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

or the beach—or the zoo, even though it’s within sight of their homes. Some of them spend their entire childhood inside an apartment, living in fear. They associate nature with the neighborhood park, which is controlled by gangs. “What does this say about our future?” asks Salahuddin. “Nature has been taken over by thugs who care absolutely nothing about it. We need to take nature back.”

12. Where Will Future Stewards of Nature Come From?

[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

—NATURALIST ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE

RECENTLY, I ASKED A committed and effective environmentalist—a person active in the creation of Southern California’s ocean-to-mountains San Dieguito River Park—this question: When the park is completed, and the vast stretches of land and water are preserved, how will kids play in it?

“Well, they’ll go hiking with their parents . . .” He paused.

Would a kid be able to wander freely on this land, and, say, build a tree house? My friend became pensive.

“No, I don’t think so—I mean, there are plenty of more constructive ways to experience nature.” When asked how he first interacted with the outdoors, the environmentalist answered, sheepishly, “I built forts and tree houses.”

He understands the paradox here, but does not know quite what to do about it. Many of the traditional activities in nature are destructive. To some people, building a tree house or a fort in the woods is not much different than running quads across the dunes. The difference is one of degree: one way of experiencing joy in nature excites the senses, the other way drowns the senses in noise and fumes, and leaves tracks that will last thousands of years.

Working through such distinctions is not easy, but as the care of nature increasingly becomes an intellectual concept severed from the joyful experience of the outdoors, you have to wonder: Where will future environmentalists come from?

If environmental groups, along with Scouting and other traditional outdoors-oriented organizations, wish to pass on the heritage of their movement, and the ongoing care of the earth, they cannot ignore children’s need to explore, to get their hands dirty and their feet wet. And they must help reduce the fear that increasingly separates children from nature.

Until recently, most environmental organizations offered only token attention to children. Perhaps their lack of zeal stems from an unconscious ambivalence about children, who symbolize or represent overpopulation. So goes the unspoken mantra: We have met the enemy and it is our progeny. As Theodore Roszak, author of The Voice of the Earth, has said: “Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people. . . . I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely . . . [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don’t shame them further.”

That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident—but more often than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world. One often overlooked value of children is that they constitute the future political constituency, and their attention or vote—which is ultimately based more on a foundation of personal experience than rational decision-making—is not guaranteed.

Take, as just one example, our national parks.

Welcome to Matrix National Park

To a new generation, the idea of camping at Yosemite is a quaint notion and brings to mind those ancient reruns of Lucy, Desi, Fred, and Ethel banging around in their Airstream trailer. Some of the largest parks are reporting a peculiar drop-off in attendance over the past few years—a trend that predates the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Such a decrease would seem to be good news for overcrowded parks choking on exhaust fumes. But there’s a hidden, long-term danger.

First, the numbers. Overall visits to the national park system, which had grown steadily since the 1930s, dropped approximately 25 percent between 1987 and 2003. With 3.4 million visitors in 2006, Yosemite National Park drew nearly 20 percent fewer people than its peak attendance ten years earlier, this despite California adding 7 million people in that period. The number of visitors topped out at the Grand Canyon in 1991, Yellowstone in 1992, and Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park in 1995. Mount Rainier National Park attendance dropped from 1.6 million visitors in 1991 to 1.3 million in 2002. Since the late 1980s, the number of Carlsbad Caverns National Park visitors plummeted by nearly half.

The most important reason for the decline, I believe, is the break between the young and nature—the transition from real-world experience to virtual nature. In 2006, Oliver Pergams, a conservation biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Patricia Zaradic, a research associate, analyzed the falling numbers. They reported that 97.5 percent of the drop in attendance is due to the increased time Americans spend plugged into electronics. They found that, in 2003, the average American devoted 327 more hours to electronic pursuits than he or she did in 1987. Pergams and Zaradic warn of what they call “videophilia”—a shift from loving streams (biophilia) to loving screens. But a Northern Arizona University study of the nation’s parks names two central barriers: shortage of family time and a widely held perception that parks are for viewing scenery, period. Other reasons include shorter vacations; the shrinking American road trip (from 3.5 to 2.5 days); a decline in park budgets and services; and increased entrance fees, as of this writing as high as twenty-five dollars per car.

The idea of working at a national park once conjured up rustic romanticism in the hearts of young Americans. That perception may have changed. In 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported a new phenomenon: “Concession managers in Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone national parks bring in hundreds of foreign workers annually from Eastern Europe,