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

the CDC’s Howard Frumkin suggests that public-health experts expand their definition of environmental health beyond concern about, say, toxic dumps, to encompass how the environment can heal. He recommends that environmental-health research be done in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, landscape architects, pediatricians, and veterinarians. Others argue that increased awareness of nature’s power to improve physical and emotional health should also guide the way classrooms are conceived, houses built, and neighborhoods shaped. And, as the coming chapters explain, the evolving research can help us rediscover the link between human creativity and experiences in nature, and could offer a new branch of therapy for such syndromes as attention-deficit disorder.

Elaine Brooks taught her community college students that each of us—adult or child—must earn nature’s gift by knowing nature directly, however difficult it may be to glean that knowledge in an urban environment.

How ironic it is, Brooks told me one day, that the reality of life in beautiful California “is that we rarely experience any of these natural settings directly and intimately, but rather live our lives in large, sprawling urban areas.” Even when we drive to mountains and deserts, “it is not unusual to make a day trip, stopping only for coffee or a snack along the way. The entire experience occurs within an automobile looking out.” Yet, “the look, feel, odor, sounds of a landscape surround every individual from the very beginning of life. The landscape is the place where we exist, where our real daily world is bounded.” As a species, we crave the very shapes we now allow to be scraped away.

Brooks’s students are grateful for what she taught them. So am I. She would have been the first person to point out that the natural world offers us no warranties. Elaine passed away in 2003. As she lay dying from a brain tumor, drifting in and out of a deepening sleep, her friends pinned snapshots of Fay Avenue Extension to the walls around her bed, and took turns sitting beside her. Perhaps, as she traveled a topology of dreams, she saw the future from the branches of that imaginary tree, high above the savanna of La Jolla.

5. A Life of the Senses: Nature vs. the Know-It-All State of Mind

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.

—JOHN BURROUGHS

CHILDREN NEED NATURE for the healthy development of their senses, and, therefore, for learning and creativity. This need is revealed in two ways: by an examination of what happens to the senses of the young when they lose connection with nature, and by witnessing the sensory magic that occurs when young people—even those beyond childhood—are exposed to even the smallest direct experience of a natural setting.

The Boyz of the Woods

In just a few weeks, a group of boyz of the hood become the boyz of the woods. At the Crestridge Ecological Reserve, 2,600 acres of mountainous California between the cities of El Cajon and Alpine, a dozen members of the Urban Corps, ages eighteen to twenty-five—all but one of them male, all of them Hispanic—follow two middle-aged Anglo women—park docents—through sage and patches of wild berries.

As members of the city-sponsored Urban Corps, they attend a charter school that emphasizes hands-on conservation work. They’ve spent the past few weeks at the nature preserve clearing trails, pulling out non-native plants, learning the art of tracking from a legendary former Border Patrol officer, and experiencing a sometimes baffling explosion of senses. The young people wear uniforms: light-green shirts, dark-green pants, military-style canvas belts. One of the docents wears a blue sunbonnet, the other a baggy T-shirt and day pack.

“Here we have the home of the dusky-footed wood rat,” says Andrea Johnson, a docent who lives on a ridge overlooking this land.

She points at a mound of sticks tucked under poison oak. A wood rat’s nest looks something like a beaver’s lodge; it contains multiple chambers, including specialized indoor latrines and areas where leaves are stored to get rid of toxins before eating. The nests can be as tall as six feet. Wood rats tend to have houseguests, Johnson explains. “Kissing bugs! Oh my, yes,” she says. Kissing bugs, a.k.a. the blood-sucking assassin bug.

“This is one reason you might not want a wood-rat nest near your house. Kissing bugs are attracted to carbon dioxide, which we all exhale. Consequently, the kissing bug likes to bite people around their mouths,” Johnson continues, fanning herself in the morning heat. “The bite eats away the flesh; my husband has a big scar on his face.”

One of the Urban Corpsmen shudders so hard that his pants, fashionably belted far to the south of his hips, try to head farther south.

Leaving the wood-rat’s lair, the docents lead the Urban Corps members through clusters of California fuchsia and laurel sumac into cool woods where a spring seeps into a little creek. Carlos, a husky six-footer with earrings and shaved head, leaps nimbly from rock to rock, his eyes filled with wonder. He whispers exclamations in Spanish as he crouches over a two-inch-long tarantula hawk, a wasp with orange wings, dark-blue body, and a sting considered one of the most painful of any North American insect. This wasp is no Rotarian; it will attack and paralyze a tarantula five times its size, drag it underground, plant a single egg, and seal the chamber on its way out. Later, the egg hatches into a grub that eats the spider alive. Nature is beautiful, but not always pretty.

Several of the young men spent their early childhood in rural Central America or on Mexican farms. Carlos, who now works as a brake technician, describes his grandmother’s farm in Sinaloa, Mexico. “She had pigs, man. She had land. It was fine.” Despite their current urban habitats, these young first- and second-generation immigrants experienced nature more directly when they were small children than have most North Americans. “In Mexico, people know how hard it is to own a piece of land