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

its back; aerial photographs taken near Blythe, California, of ancient and mysterious Indian intaglios, carved images so large that they can only be perceived from the air. Across the flanks and back and head of a deer-like intaglio were claw marks left by ATVs. “If only these people knew what they were doing,” said Stebbins.

What upset him most was not the destruction that had already occurred, but the devastation yet to come and the waning sense of awe—or simple respect—toward nature that he sensed in each successive generation. “One time, I was out watching the ATVs. I saw these two little boys trudging up a dune. I went running after them. I wanted to ask them why they weren’t riding machines—maybe they were looking for something else out there. They said their trail bikes were broken. I asked them if they knew what was out there in the desert, if they’d seen any lizards. ‘Yeah,’ one of them said, ‘But lizards just run away.’ These kids were bored, uninterested. If only they knew.”

Even among children who participate in nature activities, a conservation ethic is not assured. In a classroom in Alpine, California, I visited elementary-school pupils who reported spending far more time outside than I had heard reported in most settings across the country. Some of the students in this science class had watched bobcats play on the ridges; one boy had watched a mountain lion thread its way across his parents’ acreage. Many of these young people were growing up in this far exurb in the mountains because their parents wanted them to be exposed to more nature. One boy said, “My mom didn’t like the city because there was hardly any nature, so Mom and Dad decided to move here to Alpine. We live in an apartment. My grandma lives even farther out and she has huge property—most of it is grass, but part of it is just trees. I like to go there, because she has a baby mountain lion that comes down into her yard. When I was there on Sunday, we were going out to feed the goats and we saw a bobcat trying to catch birds. It’s really cool.”

I was glad to find a group of kids who seemed to enjoy nature as much as I had, but as they spoke, it became clear that, for nearly half of them, their favorite interaction with nature was vehicular, on small four-wheel ATVs, or “quads.” “My dad and me ride in the desert and most of the time we don’t follow the tracks. My dad races off-road cars. He says it’s cool to go out there even if you’re on a track because you can still see animals—and also it’s fun to race.” Another boy: “Every August we go to Utah, and my mom’s friend up there has three quads; we ride for the fun of it but mostly to see animals like deer and skunk at night, and if you leave fish guts and go out at night you’ll see, like, five black bears come out. It’s cool.” A third boy: “We go to the desert every weekend and they have races, there’s one hill that nobody rides on because it’s rocky, so we changed it so you go up, then jump off these cliffs; and up there we’ll see snake holes and snakes. On hot days we go out and hunt for lizards.” And a girl, displaying no sense of irony, added: “My dad had a four-wheel-drive truck and we go out in the desert, not out in nature or anything.”

After the bell rang and the students left, Jane Smith, a teacher at the school for five years, and a social worker before that, raised her hands in exasperation. “It always amazes me. Most of these students don’t make the connection that there’s a conflict between ATVs and the land. Even after this project we did a week on energy conservation, and they didn’t get it. Just didn’t see it—and they still don’t. Every weekend, Alpine empties out. Families head for the desert and the dunes. And that’s the way it is.”

Some of these young people, and their parents, are more likely to know the brand names of ATVs than the lizards, snakes, hawks, and cacti of the desert. As my friend, biologist Elaine Brooks, has said, “humans seldom value what they cannot name.” Or experience. What if, instead of sailing to the Galápagos Islands and getting his hands dirty and his feet wet, Charles Darwin had spent his days cooped up in some office cubicle staring at a computer screen? What if a tree fell in the forest and no one knew its biological name? Did it exist?

“Reality is the final authority; reality is what’s going on out there, not what’s in your mind or on your computer screen,” says Paul Dayton, who has been seething for years about the largely undocumented sea change in how science—specifically higher education—perceives and depicts nature. That change will shape—or distort—the perception of nature, and reality, for generations to come. Dayton is a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. He enjoys a worldwide reputation as a marine ecologist and is known for his seminal ecological studies, which he began in the 1960s, of the benthic (sea bottom) communities in the Antarctic. The Ecological Society of America has honored Dayton and colleagues with the prestigious Cooper Ecology Award—marking a first for research of an oceanic system—for addressing “fundamental questions about sustainability of communities in the face of disturbance along environmental gradients.” In 2004, the American Society of Naturalists presented him with the E. O. Wilson Naturalist Award.

Now, he sits in his office on a rainy spring day staring at the Pacific Ocean, dark and cold beyond the Scripps Pier. He has a terrarium in the room, where he keeps a giant centipede named Carlos, to whom Dayton feeds mice. Dayton approaches nature with a sense of awe and respect, but he doesn’t romanticize