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

pond, a vacant and overgrown lot—and go there, regularly. Churchman repeats an old Indian saying: “It’s better to know one mountain than to climb many.”

In The Thunder Tree, Robert Michael Pyle describes his childhood haunt, a century-old irrigation channel near his home. The ditch, he writes, was his “sanctuary, playground, and sulking walk,” his “imaginary wilderness, escape hatch, and birthplace as a naturalist.”

Many of us can remember the small galaxies we adopted as children, the slope behind the neighborhood, the strand of trees at the end of the street. My first special place, like Pyle’s, was a ditch, a ravine—dark with mystery, lined with grapevine swings, elms, and tangled bramble. I sat with my dog for hours at the edge of the ravine, poking the dirt, listening to unseen creatures move far below, studying ants as they marched into the abyss. To a four-year-old, such a ravine is as deep and wide and peculiar as the Grand Canyon will be to that same boy decades later.

These are the “places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin,” Pyle writes. These are the “secondhand lands, the hand-me-down habitats where you have to look hard to find something to love.” Richard Mabey, a British writer and naturalist, calls such environments, undeveloped and unprotected, the “unofficial countryside.” Such habitats are often rich with life and opportunities to learn; in a single decade, Pyle recorded some seventy kinds of butterflies along his ditch.

What if your child has yet to discover such a special place? Then form a joint expedition into the small unknowns—not a forced march, but a mutual adventure. “The kid who yawns when you say ‘Let’s go outside’ may be intrigued enough” to follow you on a trip to gather twigs for making tea, counsels Deborah Churchman.

Encourage your child to get to know a ten-square-yard area at the edge of a field, pond, or pesticide-free garden. Look for the edges between habitats: where the trees stop and a field begins; where rocks and earth meet water. Life is always at the edges. Together, sit at the edge of a pond in August—don’t move; wait. Wait some more and watch the frogs reappear one at a time. Use all of your senses. Wander through an overgrown garden, woods, or field in October. Together, keep a journal; encourage your child to describe, in words and pictures, that tattered bumblebee staggering across autumn leaves, or the two gray squirrels rushing to gather moss and twigs for their winter nests. Ask each other: What was happening in this same spot in June? Did that bumblebee, a bumblebee-lifetime ago, bend flowers as it gathered pollen? If she wishes to, your child can draw outlines of leaves or clouds—or frogs. Later, at home, she can color the drawings and press a flower between the pages, and add details about the weather. Or, she can write a tale from the point of view of the bee: What was it thinking as it looked at you looking at it? What would its summer diary say?

Take a “moth walk,” Churchman suggests. “In a blender, mix up a goopy brew of squishy fruit, stale beer or wine (or fruit juice that’s been hanging around too long), and sweetener (honey, sugar, or molasses) . . . Then take a paintbrush and a child or two, and go outside at sunset. Slap some of this goo on at least a half-dozen surfaces—trees are best, but any unpainted and untreated wood will do. Come back when it’s really dark, and look at what you lured. You’ll usually find a few moths, along with several dozen ants, earwigs, and other insects.” With help from Internet sites dedicated to birding, track bird migrations. In the winter, look for hibernating insects, galls, or the burrows of animals in or near trees. In the spring, with your child, catch tadpoles, transfer them to an aquarium, and watch them transform into frogs—then return the frogs to the wild. Visit them in August. And hunt for nests abandoned by birds in the fall, and search for the big nests that squirrels make in the fall—because they usually bear their young in the winter.

Gardening is another traditional way to introduce children to nature. Judy Sedbrook, a master gardener at Colorado State University Cooperative Extension, advises parents to encourage youthful enthusiasm by planting seeds that mature quickly and are large enough for a child to handle easily: “Vegetables are a good choice for young children. They germinate quickly and can be eaten when mature. . . . Children may even be encouraged to eat vegetables that they have grown and would otherwise avoid. If you have enough room in the garden, gourds are a good choice. After harvesting, they can be decorated and used as bird-houses.” A unique gardening project is the sunflower house. In an eight-by-eight-foot square, parents and kids can plant sunflower seeds or seedlings in a shallow moat, alternating varieties that grow about eight feet high with ones that grow to four feet. You can also plant a few corn plants among the sunflowers; corn discourages Carpophilus beetles, and the sunflowers protect the corn from army worms. Inside, plant a carpet of white clover. As a child plays within the containing protection of the sunflower house, bees, butterflies, and other insects will congregate at the blooms above. Plant seeds of indigenous pollinating plants that provide nectar, as well as roosting and nesting sites, and also help increase the number of pollinating birds and insects. This activity can strengthen interrupted pollination corridors and help reestablish the migration paths of butterflies and hummingbirds; and your child can become a participant in the winged migration, not just an observer.

Capturing Time

Time is the key. It’s far easier to recommend that parents take more time for nature than it is for the families to capture that diminished resource. Still, this is not an insurmountable