Engaging Nature — Lost in the Woods?
Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods tells a compellingly simple story about the relationship between people and nature in America, focusing on children. As I said in yesterday’s posting about this book, the story goes like this:
First–up until the end of the 19th century–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.
Louv’s book explores the possible causes of this loss of children’s connection with nature. TV and video games get some blame, of course, along with cell phones, the Internet, back seat entertainment systems, and other things that move a child’s attention from the natural world to an electronic, simulated one. Louv also identifies other, less commonly discussed factors that make it more difficult for children to experience nature directly. There is, for instance, the increase in rules, established by subdivision covenants and by well-meaning adults, that are intended to protect nature. For many children, climbing a tree is a sure way to have a grown-up tell them to climb down and stop hurting the tree. Or imagine if children actually build a tree house or two in a planned community’s open space. In Louv’s telling, these children will more often than not by confronted by adults who show up to disassemble the tree house and tell them that they have been bad kids. Staying inside, it seems, is a way to stay out of trouble.
The adults keeping the children out of the trees are not just protecting trees. If they own the trees, they are also protecting themselves from lawsuits from other parents if the children fall out of the trees. Add to this our society’s increasing fear of letting children play outside without supervision–who knows what strangers might be walking through the woods where the children play, and what their intentions might be? So, instead of unstructured play in the fields and woods, children spend what time they do have out-of-doors engaged in structured activities–in soccer practice, tennis lessons, and so on. It is a poor way to connect with nature.
Part of the irony here is that, in many ways, today’s children know more about environmental issues than any of us did fifty years ago. But the increased knowledge about global environmental issues seems to actually increase the separation between children and the natural world around them. Here is how Louv explains the problem:
"Environmental educators, parents, and teachers are descending on second- and third-graders to teach them about the rainforests," [David] Sobel writes in his volume, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. "From Brattleboro, Vermont, to Berkeley, California, schoolchildren … watch videos about the plight of indigenous forest people displaced by logging and exploration of oil. They learn that between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than ten thousand acres of rainforest will be cut down, making way for fast-food, ‘hamburgerable’ cattle."
In theory, these children "will learn that by recycling their Weekly Readers and milk cartons, they can help save the planet," and they’ll grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth, "voting for environmental candidates, and buying energy-efficient cars." Or maybe not. The opposite may be occurring, says Sobel. "If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation. In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots." Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder.
During the second half of Last Child in the Woods Louv explores ways to reverse this dissociation, helping children to once again connect with nature in unstructured ways, creating their own, personal relationship with trees, bugs, fish, rocks, and fields. The reasons for making this effort to reconnect kids and nature have to do both with a desire to protect children and a desire to protect nature.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I think that Louv is right to conclude that valuing nature and National Parks as an adult depends on valuing nature as a child. I care about Acadia National Park not for some abstract reason–not because it is a good thing to do–though it certainly is– but because I relate to the woods, rocks and water personally. My ability to be comfortable in that personal relationship–to find joy in it nearly every day–comes out of a lifetime of association with the out of doors. When I sit quietly in the woods in the morning, it is a quietness that goes back fifty years. And, heck, I am still following animal tracks in the snow with a dog at my side. The great pleasure and value in my connection to nature is rooted both in its immediacy and in its continuity.
Louv catalogs the case histories of others committed to protection of parks and the environment and shows that my experience is anything but unique. Connecting to nature as a child seems to have a lot to do with one’s ability to maintain a personal relationship to nature and to wild places when the child is an adult.
Louv does not provide his readers with a simple, sweeping solution to the problem that he describes. His solutions consist of a broad variety of separate attacks on the problem, including tort reform to address increases in litigation and liability insurance premiums, changes in the structure of family life so that parents spend more time with children, changes in the way we teach science in the schools, changes in the physical structure of communities, changes in the kinds of parks we create and how we manage them, changes in how we include nature in our cities, and changes in the ways that parents spend time outdoors with their children.
In truth, I find Louv’s list of problems to solve a little exhausting and discouraging. While acknowledging that progress toward a healthier connection to nature must, of course, involve lots of small steps, I find myself seeking some kind of overall direction–a "big picture" plan. It would be nice if the picture of the solution was as easy to understand as is Louv’s story about how we got into this fix. We used the land and sought to conquer nature. Then, after we dominated the continent, we sought comfort and inspiration in nature. Now it seems that children are no longer connected to nature at all. And the solution is tort reform? Better urban planning?
Fortunately, I think that there is a way to look from a slightly different perspective at the problem that Louv describes so well. For me, the new perspective opens up more hopeful view of a possible path out of the dilemma. I will try to put that perspective into words tomorrow.