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

Closely associated was the “healthy cities” movement in the early twentieth century, which welded public health to urban design, even codifying how many feet parks and schools should be from a home.

Then other forces interceded. Cities continued to build a few large urban parks in post–World War II development, but usually only as an afterthought—and these were increasingly less natural and more attuned to organized sports and the threat of litigation. Neither children nor wildlife have been of much concern to urban planners in recent decades. Arguably both were given more consideration in the early part of the twentieth century. Since then, playgrounds and parks have not kept up with population growth in most cities (in terms of acreage covered). At the same time, these public spaces have become increasingly domesticated, flat, lawyered, and boring—and designed without taking wildlife into consideration. Wolch has noted how the debate about sprawl does not concern itself with wildlife; the new urbanism tends to define sustainability as a question mainly of energy resources, transportation, housing, and infrastructure.

In the recent past, even nature writers ignored the nature within urban or suburban realms. “As recently as 1990, you could read all 94 writers and 900 pages collected in the Norton Book of Nature Writing and barely comprehend that most people spent most of their lives in cities,” reported the Los Angeles Times, in a glowing article about one of the prophets of this urban-nature movement, naturalist Jennifer Price, author of Flight Maps. In that book, Price argues that, “You cannot expect to preserve wilderness or endangered species unless you think about how to make the places where most people live sustainable.” This movement goes far beyond the traditional focus on parks and reaches toward a new definition of urban planning, architecture, and the restoration of that which has been lost. The Times describes a “vast and probably unstoppable conglomeration of community groups, architects, urban planners, engineers, writers, bureaucrats and politicians that is now out to restore the river [the Los Angeles River system] to something more than a ditch.”

Times are changing. Wolch talks about “re-enchanting the city” by bringing animals back in. Her views are steeped in a philosophy of animal rights; in fact, she may view the primary beneficiaries of a renaturalized city as being the animals themselves. “Agreement about the human/animal divide has recently collapsed,” she writes. “Critiques of post-Enlightenment science have undermined claims of human-animal discontinuity, and exposed the deeply anthropocentric and androcentric roots of modernist science. Greater understanding of animal thinking and capabilities now reveals the astonishing range and complexity of animal behavior and social life, while studies of human biology and behavior emphasize the similarity of humans to other animals. Claims about human uniqueness have thus been rendered deeply suspicious.”

Some of us, myself included, are less comfortable with a total rearrangement of the relationship. We’re not quite ready to pass laws requiring equal housing for possums. Nonetheless, we do acknowledge that a de-natured urban or suburban environment is not good for children or the land. Rather than some kind of polemical realignment, what we seek is simply a reattachment. Even a truce would be progress.

Cities and suburbs are still wilder than we think, with deeper roots than we know. In 2002, the New York Times reported that remnants of virgin forests still stand in the Bronx and Queens—a 425- to 450-yearold, 75-foot tulip tree in Queens is the oldest living thing in New York City; in Pelham Bay Park, in the Bronx, according to the Times, “rare birds and vegetation flourish among trees that have been growing since the 1700s.” Just as we, counterintuitively, must now plan unstructured time and supervise opportunities for solitude for the young, we must now also manage our urban regions as if they were wildlife preserves. “Where we have a large opportunity for gain is to see that people and animals coexist in a lot of areas. The largest unmanaged ecosystem in America is suburbia,” writes wildlife biologist Ben Breedlove, a noted designer of sustainable communities.

Indeed, the peculiar and growing proximity of wild animals and urban/suburban dwellers is one of the defining characteristics of the time, ironic because this is occurring even as young people disengage from nature. The urban/suburban influx of wild animals could stimulate a rethinking of who lives in the city, and why. Wolch writes: “The fast-expanding metropolitan edge brings a wide range of species—including predators—into back yards and public spaces, much to the consternation of residents unfamiliar with their behavior and unprepared for their presence. . . . The presence of wild animals thus often triggers public debate and conflict, lawsuits over wildlife-related injuries, contested hunts and extermination efforts. In short, what do you do with a mountain lion in the middle of Santa Monica?” As she points out, the destruction or domination of nature is unpopular or unacceptable with much of the public, “yet the arts of coexistence with wild animals remain unfamiliar.”

According to Wolch, the growing public awareness that “conventional landscaping produces biologically sterile, resource-intensive environments, [is] leading some cities to pass regulations emphasizing native species to reduce resource dependence and create habitat for wildlife.” She also points out that there is a growing number of grass-roots struggles in urban regions focused on the protection of specific wild animals or animal populations, and on the preservation of urban canyons, woodlands, wetlands, and other wildlife habitats. Even as science commodifies the bodies of humans and other animals, Wolch and others have detected a growing public sensitivity to wild animals as beings in their own right.

Landscape urbanism is one conceptual framework for such thinking. Ruth Durak, director of the Kent State University Urban Design Center, offers this definition:

Landscape urbanism is a call to turn urban design inside out, starting with open spaces and natural systems, to structure urban form instead of buildings and infrastructure. . . . The idea of landscape urbanism reorders the values and priorities of urban design, emphasizing the primacy of the void over built form and celebrating