By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator.

Scientists are discovering that spending time in forests may help prevent disease before treatment is ever needed…

Nature is powerful medicine. Multiple studies over the years have found that people in hospitals with windows overlooking nature recover and heal faster than those without. And I remember the years when Louise and I ran a community for abused kids that was out in the woods of rural New England, it always seemed that taking them on nature walks calmed them down more than anything else, including most of the meds.

Last month, a team of researchers from six countries published an argument in Communications Health that nature should be thought of as a therapeutic tool in and of itself, and should be available to everybody. They point out that worldwide anxiety is up 63 percent and depression up 26 percent just over the past 15 years, and argue that much of this is the result of what they call “nature deprivation.”

The solution, they recommend is something called “nature-based mental healthcare” or NBMHC, citing multiple studies showing the power of regular immersion in nature as a psychological tool every bit as important and effective (and sometimes more so) as pharmaceuticals.

Ralf Buckley, the lead author, points out that more than half of all doctor visits these days are now about some aspect of mental rather than physical health, but mental health gets roughly half of one percent of public health funding.

— A 2007 study found that “forest bathing”—a Japanese concept that’s taken hold around the world, basically standing in the forest and pausing to take it all in—measurably reduces levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone.”

— A 2010 study discovered that the anti-cancer immune system “killer cells” (NK cells) in our bloodstream jacked up by exposure to nature:

“…2-night/3-day trips to forest parks enhanced human NK activity, the number of NK cells, and intracellular anti-cancer proteins in lymphocytes, and that this increased NK activity lasted for more than 7 days after the trip in both male and female subjects.”

Follow-up research found that even a one-day trip to the forest similarly increased killer cell activity, helping prevent cancer in people for at least a week thereafter.

I’ve been drawn to nature my entire life, from exploring forests and a nearby stream as a kid to Louise and my weekend trips to Portland’s Forest Park to climb the foothills of the Tualatin mountains.

And it’s not just the physical activity; when “forest bathing” is compared to working out in a gym both produce physical improvements, but the psychologically positive effects of forest bathing far outstrip those of simple exercise.

Louise and I, however, live in a city with the largest urban park in the world with over 80 miles of trails in it. And we have a good enough income to afford a car to drive to it, something many people simply can’t do.

Pointing specifically to this imbalance in access to nature caused by financial status, the authors of that first study I mentioned argue that nations should start thinking of natural spaces as part of the panoply of psychotherapeutic tools available to society, rather than decorations or recreational opportunities for people who can afford to get to them (or pay for a park pass, like in many parts of America; here in Portland, Forest Park is free).

I wrote a while back about awe being the cheapest medicine we’ve got, but cheap isn’t the same thing as accessible. In the medical context, we spend a fortune on both physical and psychological tools to repair people, but nature is almost never (other than the hospital windows studies and changes in new hospital construction) considered as a therapy.

Buckley’s team calculated back in 2019 that national parks contribute upwards of five trillion dollars a year to the global economy through the mental health benefits to visitors alone; that’s roughly five hundred times what the world spends maintaining protected areas that, it turns out, can be so critical to improving mental health (with considerable side-benefits for physical health).

Nature, it turns out, is the cheapest, safest, best-tolerated intervention in the entire mental health toolkit, but has been quietly reclassified as, essentially, a consumer good, now only available to people who have a car, a weekend, and enough disposable income.

Teddy Roosevelt understood the importance of wilderness areas instinctively and intuitively, having used nature for years to treat his own asthma and “weak constitution.” It’s why he set aside over 230 million acres of wilderness as national parks, land that sadly today’s administration is trying to sell off to donor drilling and mining operations as fast as it can.

China, on the other hand, having examined this type of research and drawing on centuries of folk medicine pointing in the same direction, has, according to researchers, a “national health strategy includes nature-therapy infrastructure in 1200 forest reserves, to provide a billion person-hours per year.”

Nature should be available to everybody, and our urban planning and policies should make sure that we have wild spaces and public transportation cheap enough to get pretty much everybody to the wild spaces.

