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

degrees of experience. It is possible, she writes, that the developing consciousness of all children involves what Cobb described as a dynamic sense of relationship with their place. “Only in some children, however, is this experience so intense that it burns itself into memory to animate adult life.” For example, businesspeople and politicians report less emphasis on nature experiences in early childhood than do artists. This does not mean that early childhood experiences in nature do not shape future politicians or captains of industry; they may just be less likely to report them. Certainly the biographies of Edison and Benjamin Franklin suggest that the very foundations of modern industry and design grew first in the waters and woods and farmlands of childhood.

Chawla has not rejected Cobb’s theory, but argues instead that the relationship between creativity and environment is more complex than Cobb imagined. For example, transcendent childhood experiences in nature were “never reported when a child did not enjoy freedom within an alluring natural or urban environment.” Transcendence did not require spectacular scenery, “but could be evoked by environments as small as a patch of weeds at the edge of a sleeping porch, or during freedom as brief as an escape [into nature] during a school outing.”

Chawla’s own research further suggests a deep but still vaguely understood link between creativity and early experiences in nature. “The good thing, from what we are finding, is that nature isn’t only important to future geniuses,” she says. So-called regular people also report these transcendent moments in nature. “Many threads come together to form the final creative fabric, and experience in nature is one of them.”

In her more recent work, Chawla explores “ecstatic places.” She uses the word “ecstatic” in its original meaning. The contemporary synonym is delight or rapture, but the word’s ancient Greek roots—ek statis—as some sources have it, mean “outstanding” or “standing outside ourselves.” These ecstatic moments of delight or fear, or both, “radioactive jewels buried within us, emitting energy across the years of our lives,” as Chawla eloquently puts it, are most often experienced in nature during formative years.

Author Phyllis Theroux wrote a moving description of an ecstatic moment she had on a sleeping porch, as she watched a clump of weeds lit by morning sun, the cockleburs “like bumblebees quivering on harp wires . . . golden, translucent, amazing sheaves of wheat. The light drove down the shafts of the stalks, making a cool fire of the dew that collected at the roots. My eyes would contemplate the cockleweeds without searching for the adjectives that even now elude me. I would simply hang off the mattress, staring at the sight, getting my bearings, not knowing why.” Theroux continued:

Could it be, and this is the question of a speculative, unmarveling adult, that every human being is given a few signs like this to tide us over when we are grown? Do we all have a bit or piece of something that we instinctively cast back on when the heart wants to break upon itself and causes us to say, “Oh yes, but there was this,” or “Oh yes, but there was that,” and so we go on?

Reviewing the conditions in which ecstatic memories are made, Chawla was “struck by the fragility of their setting.” Ecstatic memories require space, freedom, discovery, and “an extravagant display for all five senses.” When these requirements are met, even in cities, nature nurtures us. And behind these requirements hover “that difficult-to-define yet effusive quality of loveliness. . . . This combination of conditions cannot be taken for granted.” Ecstatic places offer our children, and us, even more than Cobb suggested. As Chawla explains, ecstatic memories give us “meaningful images; an internalized core of calm; a sense of integration with nature; and for some, a creative disposition. Most of these benefits are general human advantages, whether or not we make our way in the world as creative thinkers.”

Playgrounds for Poets

Most children today are hard-pressed to develop a sense of wonder, to induce what Berenson called the “spirit of place” while playing video games or trapped inside a house because of the fear of crime. Asked to name their favorite special places, children often describe their room or an attic—somewhere quiet. A common characteristic of special places is quietness, peacefulness, Chawla emphasizes. So finding wonder outside of nature is surely possible. But electronics or the built environment do not offer the array of physical loose parts, or the physical space to wander.

Many years ago, I interviewed Jerry Hirshberg, founding director and president of Nissan Design International, the Japanese auto company’s design center in America. This was one of several such centers established by Japan’s car manufacturers up and down the California coast. When I asked Hirshberg why these centers existed, he explained that the Japanese know their strengths and ours: their specialty was tight, efficient manufacturing; ours was design. The Japanese, said Hirshberg, recognized that American creativity comes largely from our freedom, our space—our physical space and our mental space. He offered no academic studies to support his theory; nonetheless, his statement rang true, and it has stayed with me. Growing up, many of us were blessed with natural space and the imagination that filled it.

America’s genius has been nurtured by nature—by space, both physical and mental. What happens to the nation’s intrinsic creativity, and therefore the health of our economy, when future generations are so restricted that they no longer have room to stretch? One might argue that the Internet has replaced the woods, in terms of inventive space, but no electronic environment stimulates all the senses. So far, Microsoft sells no match for nature’s code.

Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees. What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family’s garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and