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

Learning about birds might lead your youngster to take an interest in other earth sciences: Why not help your child plant several rows of beans in the garden using different composts and fertilizers, or watch and compare three different types of trees budding? The goal is to encourage your youngster to observe, question, and answer.

Is wildlife watching the twenty-first-century expression of our urge to hunt? World Watch associate editor Howard Youth offers a more complex explanation: “When only a few hundred members of a species remain, those last members may ironically attract thousands of humans who paid little attention when the species was common: witness the crowds that gather to observe captive pandas, gorillas, or California condors.”

Nature journaling is also a useful tool for young people. The great naturalist writers John Muir and Aldo Leopold kept nature journals. Beginning at age eleven, Bill Sipple, an ecologist with the Environmental Protection Agency, kept a journal—now two volumes totaling over twelve hundred pages. Early explorer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft trekked across the Ozarks in 1818, and later published a detailed account of his journey. His journals depict a different landscape from what we see today. He vividly described the lush expanses of prairies and his encounters with herds of elk and bison. For more than 150 years, New England anglers have been keeping fishing logs and fishing diaries—and the ecological record kept in these logs is now key to the protection of wild trout streams.

Outdoor journaling is something a family can do together, and it offers reason and focus for being in nature. Linda Chorice, assistant manager at the Missouri Conservation Department’s Springfield Nature Center, points out that journaling demands no special equipment, only a pad of paper or spiral notebook, several pencils, and a pencil sharpener. “While your journal may never be published as a historical document, it will serve as a personal record of your outdoor experiences, allowing you to accurately relive your memories each time you open its cover,” she says.

All of these activities can teach children patience and respect for the other creatures on the planet, even if the lessons take a little time to accrue.

It’s Not the Internet, It’s the Oceans

Not long ago, I learned how one father, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., exposed his kids to nature—through catching, releasing, and watching. Kennedy made his name as an environmental lawyer working with Riverkeeper, an organization that was created to protect the New York City watershed and that has helped bring the Hudson River back from its watery, polluted grave. One of Kennedy’s most notable accomplishments was the New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and the city’s watershed consumers to ensure the purity of the city’s water. As the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, and a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Kennedy has worked on environmental issues throughout the Western Hemisphere. In his spare time, he likes to take his five young children scuba diving in the Hudson. He does something called “buddy diving.”

Kennedy and one of his children descend to the bottom of the river and sit next to a favorite large rock, sheltered from the current. He will hold his child around the shoulders or waist (for the child’s security, and also to feel the child’s breathing) and the two of them will pass the mouthpiece back and forth. They sit down there, next to that rock, embraced by the underwater foliage that dances in the current, and watch the fish go by: the aggressive bass and whiskered catfish, tropical fish released from aquariums (angel fish, especially, and sometimes sea horses), and even an occasional native sturgeon—monstrous, prehistoric, and graceful. For Kennedy, watching the fish go by is a way to distance himself from the pressures that come with his name; it is also a metaphor for how we can experience nature with our children.

As part of my research for an earlier book, I went fishing with Kennedy. I took my sons along in a small boat off the California coastline. And as we fished, Kennedy told me of his earliest experiences as the family’s “nature child,” as he called himself, and how those experiences shaped his fathering. “I spent every afternoon in the woods when I was growing up,” he said. “I loved finding salamanders, crayfish, frogs. My room was filled with aquariums, filled, from when I was six years old. And it still is today. I have a 350-gallon aquarium, and I have aquariums all over my house.” From the Hudson, he and his kids catch catfish, eel, bullheads, sturgeon, striped bass, perch, largemouth, bluefish, and trout—and bring them home live and keep them in their aquariums.

As we headed out to sea, Kennedy spoke passionately for the reconnection of children to nature. “We’re part of nature, and ultimately we’re predatory animals and we have a role in nature,” he said, “and if we separate ourselves from that, we’re separating ourselves from our history, from the things that tie us together. We don’t want to live in a world where there are no recreational fishermen, where we’ve lost touch with the seasons, the tides, the things that connect us—to ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops, and ultimately connect us to God.”

We shouldn’t be worshipping nature as God, he said, but nature is the way that God communicates to us most forcefully. “God communicates to us through each other and through organized religion, through wise people and the great books, through music and art,” but nowhere “with such texture and forcefulness in detail and grace and joy, as through creation,” he said. “And when we destroy large resources, or when we cut off our access by putting railroads along river banks, by polluting so that people can’t fish, or by making so many rules that people can’t get out on the water, it’s the moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last