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

carry semiautomatic weapons. Also in 1998, in the Great Smoky Mountains, a deranged landscaper who enjoyed singing gospel music shot and killed National Park Service ranger Joe Kolodski. Elsewhere, two park rangers were shot, one fatally, in Oregon’s Oswald West State Park.

Movies tap into this fear. The 1930s Wolfman seems mild compared with the terror exploited in the lengthening string of summer-camp slasher films or The Blair Witch Project, a horror movie set in the forest.

Jerry Schad, a naturalist of repute and the author of a series of Afoot and Afield guides to the Southern California backcountry, works tirelessly to help young people bond with the natural world. He reports:

Every semester I invite the students in my Survey of Physical Science course at Mesa College on a trip to Mt. Laguna Observatory. The students are required to write a short report on what they learned or what impressed them the most. As the years go by, fewer and fewer students have any notion of what is out there one hour east of San Diego. Relatively few now have ever seen the Milky Way until (perhaps) the date of the trip. Most are very impressed with what they see and learn, but for a significant number the trip is downright frightening. Several have mentioned the trees in the forest at dusk in the same sentence as Blair Witch Project.

Real dangers do exist in nature, but the threat is greatly exaggerated by the media. Reality is different. Take the park scare, for example.

Joe Kolodski was only the third U.S. Park Service ranger killed in the line of duty in the agency’s eighty-two-year history. As the Seattle Times reports, the crime rate in the Olympic National Park “wasn’t exactly a crime wave,” considering that the park counted 4.6 million visits. No city that size could claim so little crime.

In fact, the crime rate is falling in most wilderness parks. From 1990 to 1998, reported robberies in the national parks dropped from 184 to 25, murders from 24 to 10, and rapes from 92 to 29. Yosemite is, in fact, one of the safest of the nation’s parks. The killing of the young naturalist in Yosemite, though tragic, was the first murder reported there in a decade.

Worried about lions, tigers, and bears? The number of attacks is minuscule. Or West Nile virus? Mosquitoes, who love a good night-light, can transfer that bug indoors, too. And the brown recluse spider—often more deadly than any rattlesnake—prefers staying indoors. Brown recluse spiders take refuge in clothing that has been placed on the floor; they bite when trapped and pressed between the individual’s skin and clothing. We may fear the outdoors, but kids may generally face more dangers in their own home. The Environmental Protection Agency now warns us that indoor air pollution is the nation’s number one environmental threat to health—and it’s from two to ten times worse than outdoor air pollution. A child indoors is more susceptible to spores of toxic molds growing under that plush carpet; or bacteria or allergens carried by household vermin; or carbon monoxide, radon, and lead dust. The allergen level of newer, sealed buildings can be as much as two hundred times greater than that of older structures. Pediatric Nursing journal reports that those indoor ball-pit playgrounds at the fast-food restaurants can spread serious infectious diseases: “Although these commercial food establishments must adhere to the Food and Drug Administration’s model of sanitation and food protection,” none of their guidelines followed the “Centers for Disease Control recommendations for cleaning and disinfecting the areas in which these children play.”

Ironically, a generation of parents fixated on being buff is raising a generation of physical weaklings. Two-thirds of American children can’t pass a basic physical: 40 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls ages six to seventeen can’t manage more than one pull-up; and 40 percent show early signs of heart and circulation problems, according to a recent report by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

So where is the greatest danger? Outdoors, in the woods and fields? Or on the couch in front of the TV? A blanket wrapped too tightly has its own consequences. One is that we may end up teaching our children, in the same breath, that life is too risky but also not real—that there is a medical (or if that fails, a legal) remedy for every mistake. In 2001, the British Medical Journal announced that it would no longer allow the word “accident” to appear in its pages, based on the notion that when most bad things happen to good people, such injuries could have been foreseen and avoided, if proper measures had been taken. Such absolutist thinking is not only delusional, but dangerous.

11. Don’t Know Much About Natural History: Education as a Barrier to Nature

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.

—THOMAS HUXLEY

DAVID SOBEL TELLS this story: A century ago, a boy ran along a beach with his gun, handmade from a piece of lead pipe. From time to time, he would stop, aim, and shoot at a gull. Today, such activity would be cause for time spent in juvenile hall, but for young John Muir, it was just another way to connect with nature. (Muir, it should be noted, was a bad shot, and apparently never killed a seagull.) Muir went on to become one of the initiators of modern environmentalism.

“Whenever I read Muir’s description of shooting at seagulls to my students, they’re shocked. They can’t believe it,” says Sobel, co-director of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch New England Graduate School. He uses this example to illustrate just how much the interaction between children and nature has changed. Practitioners in the new fields of conservation psychology (focused on how people become environmentalists) and ecopsychology (the study of how ecology interacts with the human