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

to stop. “Somehow,” says Rick, “that tree house was now a fire hazard. Or the ‘dam’ might cause severe flooding.”

Authoritative adults from the Scripps Ranch Community Association chased kids away from a little pond near the public library, where children had fished for bluegills since Scripps Ranch had been a working cattle spread many decades earlier. In response to the tightened regulations, families erected basketball hoops. Young people moved their skateboard ramps to the foot of their driveways. But the community association reminded the residents that such activities violated the covenants they had signed when they bought their houses.

Down came the ramps and poles, and indoors went the kids.

“Game Boy and Sega became their imagination,” Rick says. “Parents became alarmed. Their kids were getting fat. Something had to be done.” So the parents supported the creation of a skate park in a more willing neighborhood. That neighborhood was ten miles away.

Rick is free to move to another neighborhood, but in the growing donuts of development surrounding most American cities, such restrictions are becoming the rule. Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents and kids now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law.

One source of constriction is private government. Most housing tracts, condos, and planned communities constructed in the past two to three decades are controlled by strict covenants that discourage or ban the kind of outdoor play many of us enjoyed as children. Today, more than 57 million Americans live in homes ruled by condominium, cooperative, and homeowners’ associations, according to the Community Associations Institute. The number of community associations burgeoned from 10,000 in 1970 to 286,000 today. These associations impose rules on adults and children (if children are allowed in them at all), ranging from mildly intrusive to draconian. Scripps Ranch is governed by one of the more flexible community associations, but even there official squads of adults regularly tear down forts and tree houses built by kids in the wooded canyons.

Some reasons are understandable: for example, concern about camps of transients or the outbreak of fire. But the unintended consequence is the discouragement of natural play.

Public government also restricts children’s access to nature. For the most part the criminalization of natural play is more suggestive than real. However, in some communities, young people who try to recreate their parents’ childhoods may face misdemeanor charges or see their parents sued. In Pennsylvania, three brothers, ages eight, ten, and twelve, spent eight months and their own money to build a treehouse in their backyard. The district council ordered the boys to tear it down because they had no building permit. In Clinton, Mississippi, a family happily spent four thousand dollars to build an elaborate, two-story, Victorian-style tree house. They asked the city if a permit was necessary, and a city official said no. Five years later, the city planning and zoning department announced that the tree house must be demolished because it violated an ordinance prohibiting construction of an accessory building in front of a house.

Other stringent restrictions on children’s outdoor play spring from our efforts to protect nature from human population pressures. For example, to protect the endangered Arroyo southwestern toad, three thousand acres of camping and fishing in Angeles National Forest were closed year-round. At California’s Oceano Dunes region, kite-flying has been banned because kites scare off a protected species of shorebird, the snowy plover, which has a limited habitat suitable for nesting. After the ban went into effect, a park ranger told Oceano resident Ambrose Simas he could no longer fly kites (perceived as hawks by the plover) with his great-grandson on the same beach where he had once flown kites with his father and grandfather. In my city, it is illegal to “injure, destroy, cut or remove any tree . . . [or] plant . . . growing in any city-owned park . . . without written permission from the city manager.” But what exactly constitutes “to injure?” Does a child seriously injure a tree by climbing it? Some think so. Another statute makes it illegal to “take, kill, wound, or disturb . . . any bird or animal . . . unless the same shall have been declared noxious by the city manager . . .”

If endangered and threatened species are to coexist with humans, adults and children do need to tread lightly. But poor land-use decisions, which reduce accessible nature in cities, do far more damage to the environment than do children. Two examples: Each year, 53,000 acres of land are developed in the Chesapeake Bay watershed; that’s about one acre every ten minutes. At that rate, development will consume more land in the Chesapeake watershed in the next twenty-five years than in the previous three and a half centuries, according to the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. Similarly, the Charlotte, North Carolina, region lost 20 percent of its forest cover over the past two decades; between 1982 and 2002, the state lost farmland and forests at the rate of 383 acres a day. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects forests declining from 767,000 acres in 1982 to 377,000 in 2022. Amazingly, developed land in North Carolina increased at a rate twice that of the state’s population growth.

As open space shrinks, overuse increases. This is true even in those metropolitan regions considered, by the public, to be more suburban than urban. Ironically, people who move to Sun Belt cities expecting more elbow room often find less of it. Eight of the nation’s ten highest-density metropolitan areas are in the West. In some of those cities, typical development methods favor decapitated hills, artificial landscaping, yards the size of gravesites, and few natural play areas. The disappearance of accessible open space escalates the pressure on those few natural places that remain. Local flora is trampled, fauna die or relocate, and nature-hungry people follow in their four-wheel-drive vehicles