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

over Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton University read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” We don’t have to wait for more, needed, research to act on common sense, or to give the gift of nature—even when it might seem to be too late.

Touching the Sky with a Stick

On a Sunday afternoon, a half-dozen teenagers gathered in defense attorney Daniel Ybarra’s office not far from where I live. These teenagers—several diagnosed with ADHD—were on probation. They looked like your usual troubled teenage suspects: a gang member wearing a white net skullcap and black jersey; a girl with orange hair, her fingernails chewed to the quick; another boy with a black skullcap with a bandana tied around his head. He was wearing a sealskin Tlingit medicine pouch around his neck.

“You gonna carry your bus tokens in that, now?” one of the teens teased.

They had just returned from two chaperoned weeks living with tribal people in Ketchikan, Alaska, and in the southwestern Alaskan village of Kake, population 750. Kake is on an island served by a ferry that comes once every five days. The young people had been ordered to Alaska by a superior court judge who has an interest in alternative approaches to punishment.

For years, Ybarra had dreamed of pulling at-risk kids out of their urban environment and exposing them to nature. With the blessing of the judge, he acted. He persuaded Alaska Airlines to provide inexpensive airline tickets and raised contributions from law school classmates, a professional football player, and the United Domestic Workers union.

Some of the teenagers Ybarra took under his wing had never been to the mountains or beyond earshot of a combustion engine. The farthest one girl had been from her inner city home was a trip to a suburb. Suddenly they were transported to a place of glaciers and takus—storms that come out of nowhere, with winds that can blow a forest flat. They found themselves among grizzlies on the beaches, sea elephants that loomed up from the channel, and bald eagles that sat ten to a branch, as common as sparrows.

Tlingit villages face the sea, as they have for thousands of years, and life still revolves around the ocean’s harvest. Although the Tlingits have their own problems with substance abuse, they retain pieces of what so many young people have lost. The boy with the black skullcap said: “I never seen a place so dark at night. I seen seals, bears, whales, salmon jumpin’—and I caught crabs and oysters, and as soon as we caught ’em, we ate ’em. I felt like I was in a past life.” A girl dressed in neo-hippie garb added: “I never saw a bear before. I’m scared of bears, but when I saw them, I had no stress. I was calm, free. You know what was great? Picking berries. It was addictive. Like cigarettes.” She laughed. “Just the picking, just being out in the bushes.”

One of the young men said he almost refused to get on the airplane to come home. But he returned determined to become an attorney specializing in environmental law.

They learned about sha-a-ya-dee-da-na, a Tlingit word that loosely translates as “self-respect,” by being in nature, and by associating with people who had never been separated from it.

“I met a little boy and spent a lot of time with him,” said one of the young women in the room. She had long, dark hair and eyes as bright as the midnight sun. “One day I was outside—this was right before we went into a sweat lodge—and he asked me, ‘Can you touch the sky with a stick?’ I answered, ‘No, I’m too short.’ He looked at me with disgust and said, ‘You’re weak! How do you know you can’t touch the sky with a stick if you don’t even try?’” Recalling the riddle, the young woman’s eyes widened. “This was the first time I’ve ever been spoken to like that by a four-year-old.”

When she came home, her mother was not at the airport to pick her up. She returned to an empty house.

“Last night, I looked out at the trees and I thought of Kake,” she said.

Anyone who has spent much time around addicts or gang members understands how disarming—and manipulative—they can be. Yet on this afternoon, I saw no evidence of the con artist in their eyes. At least for a while—a day, a week, a year, or perhaps even a lifetime—they were changed.

PART III

THE BEST OF INTENTIONS:

WHY JOHNNIE AND JEANNIE DON’T PLAY OUTSIDE ANYMORE

Our children no longer learn how to read

the great Book of Nature

from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively

with the seasonal transformations of the planet.

They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes.

We no longer coordinate our human celebration with

the great liturgy of the heavens.

—WENDELL BERRY

9. Time and Fear

NOW THAT WE KNOW more about the wide-ranging value of direct experience in nature, it’s time to look deeply into the hurdles that must be crossed to increase that exposure. Some of these obstacles are cultural or institutional—growing litigation, education trends that marginalize direct experience in nature; some are structural—the way cities are shaped. Other barriers are more personal or familial—time pressures and fear, for example. A shared characteristic of these institutional and personal barriers is that those of us who have erected them have usually done so with the best of intentions.

When my son Jason was nine, I picked him up from school one afternoon and we stopped at a neighborhood park to play catch. The expanse of grass was filling up with children’s soccer teams. Jason and I moved from the center to the edge of the park and found a patch of green with no soccer players. We began to toss a ball back and forth. A mother of one of Jason’s classmates approached. I knew this athletic woman; she was extremely committed to her children’s academic and athletic achievements. She drove