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

or on their motorcycles. Meanwhile, the regulatory message is clear: islands of nature that are left by the graders are to be seen, not touched.

The cumulative impact of overdevelopment, multiplying park rules, well-meaning (and usually necessary) environmental regulations, building regulations, community covenants, and fear of litigation sends a chilling message to our children that their free-range play is unwelcome, that organized sports on manicured playing fields are the only officially sanctioned form of outdoor recreation. “We tell our kids that traditional forms of outdoor play are against the rules,” says Rick. “Then we get on their backs when they sit in front of the TV—and then we tell them to go outside and play. But where? How? Join another organized sport? Some kids don’t want to be organized all the time. They want to let their imaginations run; they want to see where a stream of water takes them.”

Not every youngster automatically conforms. When Rick asked his students to write about their experiences in nature, twelve-year-old Lorie described how she loved to climb trees, particularly ones on a patch of land at the end of her street. One day, she and a friend were climbing in those branches and “a guy comes along and yells, ‘Get out of those trees!’ We were so scared; we ran inside and didn’t come out again. That was when I was seven, so that old man seemed pretty frightening. But it happened again last year in my own front lawn—but this time it was someone else, and I decided to ignore him, and so nothing happened.” Lorie thinks all of this is pretty stupid, limiting her opportunities to be “free and not have to be clean and act like girls who are afraid of a scratch or mud all the time.” She adds, “To me, still being considered a kid, it can’t be too much to ask. We should have the same rights as adults did when they were young.”

Measuring the De-natured Childhood

Over the past decade, a small group of researchers has begun to document the de-naturing of childhood—its multiple causes, extent, and impact. Much of this is new territory; the criminalization of natural play, for example, which is both a symptom and cause of the transformation, is occurring without much notice. Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by modern families, more time in front of the TV and the computer, and growing obesity among adults and children because of diet and sedentary lifestyles. We know these things. But do we know exactly how much less time children spend specifically in nature? No. “We also don’t know if there is any geographic or class divide, in terms of which kids spend time in nature,” says Louise Chawla, a Kentucky State University environmental psychology professor and a tireless champion for increasing children’s experiences in nature. Good longitudinal studies that span the decades are missing. “We don’t have older data to compare. No one thought to ask these questions thirty or fifty years ago,” she says.

Like many of us, too many researchers have taken the child-nature connection for granted. How could something so timeless change in such a short time? Even if some researchers asked that question, others dismissed it as an exercise in nostalgia. One reason is that there’s no commercial incentive to ask. For years, James Sallis has been studying why some children and adults are more active than others. He is program director of the Active Living Research Program for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a multi-year effort to discover how to design recreational facilities and whole communities so they stimulate people of all ages to be more active. The studies are focusing on such sites as urban parks, recreation centers, streets, and private homes. “Based on previous studies, we can definitely say that the best predictor of preschool children’s physical activity is simply being outdoors,” says Sallis, “and that an indoor, sedentary childhood is linked to mental-health problems.”

I asked him what he had learned about how children use woods, fields, canyons, and vacant lots—in other words, unstructured natural sites.

“We don’t ask about those places,” he said.

If the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation isn’t collecting such data, it’s unlikely that studies funded by commercial interests would finance such research. One of the great benefits of unstructured outdoor recreation is that it doesn’t cost anything, Sallis explained. “Because it’s free, there’s no major economic interest involved. Who’s going to fund the research? If kids are out there riding their bikes or walking, they’re not burning fossil fuel, they’re nobody’s captive audience, they’re not making money for anybody. . . . Follow the money.”

Nonetheless, evidence of a generational break from nature—gathered since the late 1980s—is growing in the United States and elsewhere.

Robin Moore, a professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University, first charted the shrinkage of natural play spaces in urban England, a transformation of the landscape of childhood that occurred within a space of fifteen years. Another British study discovered that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify characters from the Japanese card trading game Pokémon than native species in the community where they lived: Pikachu, Metapod, and Wigglytuff were names more familiar to them than otter, beetle, and oak tree. Similarly, Japan’s landscape of childhood, already downsized, has also grown smaller. For almost two decades the well-known Japanese photographer Keiki Haginoya photographed children’s play in the cities of Japan. In recent years, “children have disappeared so rapidly from his viewfinder that he has had to bring this chapter of his work to an end,” Moore reports. “Either indoor spaces have become more attractive, or outdoor spaces have become less attractive—or both.”

In Israel, researchers revealed that nearly all adults surveyed indicated that natural outdoor areas were the most significant environments of their childhood, while less than half of children ages eight to eleven shared that view. Even accounting for romanticized memories, that’s a startling difference in perception. The Netherlands, often associated with greener-than-average thinking is, nonetheless, a highly