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

The core of the naturalist intelligence is the human ability to recognize plants, animals, and other parts of the natural environment, like clouds or rocks. All of us can do this; some kids (experts on dinosaurs) and many adults (hunters, botanists, anatomists) excel at this pursuit. While the ability doubtless evolved to deal with natural kinds of elements, I believe that it has been hijacked to deal with the world of man-made objects. We are good at distinguishing among cars, sneakers, and jewelry, for example, because our ancestors needed to be able to recognize carnivorous animals, poisonous snakes, and flavorful mushrooms.

Gardner’s monumental work, which has helped shape public and private education, used findings from neurophysiology research to pinpoint parts of the brain that correlate to each identified intelligence; he showed that humans could lose one of the specific types of intelligence through disease or injury. Naturalist intelligence is not as clearly linked to biological evidence.

“Were I granted another lifetime or two, I would like to rethink the nature of intelligence with respect to our new biological knowledge, on the one hand, and our most sophisticated understanding of the terrain of knowledge and societal practice, on the other,” he wrote in 2003.

The Montessori movement, along with other education approaches, has made this connection for decades. However, the impact of nature experience on early childhood development is, in terms of neuroscience, understudied. Gardner’s designation of the eighth intelligence suggests another rich arena for research, but his theory has immediate application for teachers and parents who might otherwise overlook the importance of natural experience to learning and child development.

Professor Leslie Owen Wilson teaches courses in educational psychology and theories of learning in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin. Her university offers one of the premier graduate programs in environmental education. She, for one, awaits more definitive biological evidence. Nonetheless, she offers a list of descriptors for children with the eighth intelligence. Such children, she writes:

1. Have keen sensory skills, including sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

2. Readily use heightened sensory skills to notice and categorize things from the natural world.

3. Like to be outside, or like outside activities like gardening, nature walks, or field trips geared toward observing nature or natural phenomena.

4. Easily notice patterns from their surroundings—likes, differences, similarities, anomalies.

5. Are interested in and care about animals or plants.

6. Notice things in the environment others often miss.

7. Create, keep, or have collections, scrapbooks, logs, or journals about natural objects—these may include written observations, drawings, pictures and photographs, or specimens.

8. Are very interested, from an early age, in television shows, videos, books, or objects from or about nature, science, or animals.

9. Show heightened awareness of and concern for the environment and/or for endangered species.

10. Easily learn characteristics, names, categorizations, and data about objects or species found in the natural world.

Some teachers, as we will see later, are making good use of their knowledge of the eighth intelligence. However, the problem with such a helpful list of indicators is that some adults may incorrectly use it to interpret naturalistic intelligence as a separate intelligence, one somehow relegated to a stereotype: Nature Boy or Nature Girl, the kids who collect snakes or hover over the classroom aquarium (if the classroom is lucky enough to have one). It’s unlikely that Ben Franklin’s teachers thought of him as a Nature Boy, but surely his intensified senses and ability to see natural connections were related to his transcendent experiences in nature. Children are able to attune themselves to all kinds of learning if they have appropriate developmental experiences.

Gardner has drawn needed attention to the fact that intelligence should not be narrowly defined as linguistic or logical-mathematical. Further, he emphasizes that children may have several of the eight intelligences, or all, in different degrees. Wilson’s first descriptor is “keen sensory skills.” Certainly all the intelligences teach children to pay attention, but as we will see in a later chapter, there is probably something peculiar to experiences in nature that work particularly well in attuning attention—and not only because nature is interesting.

Janet Fout, a West Virginia environmental activist, told me that when her daughter was small she encouraged her to note the details, to detect them with all of her senses. Janet’s own affinity with the natural world began early. Now in her early fifties, Janet was raised in her grandmother’s house in town. Her grandmother had moved there after forty years of harsh living in rural West Virginia. The simple white house was fronted by one of the few remaining dirt roads in Huntington. Day and evening, she and the other kids in her neighborhood spent hours playing hide-and-seek or freeze-tag. A water maple in the front yard offered her a branch low enough to grab, wrap a leg around, and pull herself up, and served as her personal hideout and escape, “a place where I could contemplate my life and future, undisturbed, and feed my wild, wild dreams.” Her recollections are rich with sensory learning, with paying attention:

My Grandma generally had to threaten a switching to get me to come inside, and the sinuous willow tree in our neighbor’s yard provided her with all the fine keen switches she needed to coerce me—even when the weather turned “bad.” What we call “bad” weather now was seen by me as an opportunity. I never judged the weather then but took advantage of the shifting winds. Summer rains sent me charging inside in search of a swimsuit and back outside to drench myself, fully clothed if my swimsuit wasn’t found. Rain on the dirt road at Twelfth Street had a smell all its own—different as it hit the gray dirt instead of asphalt, bricks, or concrete.

When rainfall was especially heavy, I headed for Monroe Avenue, where backed-up storm drains would provide an instant “swimming pool” with thigh-high water where I waded and splashed. Leaves became sailing ships that dodged the perils of being swept away