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

eleven thousand young people, many from inner-city neighborhoods, into the natural world. Other conservation groups have moved quickly too. The National Wildlife Federation rolled out the Green Hour, intended to persuade parents to encourage their children to spend one hour a day in nature. John Flicker, president of the National Audubon Society, is campaigning for the creation of a family-focused nature center in every congressional district in the nation. Some nature conservancy organizations are going beyond their traditional definition of conservation. The Trust for Public Land is placing increased emphasis on engaging children with nature, to ensure that natural areas preserved today will continue to be protected by future generations. The Conservation Fund, another organization that has focused primarily on purchasing and protecting land, has also taken action. In 2007, the Fund’s president, Larry Selzer, created the National Forum on Children and Nature, enlisting governors, mayors, cabinet secretaries, corporate CEOs, and non-government organizations as participants. The goal: raise twenty million dollars to fund existing programs and seed new ones.

Such organizations are recognizing that the human child in nature may well be the most important indicator species of future sustainability.

To some extent, the movement is fueled by organizational or economic self-interest. But something deeper is going on here. In 2006, ecoAmerica, a conservation marketing group, commissioned SRI Consulting Business Intelligence to conduct a comprehensive survey of Americans’ environmental values related to everything from health, animals, global warming, taxes, and more. EcoAmerica president Robert Perkowitz reports, “It was very enlightening for us to discover that the biggest shared concern about nature is really kids’ alienation from it.” Forecasting more than seventy major global developments, the World Future Society now ranks nature-deficit disorder as number five.

With its nearly universal appeal, this issue seems to hint at a more atavistic motivation. This appeal may well have something to do with what Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which, as described in Last Child in the Woods, suggests that human beings are innately attracted to nature. Biologically, we are all still hunters and gatherers, and there is something in us we do not fully understand that needs immersion in nature. We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature—if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm—they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those “places of initiation,” in the words of naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world, seen and unseen.

When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down. And when that happens, unlikely allies converge and ideas can pour forth, leading to ever more insightful approaches to entrenched social problems. Real estate developers are taking notice of a potential new market. For example, some of California’s largest developers were gathered in Carmel by Clint Eastwood to discuss how they might design, build, and market future communities that connect children to nature. Among the ideas proposed by these and other developers: leave some land and native habitat in place (that’s a good start); employ green design principles; incorporate nature trails and natural waterways; throw out or reduce the conventional covenants and restrictions that discourage or prohibit natural play and rewrite the rules to encourage it; allow kids to build forts and tree houses or plant gardens; and create small, on-site nature centers. In such a discussion, it’s a short conceptual leap from excusing more sprawl by giving it a green patina to redeveloping portions of decaying urban and suburban neighborhoods into eco-communities where nature would be an essential strand in the fabric of daily life. The fact that developers, builders, and real estate marketers—at least the ones I met with—would approach this challenge with such apparently heartfelt enthusiasm was revealing. They were visualizing a new and different future.

In similar ways, the children and nature movement is proving to be one of the best ways to challenge other entrenched concepts—for example, the current test-centric definition of education reform. A different vision is embodied in the nature-themed schools sprouting up nationwide, such as the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center Preschool, where, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2006, “a 3-year-old can identify a cedar tree and a maple—even if she can’t tell you what color pants she’s wearing. And a 4-year-old can tell the difference between squirrel and rabbit tracks—even if he can’t yet read any of the writing on a map. Young children learn through the sounds, scents, and seasons of the outdoors.” Taking cues from the preschool’s success in engaging children, an increasing number of nature centers plan to add preschool programs not only to meet the demand for early childhood education but also to “create outdoor enthusiasts at a young age,” as the Journal Sentinel reported.

The children and nature movement is fueled by this fundamental idea: the child in nature is an endangered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at Centers for Disease Control, recently described the clear benefits of nature experiences to healthy child development, and to adult well-being. “In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine,” he said. He believes that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Perhaps we will advise patients to take a few days in the country, to spend time gardening,” he wrote in a 2001 American Journal of Preventive Medicine article, “or [we will] build hospitals in scenic locations, or plant gardens in rehabilitation centers. Perhaps the . . . organizations that pay for health care will come to fund such interventions, especially