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

is supposedly protected. “Much of this destruction is done out of expediency and ignorance,” she said. She believed people are unlikely to value what they cannot name. “One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.”

She trotted down a narrow footpath and then over a rise. A red-tailed hawk circled above. On a slope ahead, rivulets of fire-retardant, non-native ice plant had turned into a flood and would soon cover the hillside. But clusters of native agave—a cactus-like succulent from which tequila is made—made their stand. The agave blooms once in its long life; it grows for two decades or more and then in a final burst of energy shoots up a single, trembling flower stalk that can be up to twenty feet high. At dusk, bats dance in the air around it and carry pollen to other flowering agave.

Brooks stopped below a small hillside covered with original native bunch grass, a species that dates from pre-Spanish California, from a time before cattle were introduced. Just as tall-grass prairie once covered the Great Plains states, bunch grass carpeted much of Southern California. (In the Great Plains, botanists can still encounter remnants of tall-grass prairie in deserted pioneer graveyards.) There is something fine about touching this grass, in knowing it.

The Ghosts of Fay Avenue Extension

As we continued our walk through Fay Avenue Extension, Brooks made her way to the highest knoll. From here she had a view of the Pacific Ocean. She often sat alone on this elevation, inhaling the nature and the long view. “One day I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. A tiny brown frog was sitting on a bush next to me. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’”

Sometimes, as she sat here, she imagined herself as her own distant ancestor: One step ahead of something large and hungry, she had leaped into branches and shinnied up a tall tree. At these times she looked out over the rooftops toward the sea, but did not, she said, see the cityscape. She saw savanna—the rolling, feminine, harsh yet nurturing plains of Africa. She felt her breath slow and her heart ease.

“Once our ancestors climbed high in that tree, there was something about looking out over the land—something that healed us quickly,” said Brooks. Resting in those high branches may have provided a rapid comedown from the adrenaline rush of being potential prey.

“Biologically, we have not changed. We are still programmed to fight or flee large animals. Genetically, we are essentially the same creatures as we were at the beginning. We are still hunters and gatherers. Our ancestors couldn’t outrun a lion, but we did have wits. We knew how to kill, yes, but we also knew how to run and climb—and how to use the environment to recover our wits.”

Today, we find ourselves continually on the alert, chased by an unending stampede of two-thousand-pound automobiles and four-thousand-pound SUVs. Even inside our homes the assault continues, with unsettling, threatening images charging through the television cable into our living rooms and bedrooms. At the same time, the urban and suburban landscape is rapidly being stripped of its peace-inducing elements.

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

Brooks taught her students about the ecology of vacant lots through the lens of “biophilia,” the hypothesis of Harvard University scientist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward O. Wilson. Wilson defines biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” He and his colleagues argue that humans have an innate affinity for the natural world, probably a biologically based need integral to our development as individuals. The biophilia theory, though not universally embraced by biologists, is supported by a decade of research that reveals how strongly and positively people respond to open, grassy landscapes, scattered stands of trees, meadows, water, winding trails, and elevated views.

At the cutting edge of this frontier, added to the older foundation of ecological psychology, is the relatively new interdisciplinary field of ecopsychology. The term gained currency in 1992, through the writing of historian and social critic Theodore Roszak. In his book Voice of the Earth, Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.” In recent years, the meaning of the term “ecopsychology” has evolved to include nature therapy, which asks not only what we do to the earth, but what the earth does for us—for our health. Roszak considers that a logical extension of his original thesis.

As he points out, the American Psychiatric Association lists more than three hundred mental diseases in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a large number of them associated with sexual dysfunction. “Psychotherapists have exhaustively analyzed every form of dysfunctional family and social relations, but ‘dysfunctional environmental relations’ does not exist even as a concept,” he says. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual “defines ‘separation anxiety disorder’ as ‘excessive anxiety concerning separation from home and from those to whom the individual is attached.’ But no separation is more pervasive in this Age of Anxiety than our disconnection from the natural world.” It’s time, he says, “for an environmentally based definition of mental health.”

Ecopsychology and all of its budding branches, reinforcing Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, have fueled a new surge of research into the impact of nature on human physical and emotional health. Professor Chawla, the international expert on urban children and nature, is skeptical about some of the claims made in the name of biophilia, but she also argues that one does not have to adopt unreservedly the entire thesis to believe that