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

survive until spring, the kids are bused north to a stream in the Catskills, where they meet the rural students, and together they release the fish into the wild. An eighth-grader named LaToya told me, “Up there you don’t smell anything like toxic waste. I never saw a reservoir before. It was so beautiful, so clean.”

ONE MORNING I visited the private Children’s School in La Jolla, where teachers, parents, and kids were hard at work on a garden, following the guidelines of a famous expert on gardening who would visit shortly. As the students waited for Mel Bartholomew’s arrival, I asked the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in teacher Tina Kafka’s class what they thought of gardening.

“I think the lettuce you buy at the store tastes better than the lettuce you get from a garden,” said James, a skeptical eleven-year-old. “At the store they wash it real well. They’ve got those spray nozzles going all the time.” James is new to gardening; the school’s is his first. Matt, ten, offered his own critique of gardening. “The problem I have with gardening is it’s not improving, not like technology, not like TVs and computers. All these old wood gardening tools haven’t changed in decades.” Speaking like a true child of the twenty-first century, he added, “Tools should improve.” James and Matt are typical of many youngsters today, particularly the ones who live in Southern California housing tracts with their square-foot backyards. It’s tough for a garden to get a kid’s attention, unless the experience is digital.

In an effort to change that, Kafka and her co-teacher, Chip Edwards, helped their students create a garden based on Bartholomew’s approach. Bartholomew, now a retired civil engineer and efficiency expert, wrote Square Foot Gardening several decades ago. The best-selling book was the basis for a long-running Discovery Channel series on cable TV. People who use his system eschew traditional rows, which made sense for plowing, in favor of square-foot blocks, which lend themselves to more personal care. Gardeners can easily reach the plants in each cluster for planting or weeding. This approach also seems to make more sense for kids, whose arms and reach are shorter. It reduces gardening to a more manageable scale and increases the chance for success. “I ate some lettuce from our school garden,” said Brandon, ten. “I washed it and put some salad dressing on it, and it tasted better than the lettuce you get from the store.”

A classmate, Ben, eleven, added, “I like the radishes out of our garden a lot better. The ones from the store are too spicy.” And Ariana, ten, reported how a gopher attacked a turnip she grew in the school garden. “He hollowed it out!”

I turned to James. “Would any turnip that touched a gopher’s lips touch yours?” “No!” he answered in horror.

Just then, Bartholomew arrived. Bartholomew, who lives in Old Field, New York, is a tall, lanky man with a mustache, thinning hair, and the kindest of eyes; he was accompanied by his sister, Althea Mott, of Huntington Beach. The two of them founded the Square Foot Gardening Foundation, which promotes the therapeutic value of gardening. They visit libraries, nursing homes, churches, and schools.

“Our goal is to have gardening included in every school curriculum,” he explained. “We’re writing programs for all grade levels and all seasons. We want kids to communicate with other gardening kids around the country, first by letter, but eventually through the Internet. We also hope they’ll take gardening home and involve their families.” Wearing jeans and ready to garden, Bartholomew headed out back to the class garden. The kids (including James and Matt, who now seemed particularly eager) moved confidently to their tasks, to weeding and watering. Bartholomew hovered over them, smiling, asking them gently about their crops.

Kafka, who stood to one side, said, “For us, the garden has been much more than simply planting vegetables and taking care of them. It’s been a bonding experience. When we go to the garden as a class at the end of the day, there is a strong feeling of shared joy and peace no matter how hard the day has been.” She described how, one drizzly Monday morning, the students arrived to find that skateboarders had vandalized their garden. “We decided to focus on renewing our garden rather than on whodunit,” said Kafka. After the vandalism, the students named their garden “Eve’s Garden,” after one of their fellow students, who had left the school and whom they missed.

Bartholomew looked proudly at the students working together. “It’s so important for kids to understand where their food comes from,” he said. Suddenly James announced, “My turnip is ready. It’s a big one.”

“James and the Giant Turnip,” someone said.

“Drum roll!”

James grunted and pulled on the turnip until it came loose from the soil. He held it up proudly for all to see, and brushed the dirt from it. Then he held the turnip close to his ear. He knocked on it to see if it was hollow. And he grinned.

Ecoschools

Ideally, school nature programs will go beyond curriculum or field trips: they will involve the initial, physical design of a new school; or the retrofitting of an old school with playscapes that incorporate nature into the central design principle; or, as described earlier, the use of nature preserves by environment-based schools.

The schoolyard habitat movement began in the 1970s, stimulated by environmental education programs, such as Project Learning Tree and Project WILD, and a successful national program in Great Britain called Learning through Landscapes. At least one-third of Britain’s thirty thousand schoolyards have been improved by this program, inspiring a similar program in Canada called Learning Grounds, and a major Swedish program, Skolans Uterum. By 1996, more than forty organizations were involved in natural school-grounds enhancement, according to a survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, one of several major agencies with traditional wildlife conservation missions working in this area. Some organizations, which originated in environmental education, have also forged links with science and education