Let your state legislators and city council know, and put together a plan to get yourself into nature at least once a week!

Copyrighted by Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator. Thom has written many respected books. Reprinted with permission from The Wisdom School of August 5th, 2026 by Thom Hartmann. All articles are free and available to everyone in The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human. Wisdom School is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Thom’s work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Wisdom School.

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No country should have to accept a food supply that makes its people sick and sad because that’s what’s most profitable, and the science is now on our side when we say so out loud.

Back in the late 1970s, when Louise and I were running a residential treatment program and school for abused and emotionally disturbed kids, we took the children off the standard institutional diet. Out went the dyes, the artificial flavors, the sugary cereals and the boxed dinners, and in came real (vegetarian) food cooked fresh every day from scratch.

While it’s impossible to know how big a factor that was (we were also on a remote forest-covered lake and had some great therapists), kids who were given up on as being incorrigible or uneducatable were soon ready for reintegration into the normal school system and a foster home.

While Ben Feingold told me diet was a huge factor in kids’ behavior, and we did a small study on salicylates in their diet that I published in 1980 in the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, I was always skeptical. Until now.

Last week, researchers at UC San Francisco published a small trial in JAMA Psychiatry that looked at what happened to people clinically diagnosed with depression stopped eating ultra-processed food (UPF). For four weeks they ate a diet that cut their UPF consumption by more than 85 percent.

And, sure enough, their depression eased with their depression eased, with moderate to large improvements showing up on three separate measures. Their anxiety scores got a little better, as well.

Similarly, in 2017 an Australian team led by Felice Jacka ran the SMILES trial, taking 67 people with moderate to severe depression and giving half of them coaching toward a Mediterranean-style diet (fresh foods, mostly vegetarian/pescatarian) while the other half got supportive counseling from trained professionals. After twelve weeks, 32 percent of the food group were in full remission from their depression, compared with of the the people who just got counseling.

Two years later, researchers at Macquarie University tried a three-week version of the same study with depressed university students. The students who cut back on processed food and ate more vegetables, fish and olive oil reported significantly less depression, and the improvement was still clinically evident a full three months later.

Then came the really big large-population studies, a gold standard in health science.

Harvard researchers followed almost 32,000 nurses for decades and found that the women eating the most ultra-processed foods had about a 50 percent higher risk of developing depression than those eating the least. (Of particular interest: artificial sweeteners stood out as the worst offenders.)

A massive review in The BMJ pulled together 45 separate analyses and tied these UPF foods to 32 different kinds of harm, with anxiety and other common mental disorders at the top of the list.

And just this week another British study looked at more than 46,000 people born around the end of postwar sugar rationing. Those who spent their first thousand days of life—from the womb to their second birthday—under sugar and meat rationing were less likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety as adults.

Why would a bag of potato chips or too many sodas slam into your mood with such impact? The UCSF team suspects the gut-brain connection.

Their idea is that the emulsifiers, preservatives and other industrial additives in these products wear down the gut’s protective lining, which sets off low-grade inflammation that travels through the whole body and triggers a freak-out (my term, not theirs) in the brain. Dr. Nyasha Chagwedera, who led the study, put it this way:

“Junky processing may harm your gut in ways that ripple up to your brain.”

Older cultures wouldn’t find any of this surprising. They were not just careful about what they ate, but had a story about every edible plant or animal in their world; it’s how both cultural and “safe-to-eat” information was transmitted from generation to generation. And it worked until we turned our food system over to the giant corporations and their “food scientists” to figure out how to make things more profitably.

As a result, today the CDC says fully 55 percent of the calories Americans eat now come from ultra-processed products, and for our kids it’s closer to a shocking 62 percent. We—and our kids—are up against some of the most well-paid scientists and greedy capitalists on the planet.

So try this: give yourself four weeks, the same stretch the UCSF volunteers got. Read the ingredient list on everything you buy, and if it’s got anything on the list that you wouldn’t find in your own kitchen, put it back. Cook simply, and notice how you feel in week one and again in week four. And if someone you love is struggling with depression or anxiety, pass this along and offer to do it with them.

