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

live in rural areas, and those who grew up in what remains of the farm country share a memory—often idealized—of that life. Before she died, my friend Elaine Brooks, who took such good care of the last natural open space in La Jolla, described the landscape of small-town western Michigan, where she had spent her childhood summers on her grandparents’ farm: “There was always a sense of being places where no one had quite been before, wandering the farm. Many years later, revisiting the farm long after it had been sold, I walked back into some woods that had not been a part of my grandparents’ farm, to discover the remains of an old house that I had never seen before.” The skeletal house was only a few hundred feet from the sandy valley where she and her cousin had played. “But we had never ventured beyond my grandfather’s wire fence. The land seemed wild to us, but it had been tamed a hundred years before.” During her occasional trips back to western Michigan to visit relatives, Elaine found that she could easily re-create this illusion of wildness. As time passed between visits, she found that she had to drive farther to get away from houses; there were more homes salted back in the woods, now that the convenience of snowblowers and dune buggies and snowmobiles made it easier to live away from town. But still, even in the small towns, it was easy to go for a walk and find patches of woods and streams that blotted out the evidence of human habitation.

Open land is still accessible and natural play is still possible in many places in America. We have seen that accessibility to nature isn’t everything. Even in areas of the country where residential neighborhoods are still nestled in woods and fields, parents express puzzlement because children tend to prefer to connect with electrical outlets. But location does count. If future generations are to rediscover nature, where will they find it? In the past, children found nature and exploratory freedom even in the densest inner-city neighborhoods—in vacant lots, weedy alleys and waterfronts, even rooftops. However, urban infill (building on remaining open space in existing neighborhoods, as a trade-off for protecting outlying green belts) is reducing even that space.

When cities get denser through infill, parks are often an afterthought, and open space is diminished. Such development is spreading quickly; it now dominates even the outer rings of most growing American cities and seeps into the most rural areas, creating an urban milieu that “screams human presence,” as Elaine Brooks once put it. In such places, most original vegetation was eradicated long ago, so that occasional landscaping is the only living relief. Landscaping in such settings is merely an architectural element in urban design. This type of development is especially dominant in South Florida and Southern California—but almost everywhere in America, new residential developments are cut from this architectural and legal pattern.

We don’t have to continue down this road. There is another possibility with long-term potential: the resettling of vast areas of rural America emptied in recent decades by the crash of agriculture and its supportive industries. We might call this “pro-nature” cluster development. In 1993 (the year that the Census Bureau stopped issuing farm-resident reports), author and New York Times Denver bureau chief Dirk Johnson pointed out that, a century earlier, Frederick Jackson Turner had declared the frontier closed based on a measurement by the Census Bureau that defined an area as “settled” when it had more than six people per square mile. As of 1993, though, in about two hundred counties on the Great Plains, population density had fallen below that frontier threshold. “While hardly anyone was paying attention, something quite extraordinary happened to a huge swath of the United States: it emptied out,” Johnson wrote. “In five states of the Great Plains, there are more counties with fewer than six persons per square mile than there were in 1920. In Kansas, such counties cover more territory than they did in 1890. . . . Even the number of counties with fewer than two persons per square mile is on the rise.”

Since then, the emptying of parts of rural America has only increased. The causes are complex—not the least of them the rise of corporate mega-farms and the bankruptcies among small farmers. But great stretches of land are now underpopulated. A few years ago, the governor of Iowa invited immigrants from other countries to resettle his state. Geographers at Rutgers University have called for the federal government to remove the stragglers and turn parts of the Great Plains into a wildlife park to be called Buffalo Commons. That specific event is unlikely, and the geographers have since amended their controversial proposal. But something akin to it could happen. The emptying of the plains, the notion of zoopolis, the new knowledge of our kinship with other animals—these trends suggest that the idea of frontier for future generations is not settled, and that future generations in this part of the world may well create a sensible way to distribute population. Permanent disconnection of the young and nature is not inevitable.

Indeed, while short-term relief is important at, for example, the family and school level, the long-term reconnection of future generations with nature will require a radical change in the way cities are designed, where population is distributed, and how those populations interact with land and water. Imagine, in a fourth frontier, a back-to-the-land movement unlike any in our history.

Such thinking should seem more familiar than grandiose, rooted as it is in Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian vision, Thoreau’s self-reliance, and the homesteading of the West. Its precedents include the middle-class “back-to-the-land” movement in nineteenth-century England. In the 1960s, a back-to-the-land movement in a number of Western countries attempted an ad hoc resuscitation of that vision as an act of rebellion against what was perceived as a materialist culture; that exodus may have attracted over one million people in the United States. While remnants