Acadia Partners Blog

Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder is an engaging read that speaks to the future health of children and of our National Parks. The book is about the way that young people connect to nature–or, more accurately, connect to it less and less. As Acadia National Park superintendent Sheridan Steele has noted, continued support for conserved places depends on engaging children with nature and getting them into the parks. Louv’s book shows us that we are failing to create that engagement.

Looking back over the past 150 years, Louv sees a sequence of three distinct ways of connecting to nature–Louv thinks of them as three different American "frontiers." Our nation’s first frontier engagement was, of course, the movement across the face of this continent–clearing the forests, plowing the plains, winning the west, building the railroads–the settling of the continent. 

This is the usual notion of "frontier," and some have argued that this particular engagement with nature shaped the American character. Most famously, Fredrick Jackson Turner wrote that during this era, every succeeding American generation returned "to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line," which became "the meeting point between savagery and civilization."  The result, according to Turner, was a national identity characterized by "that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things … that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism."

Reasonable people might disagree about the makeup of the "American character" and about the extent to which it was shaped by the frontier, as opposed to immigration and other national experiences. But, in looking at the connection between people and nature, it is clear that during this first era, nature was there to be used. Other writers, such as Donald Worster, author of  Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, argue that this relationship between the American people and the American landscape goes beyond utilitarianism to outright domination and conquest. In America’s initial engagement with nature, the guiding principles were that "Nature must be seen as capital" and that "Man has a right, even an obligation, to use this capital for constant self-advancement."

Louv’s book argues that we made a transition away from this "utilitarian" view of nature to something else. The timing of the transition coincides with the closing of the frontier in the last years of the 19th century. American settlers and pioneers reached the California coast and then bounced back to fill in the middle of the country, finally taking even the lands set aside for Native American settlement in Oklahoma. No longer was there an advancing frontier line, no longer was there a meeting point between "savagery and civilization." The result, according to Louv, was that we gradually left behind our utilitarian view of nature and entered the era of America’s romantic relationship to nature. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the American people began thinking of nature and the "frontier" in the past tense. Nature and wild places became an important part of the nation’s history and identity–something to value and enjoy–rather than just something to overcome.

What makes Louv’s thesis so important to people engaged in protecting the National Parks is that this "romantic" view of nature was behind the movement to establish the first parks. For example, the focus on spiritual value, rather than on utility, was very much was George B. Dorr had in mind as he argued for the protection of the lands that eventually became Acadia National Park:

Saved to future generations as it has been to us, in the wild primeval beauty of the nature it exhibits, of ancient rocks and still more ancient sea, with infinite detail of life and landscape interest between, the spirit and mind of man will surely find in it in the years and centuries to come an inspiration and a means of growth as essential to them ever and anon as are fresh air and sunshine to the body.

No longer something to conquer and overcome, nature emerged an essential ingredient for the health of the mind and spirit. With the disappearance of wilderness came the valuing of wilderness. This shift in our relation to nature acquired concrete form in the "Organic Act" that created the National Park Service in 1916, stating that the "fundamental purpose" of the Park Service is 

to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

Louv’s focus is on what all of this means for children as they interact with nature. He speaks fondly of a book that Daniel C. Beard wrote for children in 1915–around the time that the National Park Service was created and the first steps were taken that would eventually lead to the creation of Acadia National Park. Titled Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties, the book shows children how to build tree-houses, teepees, hogans, beaver huts, sod houses, and a variety of other places in which a child could make a private place in the woods and fields. As Louv says it, this little book "epitomizes a time when a young person’s experience of nature was inseparable from the romantic view of the American frontier."

Growing up in the middle of the century, Louv experienced a childhood that was not greatly removed from the connection to nature that Beard knew in 1915. Louv roamed through fields, fished, and built shacks and tree houses. My own experience, growing up in the fifties and early sixties, was similar. I hunted with my bow and arrow, I became a good shot with a .22, I spent summer days catching pan fish in a wonderful, secluded set of ponds near my house, and I listened to men tell stories about fishing and hunting. I worked outdoors at the local sportsman’s club mowing grass and painting picnic tables. In the winter, my dog and I followed animal tracks in the snow.

Louv’s thesis and his concern is that kids don’t do those things anymore. Sometime between the sixties and now — Louv places the date in the early 1990s — we moved through another transition to a third relationship with nature. We moved from romance to alienation. For children today, according to Louv, nature is simply not part of the picture. Louv quotes one fourth grader who explained, "I like to play indoors better, ’cause that is where the electrical outlets are." Rather romanticizing things that are wild, today’s children are more likely to romanticize things that are urban.

Louv’s vision of our changed relation to nature is powerful in its simplicity. He sees the past 150 years of connection between people and nature as a movement through three distinct phases, or–to use Louv’s term–"frontiers." First we set out to use and conquer nature. Then, with much of the conquest behind us, we romanticized our view of nature and decided to protect some of it, setting aside the National Parks as an inspiration to future generations. But the surprising dilemma is that the future generations aren’t paying attention. The iconic images for children are no longer cowboys and Indians or Davy Crockett out on the frontier, but rappers on the city streets. For most children growing up today, nature is simply not relevant.

Acadia’s Superintendent Steele is right to be concerned. How do we preserve nature "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations" if the future generations don’t see nature as an important part of their lives? That is a question I want to turn to tomorrow, as I look more closely at Louv’s story of successive frontiers.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Acadia National Park, Acadia Partners, Education, Children. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.