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

looser in design because children value unmanicured places and the adventure and mystery of hiding places and wild, spacious, uneven areas broken by clusters of plants.”

Educator David Sobel wants to reinvent the vacant lot. He campaigns for new partnerships of educators, environmental groups, landscape architects, and developers to protect natural areas, or playscapes, for children. As he points out, developers often leave aside land—slices of property not large enough to be playing fields, not conveniently enough located to be pocket parks, but just fine as islands of wildness. Sobel’s vision is to claim these stray patches as playscapes and incorporate such natural features as ponds with frogs and turtles, berry vines to pick, hills to sled, bushes and hillsides for hiding and digging. Unrealistic? A growing number of planners and educators are creating wonderful playgrounds, such as one in Central Park in Manhattan, where kids can climb rocks to the top of a granite outcrop with a spiral slide carved into its side (and mud at the bottom). At a Sunnyvale, California, play area next to wetlands, kids are encouraged to dig for fish fossils.

The concept of so-called adventure playgrounds originated in Europe after World War II when a playground designer studied children playing in “normal” asphalt and cement playgrounds—and found they preferred playing in the dirt and lumber from the post-war rubble. The concept is well established in Europe, and a few adventure playgrounds have been built in this country, including ones in Berkeley, Huntington Beach, and Irvine, California. The Huntington Beach Adventure Playground is a previously empty lot where kids created their own play environment in the past. Today, on the lot, children seven and up can still play in the mud and build forts. The playground includes a small pond with rafts. A rope bridge leads over the pond to the “zip line,” a tire swing that runs down a cable. There is also a water slide, which is simply a slot in a hill covered with plastic that lands kids in muddy water at the bottom. The Irvine Adventure Playground also offers organized outdoor and nature activities such as campfire building and cooking outdoors, astronomy, and gardening. At Irvine’s adventure playground, new kids must complete a safety course before they can take up hammer and nails and build a fort; an adult must accompany kids under age six. These playgrounds may not offer much solitude, but they do emphasize direct experience with natural elements.

Such efforts will gain credibility as the new research in the restorative quality of nature becomes better known, especially the compelling studies that show the link between outdoor play in green settings and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Healthy Planning for Children and Other Living Things

During the next decade or two, a crush of city and county master plans will be newly drawn or updated, determining the future of our open space. All over the country, creators of these plans and the public that advises them will have an opportunity to consider whether the veins of nature and wildness will be as important as the arteries of transportation to the future of our neighborhoods. Rather than accept a parcel-by-parcel, park-by-park approach, we need to call for broad, regional strategies—and for new ways to form them.

William B. Honachefsky, one of the pioneering scientists who first championed the link between environmental sustainability and local land-use planning, argues that, on the surface, municipal land-use practices would appear to minimize environmental damage, through building regulations and site-specific environmental impact statements and local ordinances that control storm-water runoff, soil erosion, vegetation removal, and steep-slope construction. “While these are certainly well-intentioned additions, there is a dark side to their application,” according to Honachefsky. “Collectively, they perpetuate a system of segmented reviews, analyses, and mitigation that is the antithesis of the way natural systems actually function.”

One answer to this fragmented, piecemeal approach is what Will Rogers, president of the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a private conservation group headquartered in San Francisco, calls “greenprinting”—an approach to urban ecology that is catching on around the country. Greenprinting uses traditional real-estate techniques and entrepreneurial conservation methods to identify and protect open space, creating a blueprint for the public conservation process. When TPL works with a city or region, “We ask [people what] they want their community to look like in fifty years,” says Rogers. He calls such proactive planning “taking conservation out of the emergency room.” Instead of reacting to sprawl, planners get ahead of the wave.

Although preserving vistas and watersheds and protecting wildlife habitat in an urban environment are worthy goals, human health provides another reason for preservation, one that doesn’t get enough attention. For example, preserving open space could be essential to solving the crisis of childhood obesity. A 2001 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a connection “between the fact that [typical sprawl] makes no room for sidewalks or bike paths and the fact that we are an overweight, heart disease-ridden society.” The authors assert that children are particularly at risk, citing a South Carolina study showing that students are four times more likely to walk to schools built before 1983 than to those built later.

One way to address that challenge is to accelerate the protection of disappearing open space through a national greenprinting movement. Such efforts are taking hold in Seattle; in Chattanooga, Tennessee; in Atlanta; in Stamford, Connecticut; and along the East River in Brooklyn. Jacksonville, Florida, the city that “used to smell like pulpwood and Puppy Chow,” according to the Orlando Sentinel Tribune, “has become the poster community for ‘greenprinting’ in Florida.” In these cities, TPL leads a four-step greenprinting process that includes “visioning” by government and private organizations, extensive public conversation, an investigation into how to pay for land, and finally the identification of the targeted land. As a result, Jacksonville voters approved a half-cent sales tax to set aside open space. Some cities, counties, and private conservation groups prefer to buy development rights from landowners, especially farmers—who are then “paid” to