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

Teedie’s interest in all “curiosities and living things” became something of a trial to his elders. Meeting Mrs. Hamilton Fish on a streetcar, he absentmindedly lifted his hat, whereupon several frogs leaped out of it, to the dismay of fellow passengers. . . . A protest by a chambermaid forced Teedie to move the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History out of his bedroom and into the back hall upstairs. “How can I do the laundry,” complained the washerwoman, “with a snapping turtle tied to the legs of the sink?”

We may owe Yosemite to that turtle. Like Roosevelt, writer Wallace Stegner filled his childhood with collected critters, often with no thought to the welfare of the species; such were the times. In his essay, “Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood,” he described the prairie town in Saskatchewan that was his home in his early years. His pets or temporary boarders included burrowing owls, magpies, and a black-footed ferret. He spent many of his young days “trapping, shooting, snaring, poisoning, or drowning out the gophers that gathered in our wheat field. . . . Nobody could have been more brainlessly and immorally destructive. And yet there was love there, too.”

In some ways, environmental organizations face the same force of attrition that newspapers now encounter with the aging of their readerships. On average, American newspaper subscribers are in their early and mid-fifties, and climbing, as subscription rates fall. The Sierra Club members’ average age is now pushing fifty, and climbing. In a country whose young are more culturally and ethnically diverse than ever (and nature is valued in radically different ways and degrees among some of these cultures), environmentalists look increasingly old and white. All the more reason for environmental and conservation groups to triple their efforts to reach the young—a topic to be addressed in a later chapter. The immediate challenge, however, is for such organizations to ask themselves if their policies, and cultural attitudes, are subtly adding to the separation.

Other organizations, ones that have traditionally linked children to nature, must ask the same question.

Scouting the Future

Madhu Narayan was three months old when her parents, recent immigrants from India, took her camping for the first time. A few years later, they drove across the West, camping as they went. Narayan figures her parents didn’t have a lot of money, and camping was an inexpensive way to see their nation of choice. “We moved through days of beautiful weather, and then the rains came,” she says. During a lightning storm, the wind blew away the family’s tent, and they slept in the car listening to the banshees of wind and rain howl and crash through the woods. Even now, at thirty, Narayan shivers as she tells this story.

She was shaped by such elemental experiences and the mystery that rode with them. Today, as the outdoor education manager for a sprawling Girl Scouts region—covering the California counties of Imperial and San Diego—she wants to offer natural experiences to girls. But there’s a problem. The traditional perception of Scouting—for girls or boys—is that nature is the star of the show, the organizing principle, the raison d’être; but the raison is shrinking.

At Scout headquarters at San Diego’s Camp Balboa, an urban campground created in 1916, Narayan and Karyl T. O’Brien, associate executive director of the regional Girl Scouts Council, spread out a stack of literature to describe the rich programs they provide to more than thirty thousand girls. Impressive, but over the past three years, membership in the region has remained flat, even as the population has grown precipitously. This region’s council markets itself aggressively. It offers such programs as an overnighter with the city’s natural history museum, a daylong junior naturalist program, and popular summer-camp experiences. But the overwhelming majority of Girl Scout programs are unconcerned with nature. Included (along with selling cookies) are such offerings as Teaching Tolerance, Tobacco Prevention, Golf Clinic, Self-Improvement, Science Festival, EZ Defense, and Financial Literacy. Camp CEO brings businesswomen to a natural setting to mentor girls in job interviewing, product development, and marketing.

The divide between past and future is seen best at the Girl Scout camps in mountains east of the city: one is billed as traditional, with open-air cabins and tents hidden in the trees; the newer camp looks like a little suburbia with street lights. “I flipped when I learned that girls weren’t allowed to climb trees at our camps,” says O’Brien. Liability is an increasing concern. “When I was a kid, you fell down, you got up, so what; you learned to deal with consequences. I broke this arm twice,” says Narayan. “Today, if a parent sends a kid to you without a scratch, they better come back that way. That’s the expectation. And as someone responsible for people, I have to respect that.”

Scouting organizations must also respect, or endure, outrageous increases in the cost of liability insurance. This is not only an American phenomenon; in 2002, Australia’s Scouting organizations Girl Guides and Scouts Australia reported increases of as much as 500 percent in a single year, leading the executive director of Scouts Australia to warn that Scouting could be “unviable” if insurance premiums continued to rise.

Considering the mounting social and legal pressures, Scouting organizations deserve praise for maintaining any link to nature. Narayan pointed out that most of the two thousand girls who attend summer camps are touched by nature, even if indirectly. “But we now feel compelled to put tech labs in camps or computers in a nature center, because that’s what people are used to,” says O’Brien. Scouting is responding to the same pressures experienced by public schools: as family time and free time have diminished, Americans expect these institutions to do more of society’s heavy lifting—more of its social, moral, and political juggling. Ask any Boy Scout how difficult that act can be.

Justly or not, the public image of the Boy Scouts of America has shifted from that of clean-cut boys tying knots and pitching tents to one of