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

if they prove to rival pharmaceuticals in cost and efficacy.” Today, Frumkin adds, “Of course, there is still much we need to learn, such as what kinds of nature contact are most beneficial to health, how much contact is needed and how to measure that, and what groups of people benefit most. But we know enough to act.”

In every arena, from conservation and health to urban design and education, the movement will have no shortage of tools and no shortage of potential far-reaching benefits. Under the right conditions, cultural and political change can occur rapidly. The recycling and antismoking campaigns revealed how social and political pressure can transform society in a single generation. The children and nature movement has perhaps even greater potential because it touches something even deeper within us, biologically and spiritually. An array of leaders from different religious backgrounds have stepped forward to support the reconciliation of children and nature. Such leaders understand that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that one of the first windows to wonder is the natural world.

Beyond all of this, the most important development has been the growing number of individual parents and other family members who have decided to do what it takes to bring nature into their lives, and keep it there. The real measure of our success will not be in the number of programs created or bills passed, but in the breadth of cultural change that will make such decisions second nature—in every family, every school, and every neighborhood. We do not know if this young movement will outlast the decade. But those who pursue it—and the pioneers who were working for change decades ago—are responding not only to nature, but to a hunger for hope. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that the success of any social movement depends on its ability to depict a world where people will want to go. Thinking about children’s need for nature helps us begin to paint a picture of that world—which must be done, because the price of not painting that picture is too high.

In January 2005, I attended a meeting of the Quivira Coalition, a New Mexico organization that brings together ranchers and environmentalists to find common ground. (The coalition is currently working on a plan to promote ranches as new schoolyards.) When my turn came to speak, I told the audience how, when I was a boy, I felt such an intense sense of ownership of the woods near my home that I pulled out scores of developers’ survey stakes in a vain attempt to keep the earthmovers at bay. After the speech, a rancher stood up. He was wearing scuffed boots. His aged jeans had never seen acid wash, only dirt and rock. His face was sunburned and creased. His drooping moustache was white, and he wore thick eyeglasses with heavy plastic frames, stained with sweat. “You know that story you told about pulling up stakes?” he said. “I did that when I was a boy too.”

The crowd laughed. I laughed.

And then the man began to cry. Despite his embarrassment, he continued to speak, describing the source of his sudden grief—that he might belong to one of the last generations of Americans to feel that sense of ownership of land and nature.

The power of this movement lies in that sense, that special place in our hearts, those woods where the bulldozers cannot reach. Developers and environmentalists, corporate CEOs and college professors, rock stars and ranchers, may agree on little else, but they agree on this: no one among us wants to be a member of the last generation to pass on to our children the joy of playing outside in nature.

—Richard Louv, March 2008

100 Actions We Can Take

No list of nature activities and community actions can be complete, but here are a few suggestions that may stimulate your own creativity. Parents, grandparents, and other relatives are the first responders, but they cannot resolve society’s nature-deficit disorder by themselves. Educators, health care professionals, policy-makers, business people, urban designers—all must lend a hand. Many of the activities presented here are adult-supervised (up close or at a distance). However, the most important goal is for our children, in their everyday lives, to experience joy and wonder, sometimes in solitude—for them to create their own nature experiences and, as they grow up, to expand the boundaries of their exploration.

Nature Activities for Kids and Families

1. Got dirt? “In South Carolina, a truckload of dirt is the same price as a video game!” reports Norman McGee, a father in that state who bought a load for his daughters, plus plastic buckets and shovels.

2. Invite native flora and fauna into your life. Maintain a birdbath. Replace part of your lawn with native plants. Build a bat house. For backyard suggestions, plus links to information about attracting wildlife to apartments and townhouses, see the National Audubon Society’s “Invitation to a Healthy Yard,” at www.audubonathome.org/yard. Make your yard a National Wildlife Federation (NWF) Certified Wildlife Habitat; see www.nwf.org/backyard.

3. View nature as an antidote to stress. All the health benefits that come to a child come to the adult who takes that child into nature. Children and parents feel better after spending time in the natural world—even if it’s in their own backyard.

4. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature. Then help them find their own: leaves beneath a backyard willow, the ditch behind the house, the meadow in the woods, the turn of a creek. In Washington State, the Wilderness Awareness School calls this the “sit spot,” recommending, “Let this be a place where you learn to sit still—alone, often, and quietly. . . . This will become your place of intimate connection with nature.”

5. Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there. Identify these