No country should have to accept a food supply that makes its people sick and sad because that’s what’s most profitable, and the science is now on our side when we say so out loud.

By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator. Thom has written many respected books. Reprinted with permission from The Wisdom School of October 7th, 2026 by Thom Hartmann. All articles are free and available to everyone in The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human. Wisdom School is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Thom’s work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Wisdom School.

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By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator

Walk into a piece of old growth Pacific Northwest forest, and something happens to you. The light goes liquid. The air thickens. The moss is six inches deep on every horizontal surface. The Doug firs go up two hundred feet without a branch and disappear into a canopy you can’t quite see. The fallen trees, what loggers used to call nurse logs, are slowly becoming the next forest, with seedlings already rooted in their soft, decaying bodies. And the silence isn’t really silence. It’s a different quality of attention than you can find anywhere else.

I’ve spent a lot of hours in those forests over the years. What strikes me, every time, is that the forest doesn’t feel like a place. It feels like someone. Or, more accurately, like many. A standing community of beings that knows you’re there before you know how you feel about being there.

For most of my life, science was telling me I was wrong about that. The official story, survival of the fittest, was that a forest is a kind of slow-motion gladiator pit, every tree fighting every other tree for sunlight and water and nutrients, and that the canopy I was walking under was the result of a few million years of relentless mutual exploitation. Whatever I was feeling under those firs was a poetic projection, not a fact about the forest.

In April, scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Forest GEO global research network published a paper in Nature that’s quietly demolishing that story.

The team examined nearly three million individual trees, across more than five thousand species, in seventeen forests spanning Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and they found that positive, supportive interactions between neighboring trees are at least as common as the competitive ones we were taught about in school, and that the closer a forest is to the equator, the more cooperative its tree-to-tree relationships tend to be.

“Most research has focused on competition and other negative interactions among trees,” the study’s co-author Matteo Detto said, “but trees can also help their neighbors in many ways. We find that these positive interactions are more common in tropical forests, adding another piece to the puzzle of understanding their remarkable diversity.”

This is on top of decades of research, by Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia and by many others, on the underground mycorrhizal networks (the so-called wood wide web) that connect tree roots through filaments of fungus, allowing them to swap carbon, water, nitrogen, and chemical defense signals across species lines.

Simard’s framework, including her concept of mother trees (older, larger trees that appear to act as hubs in the underground network), has been beautifully popularized in books like her own Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and has also, in fairness, been challenged by other ecologists who argue that some of the popular claims have run ahead of the data.

The careful version of the science, today, is this: forests are unmistakably interconnected through fungi and roots, carbon and signals do move among trees through those networks, big old trees do appear to play structural roles in the system, and the precise mechanisms of how, and how much, are still being worked out. What’s not in question, after the new Nature paper, is the larger frame. Forests are cooperative systems at least as much as they are competitive ones. They’re not gladiator pits. They’re communities.

This matters far beyond ecology, because for the last hundred and fifty years our entire economic worldview has been built on a stolen metaphor from biology. We took Darwin’s struggle for existence, ripped it out of its context, ignored the fact that he wrote at least as much about cooperation and mutualism as he did about competition, and built capitalism, libertarianism, and most of our public-policy frameworks on the assumption that competition is the law of nature.

We lectured each other about it for generations. We told the kids in our schools that the forest was red in tooth and claw. We told them the market was just an extension of the forest. We told them anyone who didn’t make it deserved their fate, because that was just how nature worked.

But nature doesn’t work that way. The Russian biologist Pyotr Kropotkin, observing wolves and birds and human peasant villages across Siberia in the 1880s, noticed this immediately and wrote his classic Mutual Aid to push back on the social-Darwinist misreading of his contemporary, Thomas Huxley.

Lynn Margulis, a century later, blew the whole story open with her work on endosymbiosis, demonstrating that the eukaryotic cell, the basic unit of every plant and animal on Earth, came into existence through cooperation between two ancient bacteria, not through competition.

