Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

Such information is not a substitute for direct contact with nature, but this kind of knowledge does inspire a certain wonder. My hope is that such research will cause children to be more inclined to cultivate a deeper understanding of their fellow creatures. Sure, romanticized closeness—say, swimming with dolphins at an animal touchy-feely resort—may soften some of our loneliness as a species. On the other hand, nature is not so soft and fuzzy. Fishing and hunting, for example, or the way Nick Raven put meat on his table, are messy—to some, morally messy—but removing all traces of that experience from childhood does neither children nor nature any good.

“You look at these kids [in the animal-rights movement], and you largely see urban, disaffected, but still privileged people,” says Mike Two Horses, of Tucson, founder of the Coalition to End Racial Targeting of American Indian Nations. His organization supports native people such as the Northwest’s Makah tribe, who are traditionally dependent on whale hunting. “The only animals the young animal rightists have ever known are their pets,” he says. “The only ones they’ve ever seen otherwise are in zoos, Sea World, or on whale-watching [now whale-touching] expeditions. They’ve disconnected from the sources of their food—even from the sources of the soy and other vegetable proteins they consume.”

I see more good in the animal-rights movement than Two Horses does, but his point has merit.

• Contact with nature: so close, and yet so far

Even as the definition of life itself is up for grabs, the potential for contact with more common wild animals is increasing, despite what Two Horses says. In a number of urban regions, humans and wild critters are coming into contact in ways that have been unfamiliar to Americans for at least a century. For one, the U.S. deer population is the highest it has been in a hundred years.

In Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, social historian and urban theorist Mike Davis describes what he calls a new dialectic between the “wild” and the “urban”: “Metropolitan Los Angeles, now bordered primarily by mountains and desert rather than by farmland as in the past, has the longest wild edge, abruptly juxtaposing tract houses and wildlife habitat, of any major non-tropical city. . . . Brazen coyotes are now an integral part of the street scene in Hollywood and Toluca Lake.” A reporter for the British newspaper the Observer writes: “[American] settlers and their descendants went about taming the environment with warlike ferocity. After ethnically cleansing the natives, they set about the extermination of bears, mountain lions, coyotes and wildfowl . . . but mountain lions adapted. Los Angeles may be the only city on earth with mountain lion victim support groups.”

At midcentury, millions of Americans migrated to suburbia, following the dream of owning their own homes and a piece of land—their own quarter-acre of the frontier. For a while, space was expansive. Today, sprawl does not guarantee space. The newly dominant type of development—with interchangeable shopping malls, faux nature design, rigid control by community covenants and associations—dominates the bellwether metro regions of Southern California and Florida, but also encircles most of the older urban regions of the nation. These dense donuts of development offer fewer places for natural play than the earlier suburbs. In some cases, they offer even fewer natural play spaces than the centers of the old industrial cities.

In fact, parts of urban Western Europe are greener—in the sense of increasing the amount and quality of natural surroundings within urban regions—than most of urban/suburban America, a land still associated with frontier and open space. “An important lesson from many of these European cities has to do with the very perception we have of cities,” writes Timothy Beatley, professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, in Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities. Particularly in Scandinavian cities, where green design is gaining popularity, “there is a sense that cities are and ought to be places where nature occurs. In the United States, a challenge remains to overcome the polar distinction between what is urban and what is natural. Perhaps because of the expansiveness of our ecological resources and land base, we have tended to see the most significant forms of nature as occurring somewhere else—often hundreds of miles away from where most people actually live—in national parks, national seashores, and wilderness areas.”

These are some of the trends that form the American context for a de-natured childhood, something that is perhaps as mysterious as—and certainly less studied than—the march of the nanorobots or the advance of the chimera.

3. The Criminalization of Natural Play

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms . . .

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

CONSIDER MISTER RICK’S neighborhood.

Fifteen years ago, John Rick, a middle-school math teacher, and his family moved to Scripps Ranch because of its child-friendly reputation. Set in a lush old eucalyptus grove in a northern San Diego neighborhood laced with canyons and linked by walking paths, Scripps is one of those rare developments where parents can imagine their children enjoying nature, just as they did. A sign near its entrance reads, “Country Living.”

“We have more Scout troops per capita than just about anywhere else in the country,” says Rick. “The planners fought to have vast amounts of open space for kids to play in and parks for every neighborhood.”

A few years after moving to Scripps Ranch, Rick started reading articles in the community’s newsletter about the “illegal use” of open space. “Unlike where we had lived before, kids were actually out there running around in the trees, building forts, and playing with their imaginations,” he recalls. “They were putting up bike ramps to make jumps. They were damming up trickles of water to float boats. In other words, they were doing all the things we used to do as kids. They were creating for themselves all those memories that we cherish so fondly.” And now it had