Nicola Chester

How to turn your kids into nature-lovers and save our planet

- Lynn Hatzius

I've spent more than two decades trying to make sure my children were 'into nature', writing about it along the way and learning from them and the wild world.

Now they are 22, 20 and 16, my work both is and isn't done. But I can be sure that nature is home to them. In their different ways, it is an important part of their world and their health: a touchstone of reassurance.

In many ways, this comes from a place of access and love, passed down to me and on to them, but it's also an awareness of the loss and precarity of nature that both I, and now they, have inherited too. Not for them the relative abundance of my youth - the clouds of butterflies and moths, large flocks of birds, 'proper winters' and an audible overwhelm of birdsong in spring.

But for them, the inspiration to play, explore and seek out nature, as I and my mum had done.