And forest ecology is now arriving at the same place. The trees, it turns out, are not in business school. They’re in a long, patient, multi-species relationship with their neighbors, their fungi, their soil, their rain, their light, and the dead bodies of every tree that ever lived and fell among them.

I made a related argument decades ago in Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. The whole basis of life on Earth is a single, vast, hundreds-of-millions-of-years-long cooperative project.

Photons from the sun cooperate with chlorophyll. Chlorophyll cooperates with carbon dioxide and water. The resulting sugars cooperate with mitochondria. Plants cooperate with fungi. Fungi cooperate with soil. Soil cooperates with microbes. Trees cooperate with other trees.

And for almost all of human history, every culture except the most recent one understood this implicitly. The forest was a relative. The river was a relative. We were not above the system. We were part of it, and our job was to maintain the relationships that kept it alive.

What does this mean for the rest of us in 2026, with a planet on fire and a civilization built on the wrong story? Three things, I think.

First, defend the old growth forests we have left. They aren’t interchangeable with tree plantations. A two-hundred-year-old Doug fir, with its underground mycorrhizal partners and the centuries of local relationships it has built, can’t be replaced by twenty saplings on a clearcut. Once those connections are severed, it can take centuries for the network to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all. There’s a reason indigenous land sovereignty consistently produces healthier forests than corporate or state management does. Indigenous knowledge has known this in its bones for thousands of years.

Second, change the story you tell yourself about how the world works. Adam Smith was wrong about the invisible hand being our deepest nature. The forest is the deeper truth. Cooperation, mutualism, kinship, and care are the substrate. Competition is real, but it sits inside the larger frame of cooperation, the way a jazz solo sits inside the band.

If you build a society on the metaphor of the forest instead of the metaphor of the market, you get a different country, with different schools, different hospitals, different elder care, different economics, and very different relationships between neighbors.

Third, find a real forest, an old one if you can, and sit in it for an hour with your phone face-down. Not to perform contemplation. Just to listen. The forest will teach you what cooperation actually feels like, in your body, with no theory required. You’ll feel small in the right way, and held in the right way, and you’ll come out of it remembering something the dominant culture spent a century trying to make you forget.

The new Nature paper is just the latest piece of the science finally catching up. The forest was never a battlefield. It’s a community we forgot we belonged to. And the very good news is that the community is still here, still patient, still willing to teach us, in the language of light and root and fungus, who we actually are.

If there’s an old growth forest within driving distance of you, go this month. If there’s a campaign to protect it, donate or volunteer. If your local government is making decisions about a nearby greenbelt or watershed or working forest, show up at the meeting and speak. And tell me in the comments where your forest is, and what it’s teaching you. We’re a wisdom school here, which means our forests, like our wisdom, belong to all of us.

The Climate Collapse Presidency

“Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter future for all.” 

  —Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General, Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024

The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.

Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement.¹ Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.²

When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”³ Tell that to thirteen-year-old Wyatt Tofte, who died in Oregon’s inferno embracing his dog as he tried desperately to save his grandmother.⁴ As our Western skies turned blood-orange, Louise and I choked from a summer of wild forest fires, and record hurricanes pummeled our coasts, Trump mocked renewable energy and praised coal.

But his second term has proved apocalyptically worse. By April 2025, Trump had reinstated his “Schedule F” executive order, purging government agencies of climate scientists.⁵ His new EPA administrator—­formerly chief counsel for a coal conglomerate—is suspending methane regulations, gutting emissions standards, and fast-tracking permits for drilling in previously protected Arctic wilderness.⁶ The phrase “climate emergency” is now prohibited in federal communications, while years of expensive-to-compile government climate data are being systematically altered, hidden, or outright deleted.

Climate collapse reveals democracy’s most fundamental challenge: can we save our planet for our children and grandchildren when fossil fuel profits demand Republicans force inaction? The answer is becoming horrifyingly clear as tipping points approach: permafrost is thawing, ice sheets are destabilizing, and ocean currents are weakening.⁷

These aren’t distant threats: they’re happening now, accelerated by policies designed to benefit the donor class while sacrificing everyone else.

