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

psyche) note that, as Americans become increasingly urbanized, their attitudes toward animals change in paradoxical ways.

To urbanized people, the source of food and the reality of nature are becoming more abstract. At the same time, urban folks are more likely to feel protective toward animals—or to fear them. The good news is that children today are less likely to kill animals for fun; the bad news is that children are so disconnected from nature that they either idealize it or associate it with fear—two sides of the same coin, since we tend to fear or romanticize what we don’t know. Sobel, one of the most important thinkers in the realm of education and nature, views “ecophobia” as one of the sources of the problem.

Explaining Ecophobia

Ecophobia is fear of ecological deterioration, by Sobel’s definition. In its older, more poetic meaning, the word “ecophobia” is the fear of home. Both definitions are accurate.

“Just as ethnobotanists are descending on tropical forests in search of new plants for medical uses, environmental educators, parents, and teachers are descending on second- and third-graders to teach them about the rainforests,” Sobel writes in his volume, Beyond Ecophobia: Reclaiming the Heart in Nature Education. “From Brattleboro, Vermont, to Berkeley, California, schoolchildren . . . watch videos about the plight of indigenous forest people displaced by logging and exploration for oil. They learn that between the end of morning recess and the beginning of lunch, more than ten thousand acres of rainforest will be cut down, making way for fast-food, ‘hamburgerable’ cattle.”

In theory, these children “will learn that by recycling their Weekly Readers and milk cartons, they can help save the planet,” and they’ll grow up to be responsible stewards of the earth, “voting for environmental candidates, and buying energy-efficient cars.” Or maybe not. The opposite may be occurring, says Sobel. “If we fill our classrooms with examples of environmental abuse, we may be engendering a subtle form of dissociation. In our zest for making them aware of and responsible for the world’s problems, we cut our children off from their roots.” Lacking direct experience with nature, children begin to associate it with fear and apocalypse, not joy and wonder. He offers this analogy of dissociation: In response to physical and sexual abuse, children learn to cut themselves off from pain. Emotionally, they turn off. “My fear is that our environmentally correct curriculum similarly ends up distancing children from, rather than connecting them with, the natural world. The natural world is being abused and they just don’t want to have to deal with it.”

To some environmentalists and educators, this is contrarian thinking—even blasphemy. To others, the ecophobia thesis rings true. Children learn about the rain forest, but usually not about their own region’s forests, or, as Sobel puts it, “even just the meadow outside the classroom door.” He points out that “It is hard enough for children to understand the life cycles of chipmunks and milkweed, organisms they can study close at hand. This is the foundation upon which an eventual understanding of ocelots and orchids can be built.”

By one measure, a rain-forest curriculum is developmentally appropriate in middle or high school, but not in the primary grades. Some educators won’t go that far, but they do agree with Sobel’s basic premise that environmental education is out of balance. This issue is at the crux of the curriculum wars, particularly in the area of science. One teacher told me, “The science frameworks bandied about by state and local education boards have swung back and forth between the hands-on experiential approach and factoid learning from textbooks.”

If educators are to help heal the broken bond between the young and the natural world, they and the rest of us must confront the unintended educational consequences of an overly abstract science education: ecophobia and the death of natural history studies. Equally important, the wave of test-based education reform that became dominant in the late 1990s leaves little room for hands-on experience in nature. Although some pioneering educators are sailing against the wind, participating in an international effort to stimulate the growth of nature education in and outside classrooms (which will be described in later chapters), many educational institutions and current educational trends are, in fact, part of the problem.

Silicon Faith

John Rick, who was quoted earlier in these pages about his community’s restrictions on natural play, is a dedicated educator who left engineering to teach eighth-grade math. Rick is dismayed that nature has disappeared from the classroom, except for discussions of environmental catastrophe.

I asked Rick to describe an imaginary classroom saturated with the natural sciences and hands-on nature learning. “I keep coming back to a class devoid of nature,” he answered. “Unfortunately, a class devoid of nature looks just like any classroom you would walk into today. We have industrialized the classroom to the extent that there is no room for nature in the curriculum.” Curriculum standards adopted in the name of school reform restrict many districts to the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. These are vital subjects, of course, but in Rick’s opinion—and I share it—education reform has moved too far from what used to be called a well-rounded education. Rick elaborated:

The society we are molding these kids toward is one that values consumer viability. The works of John Muir, Rachel Carson, or Aldo Leopold are seldom if ever taught to children in the public schools. Even in the sciences, where nature could play such an important role, the students study nature in a dry, mechanized way. How does the bat sonar work, how does a tree grow, how do soil amenities help crops grow? Kids see nature as a lab experiment.

The alternative? I imagine a classroom that turns outward, both figuratively and literally. The grounds would become a classroom, buildings would look outward, and gardens would cover the campus. The works of naturalists would be the vehicle by which we would teach reading and writing. Math and science would be taught as a way to understand the intricacies of