Today, young people spend practically every waking minute - except for the time at school - using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic devices. In his book Last Child in the Woods author Richard Louv talks of the lack of connection between children and nature. To him, children suffer from "nature-deficit disorder": they have diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. One generation from now, most people in Western countries will have spent more time in the virtual world than in nature. Today's children and young people lack possibilities and seem less able to learn about the earth first-hand through their own actions in it. Educators seem badly in need of innovative ways to awaken and nourish the sensibility of children to the natural world.

In the 1990s, a group of art teachers in Finland, aware of the ecological crisis, began to investigate whether art can play a role in the search for new ways to broaden the practice of environmental education, not only for children but for adults as well. According to Meri-Helga Mantere, who first coined the term "arts-based environmental education" in 1992, it is an approach that "supports fresh perception, the nearby, personal enjoyment and pleasure (and sometimes agony, as well) of perceiving the world from the heart." It aims, she says, at "an openness to sensitivity, new and personal ways to articulate and share one's environmental experiences, which might be beautiful but also disgusting, peaceful but also threatening."

What begins to happen when we seek to connect to the natural world primarily through art, rather than pre-established scientific knowledge? Art can contribute in unique ways to the sharpening and deepening of our perception and make us receptive to the mystery of the world around us. Artistic process allows us to approach the world around us indirectly. We invite the unforeseen, we leave habitual ways aside and grope our way forward. Artistic activities thus provide an opportunity to access more fully the sensory, perceptual, emotional, symbolic and creative dimensions of human consciousness. In the context of education about nature, art can thereby provide opportunities that conventional approaches lack.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the American naturalist Henry David Thoreau wrote that if one wants to understand something really, one should try to approach it as if it was entirely new. "It is only when we forget all our learning, that we begin to know.... If you would make acquaintance with the ferns, you must forget your botany. You must get rid of what is commonly called knowledge of them.... You must be aware that no thing is what you have taken it to be." It is exactly here that arts-based environmental education can make a great contribution: facilitating the "beginning to know" in exciting new ways, that stem from the experience of the participating children or adults themselves.