This betrayal falls hardest on poor and minority communities. Environmental justice and racial justice are inseparable.⁸ Studies consistently show that communities of color consistently face the highest levels of air pollution, toxic waste, and climate disasters while having the fewest resources to fight back. And to add further injury, Trump and Musk have now gutted FEMA.⁹

As droughts intensify, coastlines disappear, and climate refugees multiply, the social fabric unravels. Democracy requires at least a modicum of stability, but climate chaos breeds authoritarian “solutions.” The Pentagon itself identifies climate change as a “threat multiplier” that endangers national security. Scientists warn we have less than a decade to halve emissions before crossing irreversible tipping points.¹⁰

Our children will judge us not by our tweets or culture wars, but by whether we protected their right to a livable planet. The machinery of climate destruction doesn’t operate in isolation: it’s connected to the plutocracy that captured our courts, the propagandists who poison our media, and the authoritarians who threaten our democratic foundations.

This is the ultimate test of our republic: Can we break the stranglehold of fossil fuel money on our politics? Can we choose a habitable planet over quarterly profits?

Time is running out, and the climate doesn’t negotiate. Physics doesn’t care about political convenience. Either we reclaim our democracy from corporate capture and dark money in politics, or we surrender both a livable planet and our system of government to collapse.

© 2026 Thomas Hartmann, Oregon. Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator, is the author of a highly respected book: The Last American President. And this article makes the Chapter 11 of the book, and it was published in  The Hartmann Report, a reader-supported publication where all weekday articles are free and available to everyone. Reprinted with permission of the author. Opinion expressed is not necessarily that of Skipping Stones, Inc.

 From Finnish forest floors to Michigan creek beds, the science is clear:
real dirt is medicine, memory, and the immune system’s original teacher

By Thom Hartmann, author, speaker, activist, and educator

I grew up on the edge of Lansing, Michigan, with a stream just down the road and woods that felt like a secret frontier. We all did: the neighborhood kids, barefoot in the damp grass after rain, boots mucked up with creek-silt, hands scrubbed raw from climbing fallen logs and digging in the undergrowth. Getting in the dirt was part of childhood. We didn’t ask permission from microbes.

So when I read the recent report in The Guardian about Finnish nursery experiments transforming children’s health by simply letting them play in real soil, sand, leaves and forest-floor, I felt the past crash into the present and I knew again that the story of our species and our health lies in that innocent, messy contact.

In Finland, at a daycare center in Lahti (north of Helsinki), the researchers from the Natural Resources Institute of Finland adopted a radical experiment: rip out the asphalt, dig into the soil, roll out a live carpet of forest-floor moss and blueberry bushes, build compost heaps for children to feed, invite the kids to play, dig, muddle, get their hands in it.

The result, in a two-year study of three- to five-year-olds, was striking: children in the “rewilded” yards had fewer disease-causing skin bacteria (like Streptococcus) and showed stronger immune regulation (increased T-regulatory cells) within weeks. Gut microbiomes were healthier, inflammatory-associated Clostridium levels dropped.

This is the antithesis of today’s “modern” societal perspective on childhood and nature.

On the one hand, we have the modern obsession with pristine, sanitized lives: rubber-surfaced playgrounds, plastic mats, antibacterial everything. On the other, there’s the simple fact that our inner biology, our immune systems, our gut and skin microbiomes, were forged in the wild: the wild of forest floors, streams, soils, plants, bugs.

As I argued in my earlier essay “It’s All One Thing – The Story of the Worms” here in Wisdom School, our estrangement from that substrate is the seed of auto-immune disorders, of chronic inflammation, and a body that’s forgotten it’s actually part of nature.

In Michigan I was lucky: the woods and stream were mine for the exploring. I remember fingers crawling over moist logs, the smell of leaves turning, the damp cold run-off water slipping under my boots. I didn’t know at the time that those experiences were more than play: they were calibration.

