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

This latest mayor’s inventiveness, in fact, is in step with the rebirth of an older Chicago ethic. “Everyone is entitled to a home where the sun, the stars, open fields, giant trees, and smiling flowers are free to teach an undisturbed lesson of life,” wrote the great Chicago landscape planner, Jens Jensen, in the 1930s. The city’s original planners called for a metro park system “developed in a natural condition.” The initial result: the city’s park system and two hundred thousand acres of forest preserves surrounding the city. The 1909 Plan of Chicago called for “wild forests, filled with such trees, vines, flowers, and shrubs as will grow in this climate. . . . There should be open glades here and there and other natural features and the people should be allowed to use them freely.” This century’s Chicago plan, then, is no love child or wild-eyed radical act (this is big-shouldered Chicago, remember, not California), but a rational response to decades of urban de-naturing. One wonders how we strayed so far from life-affirming visions. Clearly, it’s not too late to find our way back.

Perhaps the most moving representation of green urbanism was offered in proposals from several architectural firms to green part of Ground Zero at the World Trade Center site in New York City. The proposals provided “ample proof of the power of landscape to transform a scarred and haunted place,” according to the New York Times, which published the results. Designers offered ideas to turn the crater into a tree nursery, “a memorial arboretum—a large sunken garden of extraordinary tree specimens, flowers and wildlife from all over the world.” Trees germinated there would be carried along “the same routes once traveled by daily commuters from the World Trade Center on their way home,” to be planted in neighborhoods and parks throughout the city. That serious consideration is given to such ideas in these uncertain times speaks well of Mike and Judy Corbett’s own farsighted vision, which they struggled to realize in that tomato field so many years ago.

Reinventing the Vacant Lot: Green Urban Design for Kids

Until recently, the new urbanism and the sustainable cities movement have paid insufficient attention to the needs of children. There has been little in the way of research related to urban design and the environment of childhood, according to Robin Moore. Notable exceptions have addressed the issue of traffic, worldwide, and its negative effects on childhood. For example, in cities where traffic has severely restricted children’s freedom to roam, new urbanism initiatives favor traffic-calming speed bumps and pedestrian-friendly shopping and residential areas. Such efforts help, but are seldom, if ever, coordinated with efforts to increase the urban child’s access to nature. Even so-called “green developers” show little interest in integrating children and wildlife. Biologist Ben Breedlove points to 273 publications and software that allow easy, functional wildlife habitat design: “Virtually none of these manuals and related techniques is in use, because architects, planners and regulators control the ‘natural habitat.’” Future urban design should not only meet the human needs of road capacity and smooth traffic flow, but also, as Breedlove maintains, meet the needs of nature, with provisions for wild animal mobility and life cycles.

The preservation of natural areas in an urban region does not necessarily mean that children will be exposed to more nature. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle describes, as the Bay Area’s version of the Thirty Years’ War, the long crusade to transform most of the East Bay shoreline into a state park “has found itself halted just short of its goal—torn by a civil war among different visions of what the park should be.” The most striking clash, according to the Chronicle, has been between Bay Area residents who want more playing fields and groups “appealing with equal passion for endangered hawks, migrating ducks and other wildlife.” Arthur Feinstein, co-executive director of the Golden Gate Audubon Society, calls the park “one of our last hopes for our children to understand that there is a natural world.”

The good news about the Bay’s Thirty Years’ War is that a major urban park is at least being contested by those who envision it as a future site of playing fields and those who envision it wild, as a place of direct experience. Children’s access to nature is at the center of that debate; hopefully, this and other future parks will emphasize opportunities for children to get their feet wet and their hands dirty. Yes, we need playing fields and skateboard parks, but put them where they belong, on already urbanized land—on multi-use school sites, for example. Prize the natural spaces and shorelines most of all, because once they’re gone, with rare exceptions they’re gone forever. In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness. We require these patches of nature for our mental health and our spiritual resilience. Future generations, regardless of whatever recreation or sport is in vogue, will need nature all the more.

We are now seeing small but significant examples of innovation and commitment to child-friendly green design. The city of Austin, Texas, purchased a farm, renamed it Pioneer Farms, and turned it into a living history museum. “Kids can go out there, learn about agriculture, pet the animals,” says Scott Polikov, a Texas town planner and attorney. “It’s more akin to a zoo, but at least it’s a farm that kids can visit regularly.” In Kansas City, Missouri, Randy White and Vicki Stoecklin of the White Hutchinson Leisure and Learning Group offer their help to neighborhoods or businesses interested in designing outdoor children’s play spaces—discovery play gardens. “There is a sense of wildness about a discovery play garden,” they write. “Children’s discovery play gardens are very different than landscaped areas designed for adults, many of whom prefer manicured lawns and tidy, neat, orderly, uncluttered landscapes. Discovery play gardens are much