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

natural landscape remained to at least provide the opportunity for outside play. Surely kids still played in nature here? Not often, said several parents, who came together in a living room one evening to talk about the new landscape of childhood. Though several lived on the same block, this was the first time that some of these parents had met each other.

“When our kids were in third or fourth grade, we still had a little field behind our place,” said one mother. “The kids were complaining about being bored. And I said, ‘Okay, you guys are bored? I want you to go out to that field, right there, and spend two hours. Find something to do there. Trust me; just try it one time. You might enjoy yourselves.’ So, begrudgingly, they went out to the field. And they didn’t come back in two hours—they came back much later. I asked them why, and they said, ‘It was so much fun! We never dreamed we could have so much fun!’ They climbed trees; they watched things; they chased each other; they played games like we used to do when we were young. So the next day, I said, ‘Hey, you guys are bored—why not go out to the field again?’ And they answered, ‘Nah—we’ve already done that once.’ They weren’t willing to let themselves do it again.”

“I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re saying,” responded a father. “I think that my girls enjoy things like a full moon, or a pretty sunset, or flowers. They enjoy the trees when they turn—that sort of thing.”

Another mother in the group shook her head. “Sure, the little things, they notice,” she said. “But they’re distracted.” She described the last time her family had gone skiing, in Colorado. “It was a perfect, quiet day, the kids are skiing down the mountain—and they’ve got their headphones on. They can’t enjoy just hearing nature and being out there alone. They can’t make their own entertainment. They have to bring something with them.”

A quiet father, who had been raised in a farming community, spoke up.

“Where I grew up, a person was just naturally outdoors all the time,” he said. “No matter which direction you went, you were outdoors—you were in a plowed field, or woods, or streams. We’re not like that here. Overland Park is a metropolitan area now. Kids haven’t lost anything, because they never had it in the first place. What we’re talking about here is a transition made by most of us who grew up surrounded by nature. Now, nature’s just not there anymore.”

The group fell quiet. Yes, much of that once-wild land was being graded and built upon—but I could see woods from the windows of the house in which we were sitting. Nature was still out there. There was less of it, to be sure, but it was there just the same.

A day after talking with the Overland Park parents, I drove across the Kansas-Missouri border to Southwood Elementary School in Raytown, Missouri, near Kansas City. I attended grade school at Southwood. To my surprise, the same swings (or so it seemed) still creaked above the hot asphalt; the hallways still shone with the same linoleum tile; the same pint-sized wooden chairs, carved and initialed with black, blue, and red ink, sat waiting in crooked rows.

As the teachers gathered second- through fifth-graders and escorted them into the classroom where I waited, I unpacked my tape recorder and glanced out the window at the blue-green ridge of trees, probably pin oak, maple, cottonwood, or perhaps pecan or honey locust, their limbs shivering and swaying slowly in the spring breeze. How often, as a child, had those very trees inspired my daydreams?

During the next hour, as I asked the young people about their relationship with the outdoors, they described some of the barriers to going outside—lack of time, TV, the usual suspects. But the reality of these barriers did not mean that the children lacked curiosity. In fact, these kids spoke of nature with a strange mixture of puzzlement, detachment, and yearning—and occasional defiance. In the years to come, I would hear this tone often.

“My parents don’t feel real safe if I’m going too deep in the woods,” said one boy. “I just can’t go too far. My parents are always worrying about me. So I’ll just go, and usually not tell ’em where I’m going—so that makes ’em mad. But I’ll just sit behind a tree or something, or lie in the field with all the rabbits.”

One boy said computers were more important than nature, because computers are where the jobs are. Several said they were too busy to go outside. But one girl, a fifth-grader wearing a plain print dress and an intensely serious expression, told me she wanted to be a poet when she grew up.

“When I’m in the woods,” she said, “I feel like I’m in my mother’s shoes.”

She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty—and refuge. “It’s so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it’s polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it’s completely different there,” she said. “It’s like you’re free when you go out there. It’s your own time. Sometimes I go there when I’m mad—and then, just with the peacefulness, I’m better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn’t even know why.”

Then she described her special part of the woods.

“I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I’d dug a big hole there, and sometimes I’d take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I’d fall asleep back in there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down