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

it. When he was growing up in snow-clogged logging camps, the family didn’t eat if his father didn’t hunt. A compact, athletic man with graying hair, an infectious smile, and skin burnished by cold wind and hot sun, Dayton must sometimes feel as if he has slept through a long, hard Arctic night, and awakened in a foreign future in which nothing is named and nature is sold in stores or deconstructed into pure math. He tells me that most of his elite graduate students in marine ecology exhibit “no evidence of training in any type of natural history.” Few upper-division ecology majors or undergraduates in marine ecology “know even major phyla such as arthropods or annelids.”

Sitting a few feet away from him (and farther from Carlos), Bonnie Becker, a National Park Service marine biologist at Cabrillo National Monument, says Dayton’s view is accurate. Recently, she realized that—despite her prior training—she could identify few of the more than one thousand marine invertebrate species that live off Point Loma. So she set up an informal tutoring group, mostly students teaching other students. “Word has gotten out,” she says. “You know, have a beer and teach me everything you know about limpets.” The people who name the animals, or even know the names, are fast becoming extinct. In San Diego and Orange counties, no more than a handful of people can come close to naming a significant number of marine invertebrates, and these are mainly museum workers and docents, and a few local government workers who monitor wastewater treatment and sewage outfalls. These people have little opportunity to pass on their knowledge to a new generation. “In a few years there will be nobody left to identify several major groups of marine organisms,” Dayton says. “I wish I were exaggerating.”

What we can’t name can hurt us. “A guy in Catalina sent me photos of a snail he found,” Dayton says. “The snail is moving north. It’s not supposed to be where the guy found it. Something is going on with this snail or with its environment.” Global warming? Maybe. “But if you don’t know it’s an invasive species, then you detect no change.” It’s easy enough to blame the public schools for a pervading ignorance, but Dayton places much of the responsibility on the dominance of molecular biology in higher education. Not that he has anything against molecular biology, and not that he doesn’t encounter professors who buck the trend. But, he says, the explicit goal of the new philosophy of modern university science education is to get the “ologies”—invertebrate zoology, ichthyology, mammalogy, ornithology, and herpetology—“back in the nineteenth century where they belong.” Shortly after I spoke with Paul Dayton at his Scripps office, he presented a paper, now in high demand as a reprint, at the American Society of Naturalists Symposium. In it he underscores the greater threat:

The last century has seen enormous environmental degradation: many populations are in drastic decline, and their ecosystems have been vastly altered. . . . These environmental crises coincide with the virtual banishment of natural sciences in academe, which eliminate the opportunity for both young scientists and the general public to learn the fundamentals that help us predict population levels and the responses by complex systems to environmental variation. . . . The groups working on molecular biology and theoretical ecology have been highly successful within their own circles and have branched into many specialties. These specialists have produced many breakthroughs important to those respective fields. However . . . this reductionist approach has contributed rather little toward actual solutions for the increasingly severe global realities of declining populations, extinctions, or habitat loss. . . . We must reinstate natural science courses in all our academic institutions to insure that students experience nature first-hand and are instructed in the fundamentals of the natural sciences.

What specifically, I asked Dayton, can be done to improve the situation? His answer was not hopeful. “Not only is there a huge elitist prejudice against natural history and for microbiology, [but] simple economics almost rule out a change, because good natural history classes must be small.” Nonetheless, he hopes that greater public knowledge about the generational nature deficit will encourage politicians to “start demanding that universities teach the fundamentals of biology and explicitly define these fundamentals to include real natural history.”

Unfortunately, finding anybody with enough natural history knowledge to teach such classes will be difficult. Dayton suggests that higher education “offer the courses and hire young professors eager to do the right thing” and organize the older naturalists, fading in number, to mentor the young students “never offered the opportunity to learn any natural history.” At least one organization, the Western Society of Naturalists, has come forward with support for the training of young naturalists. If education and other forces, intentionally or unintentionally, continue to push the young away from direct experience in nature, the cost to science itself will be high. Most scientists today began their careers as children, chasing bugs and snakes, collecting spiders, and feeling awe in the presence of nature. Since such untidy activities are fast disappearing, how, then, will our future scientists learn about nature?

“I fear that they will not,” says Dayton, staring out at that lost horizon. “Nobody even knows that this wisdom about our world has been driven from our students.”

RASHEED SALAHUDDIN, A high school principal who heads my local school district’s one-week outdoor-education program, sees the corrosive effect of nature-fear. “Too many kids are associating nature with fear and catastrophe, and not having direct contact with the outdoors,” he says. Salahuddin brings sixth-graders to the mountains and shows them the wonder. “Some of these kids are from Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. They view the outdoors, the woods, as a dangerous place. They associate it with war, with hiding—or they view it in a solely utilitarian way, as a place to gather firewood.”

Inner-city kids of all ethnic backgrounds show similar responses, he says. Some have never been to the mountains