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

adult leaders who ban gays and expel atheists. Like the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts struggle to be up-to-date—and marketable. At the new National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas, displays use virtual-reality technology to allow visitors to climb a mountain, kayak down a river, and conduct simulated rescues on mountain bikes. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) activists launched a campaign to convince the Boy Scouts to drop their fishing merit badge. In 2001, the Dallas Morning News reported that some Boy Scout councils across the country were selling off wilderness camps to pay their bills.

For the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, it’s not easy being green.

Today’s parents push such organizations toward ever safer, more technological activities. Scouting struggles to remain relevant, to be a one-stop shop, to offer something for just about everyone. That may be a good marketing policy. Or not. (An astute book editor once told me: “A book written for everyone is a book for no one.”) As the scope of Scouting has widened, the focus on nature has narrowed. But a slim minority of parents and Scout leaders is beginning to argue for a back-to-nature movement. “They’re usually the older adults,” says O’Brien, “the ones who can remember a different time.” Could this set of adults offer a targeted marketing opportunity to future capital campaigns? Rather than accept nature’s slide, or suggest that non-nature programs be dropped to make way for the outdoors, why not ask these adults to build a whole new nature wing to Scouting? Interesting possibility, said O’Brien. In fact, it makes sense not only as a marketing tool—define your niche and claim it—but also as a mission.

Scout leaders emphasize that Scouting is an educational program that teaches young people about building character, faith traditions, mentoring, serving others, healthy living, and lifelong learning. Boy Scouts founder Lord Baden-Powell surely sensed that exposure to nature nurtures children’s character and health. The best way to advance those educational goals (and, in a marketing sense, revive Scouting) is a return to the core orientation to nature—an approach that many parents and Scout leaders support.

Narayan is one of them. “In my first counseling job, with another organization, I took children with AIDS to the mountains who had never been out of their urban neighborhoods,” she says. “One night, a nine-year-old woke me up. She had to go to the bathroom. We stepped outside the tent and she looked up. She gasped and grabbed my leg. She had never seen the stars before. “That night, I saw the power of nature on a child. She was a changed person. From that moment on, she saw everything, the camouflaged lizard that everyone else skipped by. She used her senses. She was awake.”

An Attachment Theory

The protection of nature depends on more than the organizational strength of stewardship organizations; it also depends on the quality of the relationship between the young and nature—on how, or if, the young attach to nature.

I often wonder: What am I attached to here in Southern California, other than good friends, good work, and the weather? Certainly what attaches me is not the man-made environment, or most of it, a landscape sliced and diced beyond recognition. I do love the parks and older neighborhoods of my city, particularly on those mornings when the fog softens their edges. And I love the beaches. The Pacific Ocean, resisting change, remains the last wilderness for surfing Southern Californians. It is dependable, always there, but at the same time offering mystery and danger—and some of its creatures are larger than human size or ken. I do not surf, but I understand the attachment surfers feel to the ocean, and once this attachment is made, it is never lost.

When I drive east into the mountains, through Mesa Grande and Santa Ysabel and Julian, I know that these places have entered my heart. They have a mystery distinct from anywhere on Earth. But then always, always, a voice in me says, Don’t get too attached. Because of urban/ suburban sprawl, I have the sense that the fields and streams and mountains that I love here could be gone the next time I drive to the country, and so I cannot entirely commit to them. I wonder about children who either are never attached to nature, or learn to mistrust that attachment early. Do they exhibit similar characteristics or responses?

For twenty-five years, psychologist Martha Farrell Erickson and her colleagues have used what they call “attachment theory,” an ecological model of child development, as the framework for their ongoing longitudinal study of parent-child interaction. They apply those ideas to preventive intervention with parents in high-risk circumstances. The family’s health, related to the health of the surrounding community, has become a growing concern to Erickson.

“The way we usually talk about parent-child attachment is that we rarely see the absence of attachment, even when parents are unreliable, unresponsive, or erratically available. Rather, we see differences in the quality of attachment. For example, a child with a parent who is chronically unresponsive (let’s say a depressed parent, for example) will protect himself from the pain of rejection by detaching, acting disinterested in the parent—developing what we call an anxious-avoidant attachment.”

I suggested to her that some of the same responses or symptoms associated with attachment deficit occur with a poor sense of attachment to land. In my own experience, the rate of development in my part of the country is so fast that attachment to place is difficult; to many of us who came here decades ago (in my case from Kansas), Southern California captures the body, but not the heart. In the world of child development, attachment theory posits that the creation of a deep bond between child and parent is a complex psychological, biological, and spiritual process, and that without this attachment a child is lost, vulnerable to all manner of later pathologies. I believe that a similar process can bind adults to a place and give them a sense of