They were training my immune system, teaching my skin and gut to know what nature looked like and smelled like and felt like. To know that dirt is not an enemy. And those childhood experiences are probably why I’ve never been troubled by autoimmune disorders or asthma.

So let’s call this what it is: a radical restoration. Not of some exotic wilderness, but of our lost contact with the natural microbial terrains that co-evolved with our species. The Finnish results are more than a Kindergarten trend; they’re a signal of what our children—and we all—are missing.

Here are some of the stakes:

• When kids play in dirt rich with soil microbes, their immune system steps into a healthier balance: fewer disease-causing bacteria on the skin surface, greater regulation of internal immune responses.

• The “outer layer” of biodiversity—soil, plants, forest floor—directly influences the “inner layer” of biodiversity in our bodies, our skin, gut, and airways. This is co-evolved, not incidental.

• The modern shift away from exposure—to “sterile” play surfaces, indoor confinement, sanitized surfaces—may appear benign, but it’s been quietly shaping the epidemic rise of allergies, auto-immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases that both disturb the quality of life and can shorten lifespan itself.

• This is not just personal wellness: it’s ecological and societal. The health of children, the immune burdens we carry, the resilience of future generations: all of this ties back to whether we let the next generation touch the living earth.
  

• In the Finnish classroom yard they said: “We’re moving the action from inside to outside. We want to show the children nature so they learn about it.”

That sentence is packed. Show the children nature. Let them learn through contact, through play, through mess. Not as a museum piece, not as a “nature corridor” behind a fence, but as the ground they run on, dig in, climb across, whose bugs and fungus mix with theirs.

So, I want to issue a personal call to you—if you have children, nieces, nephews—or if you’re planning for grandchildren—or if you’re simply human, who used to feel the dirt under your fingernails and the creek cold on your shins—do this: Let the next generation get messy.

Plant a compost heap. Bring real soil into the sandbox. Create a border of moss and stones. Let the rain puddle, let the bugs crawl, let the children burrow. Let the forest floor not be exotic but ordinary.

I remember that stream down the road from the house I grew up in, the woods on the edge of Lansing, the sticky Michigan clay, the little fish, frogs, and crawdads under rocks, the mud mixing into water. I remember coming home with smudged socks, grass stains and a face kissed by sap.

I didn’t know at the time that I was feeding my immune system. I simply knew I was alive and it was a thrill.

We’ve forgotten that aliveness. Our culture has prized immaculateness, separation from the “dirty” wild, the exclusion of microbes like we exclude strangers. Yet the wildness is in us. The soil is in us. We’re made of the same living matrix as the tree roots and the beetles and the moss. Broken contact with that matrix isn’t harmless: it’s a literal loss.

In the wise old words I referenced in “It’s All One Thing”: “When we remove ourselves from that web of life, we do so at our own peril.”

The Finnish story is not just cute or scientific: it’s urgent. Rebuild our contact with the living earth. Let children scoop sand and soil, let them bury their hands, let them build mud-cakes like Aurora in Finland’s day-care. Laugh as they smear soil on their faces. It’s not chaos: it’s calibration.

Yes, modernization has brought us many gifts. Clean water. Sanitation. Vaccines. But modernization taken too far, with too much separation from our biological roots, leaves us with immune systems that misfire, bodies that mistake harmless soil microbes for threats, children who never taste actual dirt. The Finnish experiment is clear: get back to the soil, get back to the forest floor, get back to the messy, ordinary earth.

And the earth—our living earth—benefits too. More forest-floor carpets. More compost heaps. More kids playing outside, fewer rubber mats, fewer sterile boxes. We begin to treat biodiversity as not just glamorous (rainforests, coral reefs) but local (yard patches, old tree stumps, rain puddles). We begin to remember that our health is tied to the health of that biodiversity.

So my invitation to you: On your next weekend, find a patch of ground the kids (or you!) can mess with. Dig into it. Feel the soil. Let a leaf rot into the compost. Let worms do their work. Let the world pull you back. Because we’re not apart from nature: we are nature. And when we pretend otherwise, we hurt ourselves and the world around us.

