Eastern Connecticut. We backed up onto a lot of state preserves so I was out in the woods a lot but not nearly as much as when I was out with my grandmother in her garden. Now that I’ve got a garden of my own I’m really getting excited about taking that down through the generations and getting my kids hands into the ground as well.
It was funny, I got up here … Actually I think when I was in New York I read Helen and Scott Nearing’s book and I got so excited about the possibility of having my own … living off the land, building stone walls, composting, all this stuff. I went and showed my grandparents; I was like “This sounds exactly like what you guys did,” both in the Berkshires and then in Maine. They pulled out this tattered copy – it was from the late 50s – that they had been reading in their similar position in their late 30s in the city. That’s what they wanted to do, too.
I feel it’s just being outside and getting outside is just a continuation of what I think all of us want to do. It’s funny that there’s been this movement to urbanization, especially during the Industrial Revolution. We’ve all collected in these cities and farms have emptied out. Now the pendulum’s swinging back, at least for some of us, but I think more and more of us. Maybe it’s this drive, the biophilia drive to get back into nature. Cities can’t offer us everything we want, although the Chinese food is definitely something I miss.
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Wells Reserve is one of the ways that you get people interested. I grew up in Maine, I grew up in Yarmouth, and I did a lot of outdoor activities when I was growing up but I think I almost … I don’t think I recognized what we had here. It was only when I went to organizations that were doing island education or were specifically focused on doing education about the outdoors that I really started to comprehend where I lived and what was going on. What are some of the activities that the Wells Reserve is doing for people like me who are growing up in Maine and really want a little bit more insight?
Nik: I have to say I think we’re still a relatively unknown jewel down there in Wells on the Kennebunk border. Just this summer alone there’s the big Tour de Cure bike ride that’s based there coming up in June. We’ve got weekly walks, guided and self-guided tours throughout the 2,200 acres. There are wellness walks that combine both walking and coming back and doing some fresh air painting. Continuous lectures both inside and outside. We’ve got a garden space that we’re working with the York County Cooperative Extension on and the master gardeners to do garden education.
David: There’s estuary tours there which I think is fascinating. I’m a new board member and it’s something I’m chomping at the bit to do because it’s one of the natural focuses of that place. They have a rack of kayaks and you can get a guide that will take you through the estuary and point out all of what it does – or you can do it yourself. Just one thing I’m eager to do.
Nik: Yeah, they’re booking those kayak trips up online at wellsreserve.org every week now. We’ve also got summer camps with the kids and getting them out there. We have large festivals. Usually at the end of September is our largest festival, the Pumpkin Fiddle Festival the last weekend, the last Saturday of September. There’s a big crafts festival that gets a lot of people to the Maine campus.
David: Periodic talks, so there’s been a couple really neat talks on climate change. In the next couple days I’m giving a talk on the effect of being outdoors and exercise on wellness in the human body. Those things continue throughout the year.
Nik: Lastly I think this summer we’re expanding our concert series. I’m a big proponent of the arts, especially arts with the purpose of educating and connecting people with nature. Our concert series and our historic barn seats only about a hundred people – all wood, very dark and kind of cozy place. We’ll have the DaPonte String Quartet, a couple pianists, a blues band Thursdays in July. Masanobu Ikemaya is coming down from Bar Harbor; he’s a pianist who also is a permaculture enthusiast so he does a slideshow and a piano performance. Even during leaf peeping season we’re doing a kind of autumnal concert as well on Columbus Day weekend.
It’s just any way we can get people there, connect them with the place and its past and its current activities, the research and the science, the education, the climate change communication. Any way we can get people connected to that is what we’re trying to do there. I’ve only been there less than two years so right now I’m just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks and bringing on enthusiastic, excited, and really expert people like Dave here.
Lisa: Speaking of being an expert, Dr. Johnson, you mentioned that you’re giving a talk on the impact of being outdoors on human beings. What is some of the research behind that?
David: I’m sure you’re familiar with a lot of that and I think part of it is really nicely encapsulated in Richard Love’s book which is Last Child in the Woods. He talks about this unfortunate observation over the last several decades where Americans, and particularly our kids, are spending less and less time outdoors. He coins this term called nature deficit disorder. That’s looking at the negative aspect of how America’s drifted away from the outdoors.
