ForestKids Early Learning Centre daycare in Hammonds Plains, N.S., held its long-awaited reopening after it was destroyed during a wildfire in 2023.

The road to re-build hasn't been easy for ForestKids Early Learning in Hammonds Plains, but owners put up the walls this week after their daycare burned to ash in May 2023.

On a recent 80-degree day at Rock Creek Park, an urban national park in the heart of Washington D.C., a dozen children as young as four sank their hands into the creek mud, discovered crayfish hiding beneath rocks, and picked grass out of their hair. Brown, 55, runs ForestKids, a nature immersion program with the goal of helping kids connect to nature. But she's been obsessed with environmentalism since the early 2000s when it was a "weird fringe thing." "'Oh my gosh, you're a tree hugger. You're probably one of those tree huggers,'" Brown recalled hearing from others. "It was meant as a bad word." Now, she said, the word brings "pride." Next to Brown, 9-year-old Orla McClennen wears a hat with palm trees and a Joshua Tree National Park T-shirt. She doesn't know if she's ever heard the word tree-hugger, but her favorite part of Brown's program so far was walking across a "big, fat tree" to get to the other side of the creek. "I mean they give us oxygen, which is pretty like, you really need it," Orla said. Today, "tree-hugger" usually describes environmentalists and advocates for the preservation of woodlands – but the word has a...