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

Sometimes, the catalyst is a principal with vision. At Torrey Pines Elementary School, near where I live, a committed young principal and his students adopted a nearby canyon. “We get the classes down here touching, tasting, smelling, tracking. It’s hard to get twenty-six kids to be quiet, but we do it,” said Dennis Doyle, the principal. He believes that encouraging more hands-on experience with nature is a better way to introduce children to science than relying just on textbooks. In fact, he explained, during the nineteenth century, nature study, as it was called, dominated elementary school science teaching. Now that nature study has been largely shoved aside by the technological advances of the twentieth century, an increasing number of educators have come to believe that technically oriented, textbook-based science education is failing.

At Torrey Pines Elementary, sixth-grade classes were scoring poorly on the hands-on portion of a science test given nationwide by the National Teachers Association. So Doyle and his staff decided on a radical tactic. They would restore the canyon behind the school to its natural state to create an outdoor classroom and nature trail. The idea was to help kids experience the kind of intimacy with nature that many of their parents enjoyed, and to improve science education—to make it immediate and personal.

On their forays into the canyon, work teams of kids, teachers, and parents ripped out the plants not native to the area, including pampas grass and Hottentot fig (commonly known as ice plant). Spanish sailors probably brought Hottentot fig to California. It is an edible and hardy plant rich in vitamin C, useful in the prevention of scurvy, explained a docent from nearby Torrey Pines State Park, who had teamed up with the school. Many people believe the Hottentot fig, a ground cover, prevents soil erosion, but, because of weighty water content in finger-like leaves, the plant can pull down a steep embankment. In this canyon, for this fig, the jig was up. The students returned the canyon habitat to native plants, including Torrey pines, yucca, cacti, and chaparral. The schoolchildren grew seedlings in their classes for later replanting.

One weekend, thirty parents worked in the canyon alongside the kids. Half of the parents were from wealthy nearby neighborhoods, the other half from the less affluent neighborhoods from which some of the students were bused. They hacked away at the pampas grass with machetes, all pushing and pulling together. “That kind of experience binds people together more than any formal integration program,” Doyle said.

Doyle tries to keep the kids’ canyon forays as relaxed as possible, and his adult view of nature minimized. As we walked through the canyon behind the school one day, he asked the kids questions, but didn’t give the answers.

“Look at these twigs,” said a boy named Darren. “It looks like one twig is dead, but one is alive.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Doyle.

Darren launched into an elaborate and erroneous theory.

“That’s an interesting theory.”

Darren trailed after Doyle, excitedly checking other twigs. In this special classroom, imagination was more important than technical precision.

IN 1999, I MET a remarkable woman named Joan Stoliar. She lived in Greenwich Village with her husband, appeared to be in her sixties, had battled two types of cancer, and often traveled the streets of New York, with her high heels and fish-shaped earrings, astride her Lambretta motor scooter. A few months before cancer finally claimed her life, I accompanied her on a visit to a classroom at Intermediate School 318 in Brooklyn, where a cluster of seventh-graders attended four hundred trout fingerlings. The students hovered over the aquarium, set up to replicate a piece of trout stream.

For decades, Stoliar was one of the grande dames of the tweedy, traditional New York fly-fishing culture. She was probably the first woman to join the old, distinguished Theodore Gordon Flyfishers club. She talked the club into sponsoring New York State’s trout-in-the-classroom program—with the help of Trout Unlimited, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Hudson River Foundation, and Catskill Watershed Corporation.

Such programs—which began in California—have been springing up around the nation over the past decade. Their goal: to enliven biology and to connect kids to nature. The New York effort matches city kids with country kids, in what Stoliar called “a social experiment in creating sensitivity at both ends of the water tunnel.” Several hundred students in ten inner-city New York schools and eight upstate schools work together to raise the trout and replant streams.

“This program gives city kids an appreciation for nature, but also teaches them about the source of their drinking water. They become watershed children,” she said. In October, each school received several hundred fertilized brown trout eggs from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation; the hatchery director even gave the kids his home number in case anything went wrong. Students placed the eggs in tanks designed to re-create the habitat of a trout stream.

In Brooklyn’s eight-foot piece of stream, a pump pushed water over rounded rocks and aquatic plants, and routed it through a chiller to keep it at a steady forty-nine degrees. Above the water, in a canopy of screening, insects hatched, rose, and fell. A “trout-cam” sent magnified images of the fish to an adjacent TV. The students cared for the trout and checked water temperature and pH level and other factors that can kill the eggs or fish. Stoliar called what the kids were learning “instant parenting.”

In January of that year, the kids reported their progress on their class Web page: “We saw caddis fly larvae eating a dead trout [and] we found a large fry with a trout tail sticking out of its mouth—it probably ate a smaller fish. Lot of dining action! About 42 fish have died in 1999 but we still have over 400 fish.” As the trout grew, the rural and urban kids traded letters and e-mail about their progress. “We hope they remain friends for years, and maybe even fish in the same streams together someday,” Stoliar said.

Each year, if the delicate trout