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

connection to nature. Indeed, the new research focuses not so much on what is lost when nature fades, but on what is gained in the presence of the natural world. “There is a great need to educate parents about this research—to awaken or inspire the parents’ pleasure with nature play—as the necessary context for continued nature experiences for their children,” says Louise Chawla.

Such knowledge may inspire us to choose a different path, one that leads to a nature-child reunion.

PART II

WHY THE YOUNG (AND THE REST OF US)

NEED NATURE

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth

find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

—RACHEL CARSON

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

—LAO-TZU

4. Climbing the Tree of Health

I bet I can live to a hundred if only I can get outdoors again.

—GERALDINE PAGE AS CARRIE WATTS, IN The Trip To Bountiful

ELAINE BROOKS’S GRAY HAIR was wound around her head in a great nest. A pencil was stuck through the bun to hold it up. Climbing a hill, she passed quietly through a stand of native vegetation: black sage, laurel leaf sumac, and wild morning glories. She trailed her fingers through non-native species—exotic invaders, she called them—such as oxalis, with yellow blooms that mirror the sun. She enjoyed a special relationship with this stretch of forgotten land. She brought to mind writer Annie Dillard’s words about needing to “explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

“You know, in three years coming to this open space, I have never seen kids playing here, except on the bike path,” said Brooks. She bent to touch a leaf that looked like the paw of a slender cat. “The native lupine is a nitrogen fixer,” she explained. “The roots house their own foreign invader—bacteria—which collect nitrogen from air in the soil and transform it into a modified nitrogen that plants need.” Some lichens, a complex organism of symbiotic fungi and algae, also feed nitrogen to their neighbors and can live for more than a century.

When land like this is graded, lupine and lichen are destroyed, along with the ecosystems they support. Plants live together, she said, and they die together.

For years, as a community-college teacher, she brought her students here to expose them to the nature many of them had never experienced. She taught them that land shapes us more than we shape land, until there is no more land to shape.

She haunted these thirty acres of lost La Jolla, and filled fifteen notebooks with pressed plants, rainfall measurements, and observations of the species that live here. An island of grass, succulents, and cacti, this is one of the last places in California where true coastal sage and a variety of other rare native plants can still be found so close to the ocean. Not that anyone planned it this way. In the early 1900s, a light-rail line ran through the patch of wildness, but its tracks were abandoned and pulled up. The land waited. Then in the late 1950s, the city set the corridor aside, assigning to it the forgettable name of Fay Avenue Extension. The plan was to build a major street through this part of the city. But the idea faded. And for nearly half a century, as the town boomed around it, the parcel was forgotten—except for the creation of an asphalt bike path that covers the ghost rail line.

Wearing jeans, a frayed flannel shirt, and hiking boots, Brooks stood in a field of wild onions, prickly pear, and native nightshade. The pleasant scent of licorice arrived from a patch of Mediterranean fennel, first brought to California by pioneers in the 1800s and used as a condiment. Wild oats, also an exotic, towered over most of the desert-designed native plants, which clung to the earth. If you’re a plant in this environment, it’s safer to keep your head down. “Look here, at the native blue dicks,” she exclaimed, pointing to violet, long-stemmed flowers next to wild chrysanthemums. The last, while not native, are as familiar as grinning daisies. It’s hard to dislike them.

One wonders: Why would anyone spend so many hours and days in what amounts to a big vacant lot?

One answer is that Brooks was a throwback, a rarity in her profession. In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history—an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms—gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C. Brooks was uncomfortable in either environmental camp. For years, she worked at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as a biologist and oceanographer. She became a plankton expert.

She liked teaching better. She believed—as do many Americans—that she should pass along her love of nature. Plus, teaching at the community-college level afforded her the time she needed to know these hills and fields. No one paid her to study this land, but no one said she couldn’t.

Brooks was a throwback in another way. The admirable vogue in ecology is to focus on preserving networks of natural corridors, rather than isolated islands of life, which are usually deemed beyond saving. In principle, she agreed with that philosophy. But as Elaine Brooks believed, isolated patches of wild land are valuable to know, as are isolated people.

These islands of nature are most important for the young who live in surrounding or adjacent neighborhoods. She pointed to the scars of a bulldozer that came through years ago. Despite what developers will tell you about restoration, she said, once a piece of land is graded, the biologic organisms and understructure of the soil are destroyed. “No one knows how to easily re-create that, short of years of hand-weeding. Leaving land alone doesn’t work; the natives are overwhelmed by the invaders.” Spot bulldozing is common across the county, even on land that