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

increasing its liability insurance coverage. The American Insurance Association suggests that a standard homeowner’s insurance policy will cover liability for, say, a tree-house accident, but homeowners should still check their coverage. The typical homeowner policy carries on-site accident coverage of only $100,000. Some insurance experts recommend buying extra liability insurance. The price of an umbrella policy, providing $1 million worth of coverage, to accompany a homeowner policy, is, in fact, modest—usually about $200 a year; add another $50 and gain an extra million in coverage. Some umbrella policies will cover empty lots, too. The problem here is if the bar is set at $1 million, someone’s going to sue for $2 million. Where, short of legal reform—or a fortified system of peer review to stop frivolous lawsuits—does it end?

“Legal fear has infected the culture,” argues Philip K. Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and The Collapse of the Common Good. Howard is founder of Common Good, a bipartisan coalition with advisory board members ranging from conservative to liberal, from Bill Bradley and George McGovern to Newt Gingrich and Alan Simpson. Howard wants to help restore reliability to law—to come up with ways to determine acceptable or healthy levels of risk. “Polls and focus groups show that educators will do almost anything to avoid the unpleasantness of legal hearings,” says Howard.

In July 2005, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that Broward County schools had erected “no running” signs at 137 elementary schools, as one of several steps to cut down on injuries and lawsuits. Playground merry-go-rounds and swings were already history. “They’ve got moving parts. Moving parts on equipment is the number one cause of injury on the playgrounds,” explained Broward’s safety director, who ordered the no-running signs. And cement crawl tubes? Gone. “The longer they are, the higher possibility that a vagrant could stay in them,” he explained. Is such fear warranted? Depending on which study one chooses to believe, in the United States, the public’s urge to sue is falling, holding its own, or rising after a brief hiatus. Uncertainty about such statistics is aggravated by the fact that most lawsuits are settled out of court and are poorly tracked. And no one keeps track of the number of threatened lawsuits—which may have more impact on public behavior than judges and juries. In fact, some consumer attorneys attribute ulterior motives to some public officials who raise the specter of potential lawsuits, which may be easier and cheaper than investing public funds in, say, new playgrounds or lifeguards. Whatever the truth, perception rules.

Confronting this perception requires action on several fronts: the introduction of “comparative risk” as a legal and social standard; new applications of insurance; and the design and legal protection of public play areas.

Common Good calls for systemic reform that transcends the current definition of tort reform, which focuses almost entirely on capping the size of awards in lawsuits. True, sometimes it takes a huge settlement to change the behavior of a powerful offender. But capping damages or blocking access to the courts does little to reduce the number of lawsuits, and, according to Howard, protects only one side: “That approach lacks our guiding principle: a focus on society as a whole.” Common Good is calling upon judges and legislatures to create clearer standards on who can sue for what. Among other proposed changes, Howard calls for the creation of public-risk commissions that would examine areas of our lives that have been radically changed, “such as our enjoyment of outdoors and children’s play.”

Great Britain is arguably moving faster toward this goal than the United States. In 2003, in England, an eighteen-year-old named John Tomlinson dived too sharply at a public lake and broke his neck. The Cheshire County Council had been aware of the risk; had already posted “no swimming” signs and planned to close off the lake by dumping mud on the beaches and planting reeds. But before the barrier of reeds was planted, Tomlinson took his dive. His lawyer argued that the Cheshire Council should have acted sooner, and Tomlinson won. At the appellate level, the decision was overturned; the court declared that a claim should be hinged not just on whether an accident is foreseeable but also on “the social value of the activity which gave rise to the risk.” Permitting Tomlinson’s claim would deny hundreds of thousands of people enjoyment of the park. The court offered this common-sense summary: “There is an important question of freedom at stake. . . . Does the law require that all trees be cut down, because some youth may climb them and fall?”

While we wait for legal reform, environmental attorney Brian Schmidt has an idea that just might help. Schmidt is an advocate with the Committee for Green Foothills, an organization working to protect local natural environments in the South San Francisco Bay Area. To liberate natural play, he suggests the creation of what he calls a “Leave No Child Inside Legal Defense Fund,” a foundation that would pay the legal defense costs of select institutions and individuals who encourage children to go outdoors but are then hit with frivolous lawsuits. Volunteer lawyers for the Defense Fund would focus on the most frivolous, high-profile claims, or those claims that would establish the worst precedents. He suspects that the outdoor industries would be interested in funding such a foundation. “Obviously, regardless of how successful this idea could become, it will never cover all the costs of defending against all the frivolous lawsuits,” he adds. “Still it could help, and just the fact that a defendant knew it was possible to recover costs might make the defendant less likely to settle.” It would also send a public message that natural play is still valued.

Don’t Give Up

The legal tangle of outdoor play will be one of the most difficult challenges in the fourth frontier. But to encourage a host of other positive changes to take place, the barriers of a litigious society must be lowered.

“In the past, if a child