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

Environmental designers and biologists such as Ben Breedlove argue for a far larger urban eco-management system—the kind of computer-driven, digital system that’s been in use for about eighteen years by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’ Habitat Evaluation Process (HEP). This system assesses conditions of wild habitat, yet can be applied to already developed areas (say, neighborhoods in need of suburban redevelopment) and project optimum configuration of that area.

“That’s going to be increasingly important, because we’re not going to be able to buy large land tracts in the future,” Breedlove says. “You can aggregate groups of animals and their preferences in the landscape. . . . For large groups of species there is not a particular competition between humans and animals for terrain. Where there is, you can deal with landscaping, you can deal with lot sizes and basically accommodate many of those species, too.”

The problem with such visionary plans is that they are often either used to push for changes that the authors did not intend or they end up gathering dust on the shelves of planners, professors, and journalists. Critics typically say such visions never stick because no one bothers to come up with a long-term plan, with teeth, that details how to get there from here.

What we really need, in addition to the long view, is a simple, central organizing principle. The best planning guide may be hidden in the folds of one of those prescient urban plans from the past. In 1907, John Nolen, a father of American urban planning, offered four guiding principles. Future development should:

1. Conform to topography

2. Use places for what they are naturally most fit

3. Conserve, develop, and utilize all natural resources, aesthetic as well as commercial

4. Aim to secure beauty by organic arrangements rather than by mere embellishment or adornment.

Today that set of principles might be boiled down to a single focus: respect the natural integrity of place. We may not be able to agree on the definition of “quality of life,” but we all know a natural horizon when we see it. Because of what we now know about the relationship between children and nature, we can appreciate the added importance of that integrity.

Reimagining One Urban Region

I can imagine San Diego as a potential prototype. My city already markets itself as a nature designation for tourists. Why stop with the famous zoo and the beaches? Why not market all of San Diego as the nation’s first zoopolis?

“That could be an exciting campaign,” Pat Flanagan told me. Until recently, Flanagan was director of Informal Education at the San Diego Natural History Museum. “Where we could really design for urban wildlife would be to increase the number of pollinating birds and insects—including butterflies,” she said. “By planting so many non-native plants and scraping the hills, we’re depleting the native nectar plants; we’re interrupting the flow of hummingbirds coming north from Mexico in the spring.” She suggested that the natural history museum replicate the “forgotten pollinators campaign” conducted by Tucson’s Arizona–Sonora Desert Museum, which works to repair pollination corridors. Imagine the San Diego museum and zoo selling packets of indigenous seeds of pollinating plants. Every garden in San Diego “could contain a palette of plants that would not only be beautiful to look at but would provide nectar, and roosting and nesting sites for animals—as well as protective cover.”

Local school districts currently offer studies on rain forests and global warming—but fail to focus on their home region’s own rich array of indigenous species. In the new zoopolis, our schools would use surrounding natural environments as classrooms. In a city with so much sunlight, with such fair weather, natural playgrounds should be the rule.

In the surrounding city, the practitioners of green urban design could flourish. Landscape architect Steve Estrada, president of the San Diego chapter of Partners for Livable Places, suggests that one way to protect endangered species is to create new territory within the urban space: “Some of our endangered birds love willow trees. Why not plant great swaths of indigenous willows in the city—instead of palms—as new nesting areas?” New neighborhoods should contain continuous patches of local vegetation, like the English hedgerows that have for hundreds of years remained abundant with wildlife. “These days, we’re focused on smart growth for people,” he says. “Why not smart growth for animals?” He also imagines the presence of native plants and animals where people can’t miss them—in the malls. Mike Stepner, former city architect and dean of the New School of Architecture, believes that animal- and plant-related design questions should be incorporated into architecture and planning curricula.

Organizing a new urban/suburban approach to nature, it seems to me, requires an early focus on a symbolic, tangible, and reachable goal.

San Diego, for example, is blessed with a unique topology, laced with canyons that are home to an extraordinary array of plant and animal life. Steadily, almost imperceptibly, these canyons have been chipped away to accommodate sewer-access roads, expensive homes, bridges, roads, highways, hot tubs. As a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, I once suggested that what my city needs is a San Diego Urban Canyonlands Park. The political protection of these canyons depends on our ability to see each as part of a single, named, public resource. Response was enthusiastic, and progress is being made. Beyond stopping the encroachments, the San Diego Park and Recreation Department’s deputy director for open space hopes that San Diego will someday “find a way to connect the canyons, not only by the trails in the canyons, but by designated bikeways and walkways between them—a whole system.”

To achieve this, however, the public must see the currently isolated canyons (or, in other cities, other disconnected natural areas) as something large and singular. For that to happen, the biological, educational, psychological, and spiritual value of open space must be clear. Its economic value must be clear, too. Recently, American Forests, the nation’s oldest nonprofit citizens’ conservation organization, estimated that San Diego’s urban forest