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

the construction commenced,” writes Brands. “After several hours and much struggling, the jetty was completed, to the boys’ satisfaction and pride. The foreman of the building crew, arriving next morning, was less admiring. A cursory investigation revealed the whereabouts of the missing stones, from which the foreman deduced the identity of those responsible for their removal. The boys were remanded to their parents’ custody and chastisement. . . .” Though young Ben “pleaded the civic usefulness of the construction,” his father pointed out that the first civic virtue was honesty.

Whether the boy learned more about civic honesty or practical rebellion is unclear. But for Ben, as for Erin, nature was a place to use all the senses—and to learn by doing.

7. The Genius of Childhood: How Nature Nurtures Creativity

I played around our yard some and talked to the fence posts, sung songs and made the weeds sing . . .

—WOODY GUTHRIE

ART CRITIC BERNARD BERENSON, echoing the words of the psychologist Erik Erikson, father of human developmental theory, theorized that creativity begins “with the natural genius of childhood and the ‘spirit of place.’” Berenson once described how, as he looked back on his seventy years, and recalled his moments of greatest happiness, they were usually times when he lost himself “all but completely in some instant of perfect harmony”:

In childhood and boyhood this ecstasy overtook me when I was happy out of doors. . . . A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember . . . that I climbed up a stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one. Surely most children are like that. I have retained that faculty through the years.

Robin Moore would agree with Berenson. As an expert in the design of play and learning environments, Moore has written that natural settings are essential for healthy child development because they stimulate all the senses and integrate informal play with formal learning. According to Moore, multisensory experiences in nature help to build “the cognitive constructs necessary for sustained intellectual development,” and stimulate imagination by supplying the child with the free space and materials for what he calls children’s “architecture and artifacts.” “Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity observable in almost any group of children playing in a natural setting,” says Moore.

Early theoretical work in this field was done by Cambridge architect Simon Nicholson, the son of two of Britain’s most prominent twentieth-century artists, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. In a 1990 obituary for Nicholson, the Guardian of London described Nicholson’s contention that everybody is innately creative but that modern society suppresses the creative instinct, while promoting artists as a gifted elite, “who, as it happens, have all the fun.” Nicholson’s “loose-parts” theory has been adopted by many landscape architects and child’s-play experts. Nicholson summed up his theory this way: “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.” A “loose-parts” toy, as Nicholson defined it, is open-ended; children may use it in many ways and combine it with other loose parts through imagination and creativity. A typical list of loose parts for a natural play area might include water, trees, bushes, flowers, and long grasses; a pond and the creatures within it, along with other living things; sand (best if it can be mixed with water); places to sit in, on, under; structures that offer privacy and views. Go beyond that play area, to woods, fields, and streams, and the parts become looser and even more potent to the imagination.

One might argue that a computer, with its near-infinite coding possibilities, is history’s deepest box of loose parts. But binary code, made of two parts—1 and 0—has its limits. Nature, which excites all the senses, remains the richest source of loose parts.

The loose-parts theory is supported by studies of play that compare green, natural play areas with blacktop playgrounds. Swedish studies found that children on asphalt playgrounds had play that was much more interrupted; they played in short segments. But in more natural playgrounds, children invented whole sagas that they carried from day to day to day—making and collecting meaning.

Meanwhile in Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the United States, studies of children in schoolyards with both green areas and manufactured play areas found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas. One of these studies found that a more natural schoolyard encouraged more fantasy and make-believe play in particular, which provided ways for boys and girls to play together in egalitarian ways; another reported that children showed a greater sense of wonder. The researchers defined creative play widely: playing with action figures and dolls; role-playing on imaginary battlefields and planets, and in mythical landscapes with fairies and queens; elaborate jump-rope routines; constructing buildings or objects from loose materials; and exploring the environment. In Denmark, a more recent study compared two groups of children, one in a traditional kindergarten, the other from a “nature kindergarten,” where children remained outside all day long, throughout the school year. Children in the nature kindergarten were found to be more alert, better at using their bodies, and significantly more likely to create their own games.

Researchers have also observed that when children played in an environment dominated by play structures rather than natural elements, they established their social hierarchy through physical competence; after an open grassy area was planted with shrubs, the quality of play in what researchers termed “vegetative rooms” was very different. Children used more fantasy play, and their social standing became based less on physical abilities and more on language skills, creativity, and inventiveness. In other words, the more creative children emerged as leaders in natural play areas.

And, in their