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

Edward O. Wilson and the ecopsychology movement are on to something. She calls for a common-sense approach, one that recognizes “the positive effects of involvement with nature on health, concentration, creative play, and a developing bond with the natural world that can form a foundation for environmental stewardship.”

The idea that natural landscapes, or at least gardens, can be therapeutic and restorative is, in fact, an ancient one that has filtered down through the ages. Over two thousand years ago, Chinese Taoists created gardens and greenhouses they believed to be beneficial for health. By 1699, the book English Gardener advised the reader to spend “spare time in the garden, either digging, setting out, or weeding; there is no better way to preserve your health.”

In America, mental-health pioneer Dr. Benjamin Rush (a signer of the American Declaration of Independence) declared, “digging in the soil has a curative effect on the mentally ill.” Beginning in the 1870s, the Quakers’ Friends Hospital in Pennsylvania used acres of natural landscape and a greenhouse as part of its treatment of mental illness. During World War II, psychiatry pioneer Carl Menninger led a horticulture therapy movement in the Veterans Administration Hospital System. In the 1950s, a wider movement emerged, one that recognized the therapeutic benefits of gardening for people with chronic illnesses. In 1955, Michigan State University awarded the first graduate degree in horticultural/occupational therapy. And in 1971, Kansas State University established the first horticultural therapy degree curriculum.

Today, pet therapy has joined horticultural therapy as an accepted health-care approach, particularly for the elderly and children. For example, research has shown that subjects experienced significant decreases in blood pressure simply by watching fish in an aquarium. Other reports link pet ownership to a lowering of high blood pressure and improved survival after heart attacks. The mortality rate of heart-disease patients with pets was found to be one-third that of patients without pets. Aaron Katcher, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Schools of Medicine, Dentistry, and Veterinary Medicine, has spent over a decade investigating how social relationships between human beings and other animals influence human health and behavior. Katcher and Gregory Wilkins, an expert on animal-facilitated therapy in residential treatment centers, tell of an autistic child who spent several sessions with passive dogs before encountering Buster, a hyperactive adolescent dog brought from a local animal shelter. At first the autistic child ignored the dogs—but at a later session, “without any other change in regimen, the patient eagerly ran into the therapy room and within minutes said his first new words in six months: ‘Buster Sit!’” The child learned to play ball with Buster and give him food rewards—and also learned to seek out Buster for comfort.

The evidence of the therapeutic value of gardens and pets is persuasive. What do we know, though, about the next step—the influence of unstructured natural landscapes and experiences in nature on human development and health? Poets and shamans have recognized that link for millennia, but science began to explore it relatively recently.

Most of the new evidence connecting nature to well-being and restoration focuses on adults. In the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Howard Frumkin, M.D., chairman of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Emory University’s School of Public Health, wrote that he considered this a mostly overlooked field in modern medicine, even though many studies credit exposure to plants or nature with speeding up recovery time from injury. Frumkin pointed to a ten-year study of gallbladder surgery patients, comparing those who recovered in rooms facing a grove of trees to those in rooms with a view of a brick wall; the patients with the view of trees went home sooner. Perhaps not unexpectedly, research revealed Michigan prison inmates whose cells faced a prison courtyard had 24 percent more illnesses than those whose cells had a view of farmland. In a similar vein, Roger Ulrich, a Texas A&M researcher, has shown that people who watch images of natural landscape after a stressful experience calm markedly in only five minutes: their muscle tension, pulse, and skin-conductance readings plummet.

Gordon Orians, professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Washington, says such research suggests that our visual environment profoundly affects our physical and mental well-being, and that modern humans need to understand the importance of what he calls “ghosts,” the evolutionary remnants of past experience hard-wired into a species’ nervous system.

The childhood link between outdoor activity and physical health seems clear, but the relationship is complex. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that the number of overweight adult Americans increased over 60 percent between 1991 and 2000. According to CDC data, the U.S. population of overweight children between ages two and five increased by almost 36 percent from 1989 to 1999. At that time, two out of ten of America’s children were clinically obese—four times the percentage of childhood obesity reported in the late 1960s. Approximately 60 percent of obese children ages five to ten have at least one cardiovascular disease risk factor, while the Journal of the American Medical Association reported an upward trend in high blood pressure in children ages eight to eighteen.

Because of this fundamental concern, pediatricians now warn that today’s children may be the first generation of Americans since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents. While children in many parts of the world endure hunger and famine, the World Health Organization warns that the sedentary lifestyle is also a global public health problem; inactivity is seen as a major risk factor in noncommunicable diseases, which cause 60 percent of global deaths and 47 percent of the burden of disease.

In addition to possible links between child obesity and various genetic complexities, a common virus, and even sleep deprivation, the current debate circles two obvious contributors: First, television and junk food are linked to child obesity. The CDC found that the amount of TV that children watch directly correlates with measures of their body fat. In the United States, children ages six to