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

or teen broke an arm on the sidewalk, in a neighbor’s yard, or at the school yard, Dad’s insurance would pay the bills,” says Jim Condomitti, a father who lives in Escondido, California. “Our parents accepted responsibility for our accidents, careless behavior, or deliberate actions. Today, as seven-figure monetary awards dance in our heads, we open the Yellow Pages and search for attorneys who can fish in the deep pockets of a school district, a city, or an insurance company.”

Indeed, in many cases, the litigious bark may be worse than the bite. Condomitti found this out when his community began to crack down on playing ball in the street. (Such play may not involve nature, but at least it’s based on direct rather than simulated experience and it’s outdoors.) Condomitti pored over the vaguely worded legal codes of several municipalities, and found few if any legal grounds to ban such play, unless children actually block or impede the flow of traffic. “Parents and kids shouldn’t give up so easily,” he says. The good news is that they don’t have to.

Bad law can be rewritten; protections from litigation strengthened; new types of natural recreational areas invented—and even new kinds of cities and towns created, where nature is welcome and natural play the norm—for children and adults.

19. Cities Gone Wild

WHEN JULIA FLETCHER, Janet Fout’s daughter, moved from West Virginia to Washington, D.C., to attend George Washington University, she operated a refreshment cart at the Kennedy Center and sometimes took it to the roof terrace, where she found the view of the Potomac River calming. Early one evening, she noticed a man there with his two young children. The girl and boy were paying close attention to their father, who was watching a circling raptor.

“It’s not a turkey vulture,” he said, “but you’re close. What else could it be?” The kids looked heavenward again.

“A hawk,” pronounced the boy.

“Warmer,” replied Dad, “but what kind of hawk?”

“A white-headed hawk?” inquired the daughter.

“Nope. What kinds of hawks are near the water?”

As Julia tells this story, she was about to burst with the answer when the son said:

“One that eats fish?”

“Exactly. It’s an osprey,” their father said. “Now, how can you identify it next time?”

At this point, Julia moved on with her work, but continued to think about the conversation. Because her mother took time to explore nature with her, she identified with the children and their questions. “And I was heartened that even in a city like Washington, there were other children who would grow up like I did,” she says. “Until that moment, all evidence of this had been to the contrary, since no one I know at the university can identify an osprey. Nature in the city is nature at her most tenacious—in some ways that makes it my favorite kind of nature.”

Today, a growing number of ecologists and ethicists are challenging the assumption that cities have no room for wildlife. Some would have you imagine your city as a “zoopolis.” That’s the word—rhymes with “metropolis”—that Jennifer Wolch, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the Sustainable Cities Project, uses when she imagines areas in cities transformed into natural habitats through land-planning, architectural design, and public education.

To most people, that would seem like a stretch. Just listen to our language: We talk about “empty land” at the urban fringe (far from empty, it teems with non-human life), and “improving” land (grading and filling and topping it with Jiffy Lubes). Most urban theory ignores non-human species. So do even the most progressive architecture schools, even as those graders keep scraping the hills. Yet, says Wolch, a zoopolis movement, though poorly documented, is emerging in many U.S. cities, often for practical reasons. For example, conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, water-dependent environments. This has led some cities in arid regions to encourage native plant species, which need less maintenance and contribute to wildlife habitat.

Central to this notion is the psychological need for biophilia—the life-enhancing sense of rootedness in nature. Daniel Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment, in Santa Barbara, asserts: “Without the recognition that the city is of and within the environment, the wilderness . . . that most of us think of as natural cannot survive.” John Beardsley of the Harvard Design School expresses the same hope for a new kind of urban and suburban landscape in which our children and our children’s children could one day grow up:

We need to hold out for healthy ecosystems in the city and the suburbs; we need to insist that culture—however much it might flirt with simulation—retain a focus on the real world, its genuine problems and possibilities. At the mall or the theme park, what does this mean? Can we imagine a mall that is also a working landscape, that is energy self-sufficient, that treats its own wastewater, and that recycles its own materials? Can we imagine a theme park that is genuinely fun and truly educational and environmentally responsible all at once? I don’t see why not. We have created the “nature” we buy and sell in the marketplace; we should certainly be able to change it.

Preserving islands of wild land—parks and preserves—in urban areas is not enough, according to current ecological theory. Instead, a healthy urban environment requires natural corridors for movement and genetic diversity. One can imagine such theory applied to entire urban regions, with natural corridors for wildlife extending deep into urban territory and the urban psyche, creating an entirely different environment in which children would grow up and adults could grow old—where the nature deficit is replaced by natural abundance.

Growing the Zoopolis Movement

The notion of zoopolis is not as new or utopian as it might sound. In the 1870s, the “playground movement” valued urban nature more than swing sets or baseball fields; nature was presented as a health benefit for working-class Americans, particularly their children. This movement led to the nation’s largest urban parks, including New York’s Central Park.