Then you flip the coin and you say what’s the positive benefit? I think there’s been lots and lots of studies showing objective effects on psychological wellbeing, concentration, happiness, reflected in part by kids’ test scores. If you look at kids who are not exposed to the outdoors and compare them to like-minded groups who are, you can really directly measure how much better people do in terms of their academic success, their perception of their wellbeing, their happiness.
That seems to translate into very direct physiological effects like lower blood pressure, lower heart rate, decreased dependence on medication for kids who are on medications already. There’s a whole host of, first of all, psychological and then physical things that interplay from even very limited exposures to the outdoors that happens on any kind of consistent basis.
Lisa: What do you notice about each of your sets of children. You have four children and you have two children, so when you bring them outside – you you mentioned you go out with your son sometimes kayaking.
David: Surfing actually but yeah.
Lisa: Surfing, okay. What do you notice when you come back from these outdoor adventures?
David: I think it’s one of the best, most intense bonds that we share as a parent and a child because we both are focusing on the same thing. We’re not distracted by all the things that can bombard us. We’re both getting this peacefulness at the same time that we’re sharing. When we step away from that I always feel like it brings out the best in both of us. We’re interacting in the most positive way. There’s no harping on him for what I want him to be as a kid. There’s no arguing back to me about what I’m telling him dad. It’s all about talking about the star that rose over the waterline, or did you see me catch that wave, or geez, I really wiped out. It’s all the way that we interact with nature. It’s this really common, fun, beautiful bond.
Lisa: What do you notice with your children, Nik?
Nik: Even in New York, if we weren’t leaving the city every weekend for the last couple years that we were there to go to my mother’s house up in the country, we were meeting up with a group of friends and walking through some of the wilder parks in the five boroughs and just letting the kids go out in front of us. Keep them maybe in eyesight but even sometimes not and just to have that freedom for them, that opportunity for them to go and explore and climb, falling down trees and crawl under things and get really dirty. Just get them out there.
I’m dreading the programmed years. We already go to swim lessons on the Saturday morning and I hate going inside on a Saturday morning, but learning to swim is pretty important if we want to go surfing eventually. Just looking at my future and seeing how can I avoid some of the sitting on the bleachers every morning and afternoon and every weekend. How can I continue to instill and inculcate in my boys just the fact that they can get outside, get energetic, get moving, and that I can do it with them. As Dave was saying, to just be out there spending time together in the non-judgmental, the non-cheering. Just being out there I think is the real opportunity it gives us.
When they get back from these places, from a day at the beach, from a day at the Wells Reserve, the boys will come down and they’re starting to learn their way around the place and I just let them out the door and say “See you in an hour.” They come back and they’re tired first of all, which when you’ve got a 3 year old, anything that really wipes them out is a godsend. Also, their skin is glowing, they found some bugs that they’ve brought back. They’re out there, they’re curious, they’re attentive. To me that’s what wellness looks like in a little package is these little things running back and just saying “Look! There’s a birds nest that we tipped over and knocked all the eggs out of.” We’ll talk about that later but … That they’re out there.
David: If I think back about what my kids remember and what they bring up in excited conversation, there’s a very common theme that they’re outdoor experiences. It was a great moment skiing or it was a moment when they caught the best fish of their life, or it was something that intrigued them. That’s a repeated theme that you see that that’s really what sticks in their head.
Nik: In Maine we don’t this epidemic … I hope not anyway. I ask you doctors whether we do, but certainly in New York City, just coming up against kids all the time who are latchkey kids or glued to their screens or their bags of Fritos. It’s like listen, even in New York City there are places that you can find and do this, and the effects were obvious.
Lisa: Nik, where can people find out more about the Wells Reserve at Laudholm?
Nik: We’re on Facebook, we’re on the web. Facebook it’s Wells Reserve and our URL is wellsreserve.org. A lot of stuff coming up this summer, a lot of programs, lot of outdoor activities, a lot of what we do there everyday, which is trying to give more and more to the public.
Lisa: I appreciate the work that you’re doing. We interview a lot of guests and we don’t always see the passion that the two of you have shown for the impact of the outdoors upon the self and the being. I suspect that people who are listening will want to spend some time at the Wells Reserve learning more about what you do or maybe going surfing and looking for the star on the horizon. I encourage people to look into the Wells Reserve and to being outdoors in any way as we begin this summer here in Maine. We’ve been speaking with Nik Charov, the president of Wells Reserve at Laudholm, and Dr. David Johnson, a local orthopedic surgeon and Laudholm Trust board member. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day and being with us today.
Nik: Thanks so much. See you out there.
David: Thank you, Lisa.