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

Paul Brainerd, a proliferation of smaller-scale child/nature preserves is possible and practical—given the high cost of brick-and-mortar classrooms.

The future of education, said Candy Vanderhoff, is in the outdoors. I walked with her as she headed through the cool woods down a little ravine and watched students spread out in solitude, writing, listening. Vanderhoff is an architect whose side specialty is indigenous shelters. Her personal goal is to photograph and catalogue South Sea island huts before they fade away forever. Several years ago, she found her way to Tijuana, Mexico, to help internationally respected artist James Hubbell create a school of earth and stone and tiles. In 2001, Hubbell urged her to take a lead role in a program for teenagers at Crestridge Ecological Reserve, a 2,600-acre parcel of mountainous land near El Cajon, California—the same place I visited with the boyz of the woods.

Crestridge is a new kind of park—part day camp, part nature preserve—a type that some communities across the country are creating and a model for what others should create.

Here, a partnership of several organizations, including Granite Hills High School, a conservation organization called the Back Country Land Trust, and Hubbell’s company have joined forces. At the time of my first visit, Hubbell and his son Drew were planning to construct “a nature kiosk at the head of the trail, a gate of sorts, a way to break out of one pattern and enter another,” as James put it. Construction will be “sustainable,” said Vanderhoff. Biodegradable. Recycled.

Later in the day, we hiked through the tangle of oaks and joined a half circle of students under an oak old enough to have sprouted when Lewis and Clark were scouting real estate. The kids sat on granite boulders pocked with wrist-deep acorn grinding holes created long ago by the Kumeyaay Indians. The group listened to Larry Banegas, founder of Kumeyaay.com, a Web site that tells the history of his people. Raised on the nearby Barona reservation, Banegas teaches what he calls “traditional knowledge.” He explained to the kids that the Kumeyaay “weren’t nomadic; they lived part of the year in the mountains and part of the year at the beach,” and were far from passive players in the wilderness. Among other techniques, they employed fire to open the chaparral canopy and allow the growth of plants used for food and medicine. They also created dams to trap river sediment, raising the water table and creating new wetlands for watercress and wild celery and lettuce. These manipulations of land and water contradict the Eden myth: that the Indians lived in a wilderness untouched by human intervention. What Banegas was saying lends weight, instead, to controversial new theories about the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere: that it was much more populated and sophisticated than we have generally believed.

I wondered: What message will the students take home about human involvement in nature? Will they learn that humans have always shaped nature in order to sustain it, in order to survive? This question is at the heart of the future of environmentalism.

Later that morning, I mentioned a pet peeve to Vanderhoff. By the understandable rules of nature preserves everywhere, no kid will be allowed to build a tree house or fort on Crestridge Ecological Reserve—despite the fact that many of us, including environmentalists, first learned to engage nature by building forts in the woods. What happens when kids can no longer do that, when what remains is under glass?

Vanderhoff thought about this for a while, then went to her car and returned with a book about California Indian survival techniques. She pointed to an illustration of a hut, a Kumeyaay shelter framed in willow and covered by brush and tulles. “There!” she said, smiling. “That’s what kids could build here. Wouldn’t that be terrific?”

That it would.

TODAY’S YOUNG PEOPLE ARE, as we’ve seen, growing up in America’s third frontier. This frontier has yet to completely form, but we do know the general characteristics. Among them: detachment from the source of food, the virtual disappearance of the farm family, the end of biological absolutes, an ambivalent new relationship between humans and other animals, new suburbs shrinking open space, and so on. In this time of quickening change, could we enable another frontier to be born—ahead of schedule?

PART VI

WONDER LAND:

OPENING THE FOURTH FRONTIER

We have not merely escaped from something

but also into something. . . . We have joined the greatest of all communities,

which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us

the great adventure of being alive.

—JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

18. The Education of Judge Thatcher: Decriminalizing Natural Play

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS that Mark Twain’s Tom and Huck should pack it in—come home from the woods, plug in Becky’s PlayStation, and master the new Grand Theft Auto video game. If Becky’s father, Judge Thatcher, were to review the bizarre legal framework today covering children, recreation, the environment, and landowner liability, he might be puzzled by the phalanx of legal restrictions and homeowners’ covenants—which come from the left and the right—that favor electrical outlets over just about every form of natural play.

Asked for legal advice on this matter, the judge might log on to LexisNexis, the online legal database, and study up. Likely, he would seize on the one apparent bright spot in our legal structure: the so-called “recreational use” statutes adopted by many states in recent years.

“Ah, potential satisfaction!” he might mutter.

These laws were established to encourage landowners to allow people to recreate on their open land. For example, California Civil Code section 846 is calculated “to balance the need for increased recreational area with the concern of landowners regarding liability to entrants who use private land for recreation.” The statute states that a property owner “owes no duty of care to keep the premises safe for entry or use by others for any recreational purpose or to give any warning of hazardous conditions. . . .” In other words, a landowner who permits people to recreate on his property is not required