It’s time to stop treating microbes as abstract threats or invisible villains. They are—and have always been—our companions, our allies, our ancestral family. The Finnish children’s laughter in the sandy forest-floor yard is our ancient laughter too.

Let’s dig in.

—Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator, is the author of many respected books. Reprinted with permission. To receive new Wisdom School posts you can become a free or paid subscriber of this reader-supported digital publication, The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human. All Wisdom School articles are free and available to everyone. Copyright by Thom Hartmann, 2025.

By Thom Hartmann, author, educator and commentator

The modern school system wasn’t built with the hunter in mind. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep using it.

Every September, countless ADHD kids return to school full of promise, only to feel like failures by October. It’s not because they’re lazy, stupid, or broken. It’s because the system was never designed for them in the first place.

We built our modern education system during the Industrial Revolution. Its purpose wasn’t to foster creativity or honor individual strengths—it was to create obedient factory workers and good soldiers. Schools emphasized conformity, repetition, and hierarchy. Sit still. Follow the rules. Memorize and repeat. Don’t ask too many questions.

For kids with ADHD—what I call Hunter brains in a Farmer’s world—this is a death sentence for the spirit.

The Classroom as a Factory

Think about it: A standard classroom requires kids to sit still for long periods, absorb abstract information, and stay quiet unless called on. That’s not how Hunters are wired. A Hunter scans their environment, reacts quickly to movement, explores, wanders. Their learning is active, kinetic, sensory.

Now imagine putting that child in a chair under fluorescent lights for six hours a day. Penalize them when their minds wander. Shame them for blurting out brilliant but untimely observations. Force them to repeat tasks that bore them to tears. That’s not education—that’s imprisonment.

The Myth of the Lazy Kid

One of the most insidious myths about ADHD kids is that they “just need to try harder.” But ADHD isn’t about willpower. It’s about neurological wiring. The hunter brain isn’t motivated by future rewards; it responds to immediate stimuli. It craves novelty, intensity, and challenge. Long-term projects, repetitive drills, or quiet reading time simply don’t register as important. It’s not a choice. It’s chemistry.

This leads to an avalanche of negative feedback: low grades, constant reprimands, damaged self-esteem. The message they internalize is clear: you’re not good enough. And so they begin to disengage, act out, or give up altogether.

Rebellion Is Not a Flaw

We treat rebelliousness in children as a character defect. But sometimes it’s wisdom. Hunter kids resist systems that don’t serve them. That resistance, if nurtured, becomes the same trait that leads adults to become inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, and change-makers.

But too often we crush it early. We reward conformity. We punish curiosity. We drug children into silence.

This isn’t just a tragedy. It’s a massive loss of potential. How many future Einsteins and Edisons have we labeled as disruptive? How many future innovators dropped out to escape systems that refused to see their genius?

Real Learning Happens in Motion

Look at how young children naturally learn: by touching, exploring, imitating, asking questions. That’s a Hunter’s learning style. The farther we move from that model, the more we lose those kids.

Project-based learning, outdoor education, apprenticeships—these approaches work brilliantly for ADHD brains. They restore meaning to the learning process. They offer feedback in real-time. They respect movement, engagement, and challenge.

Why do so many ADHD kids come alive in summer camp, theater, robotics, or sports? Because such environments match their wiring.

What Can We Do?

First, we stop blaming the child.

Then we fight to reform the system. Advocate for alternative learning models that honor multiple intelligences. Support teachers who think outside the box. Push back against standardized testing regimes that reduce learning to a number.

And at home, we tell our Hunter kids the truth: You’re not broken. You’re different. And in many ways, you’re better suited to thrive in a world that desperately needs new thinking.

The modern school system wasn’t built with the hunter in mind. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep using it.

Let’s rebuild it. Let’s build schools where Hunters can run. 

—Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator, is the author of a highly respected book, ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World. Reprinted with permission from ADHD: Hunter in a Farmer’s World with Thom Hartmann. To receive new posts you can become a free or paid subscriber of this reader-supported publication.